Academic literature on the topic 'American wit and humor, juvenile literature'

ABSTRACT This article explores how Fran Ross’s 1974 novel Oreo uses humor to challenge static notions of Black, Jewish, and American identity. Through her mock heroic quest, Oreo’s eponymous protagonist develops WIT (“Way of the Interstitial Thrust”), a system of self-defense that draws on her multifaceted identity as a Jewish, African American woman and that she uses to successfully navigate spaces that threaten her with physical violence and symbolic erasure. In its hilarious exploration of the complexity and commodification of identity in the late twentieth century United States, Oreo provides a still-relevant example of how humor can create new spaces for minoritized subjects who exist in the “interstices” of the landscape of American cultural production.

The article provides an in-depth analysis of the history of the origin of the term satire types of satire, definitions of the term satire in encyclopedias and scientific dictionaries. Representatives of satire in Russian, English and Uzbek literature are also mentioned. The article also includes opinions of famous scholars on satire, as well as their translation into Uzbek. The genre of satire has evolved since ancient times and covered almost all types of fiction. The satirist writers exposed the social events of the period in which they lived with humor and satire. They put the final conclusion on their works to readers themselves. Satirical works delight readers, they are immortal. In ancient Roman literature, Quintus Horace Flaccus, Detsim Junior Juvenile, Menippus Gadarsky elevated satire, while in English literature Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, in American literature Mark Twain left a deep imprint in the hearts of readers with their works. In Russian literature, the works of Nikolai Gogol, Mikhail Saltikov-Shchedrin, Mikhail Zoshchenko further flourished the genre of satire. In Uzbek literature, the first examples of satire appeared in folklore, and later flourished in written literature. In the genre of satire, our ancestors Alisher Navoi, Turdi, Makhmur, Gulkhani, Haziq, Muqimi, Zavkiy created. Hamza Hakimzoda Niyazi, Abdulla Kodiri, Ghazi Yunus, Sofizoda, Gafrur Gulam, Abdulla Kahhor, Said Ahmad, Nemat Aminov, Sadulla Siyoev also contributed the further development of satire. The purpose of the article is to analyze the status of satire as a genre, the system of artistic interpretation of satirical works, the specific artistic expression of the moral and philosophical worldview and the stages of formation and development of this genre, its dynamics and its new forms, comparative-historical, comparative-typological analysis. Theoretical methods were used: comparative analysis, synthesis, comparative induction, deduction, and comparative-historical analysis. In results the genesis of the satire genre, the historical, theoretical and poetic foundations of the satire genre and the stages of its formation were established. The most common types of satire were analyzed. Conclusion 1. The folklore roots of satire and the peculiarities of satirical images in oral folklore have been identified. 2. The problem of the genesis of the genre of satire was considered on the basis of world artistic-philosophical, socio-cultural thinking. 3. The problem of the genre of satire is covered in the comparative literary aspect. 4. The peculiarities of the classification and types of the genre of satire were determined.

Teachers of English to speakers of other languages have often incorporated humor in the curriculum, yet a recent computer search revealed that there were no empirical studies which have shown that curricular humor enhances English language learning. The three specific questions of the thesis are: does the use of curricular humor 1) improve memory/recall, 2) improve over-all English proficiency, and 3) result in the subjects' having more positive attitudes towards Americans, and if so, does a more positive attitude correlate with improved memory/proficiency?

"Investing in Stereotypes" unearths a tradition of humor that may initially sound counter-intuitive: it sees stereotypes as valuable. Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, Charles Wright, and Suzan-Lori Parks reveal the way racial and sexual stereotypes paradoxically complicate their subjects in the very attempt to simplify them. The compulsive repetition of stereotypes and the contradictory meanings that stereotypes embody create absurdly comical effects that are, in the hands of these writers, surprisingly humanizing. To unveil the tensions in, say, Sambo, the happy plantation slave who is at once harmless and savage, completely known and enigmatic, is to invest in the stereotype's comic implication that the subjects it hopes to fix are endlessly changing and exhaustingly complex--that those subjects are, in fact, human. Departing from the most common techniques used to resist stereotypes (inversion, exaggeration, and modification), investment, as I theorize it, is a comic form of engagement that enacts Du Bois's concept of second-sight: the ability to perceive the blind-spots of another's cultural perspective from the vantage point of one's own. I begin the dissertation with Hurston because the sort of second-sight her characters practice is the precondition for Ellison's democratic America, Wright's empathic witnessing, and Parks's sovereign communities. Hurston uses tactics of trickery, even more nuanced than Henry Gates's field-framing concept of "Signifyin(g)," to encourage her readers to account for their cultural blind-spots by forcing them to move between the contradictions within a stereotype. For example, when the speaker of "How It Feels to Be Colored Me" vacillates between being "savage" and "cosmic" as she dons the Sambo stereotype, she creates epistemological uncertainty about the cultural knowledge the reader uses to racialize others. By helping people in conflicting positions of power understand their common humanity and their mutually limiting misrecognitions, comic second-sight can work to bridge social divides. "Investing in Stereotypes" shows why the humor of the oppressed deserves more than the scant scholarly attention it has received and also unearths a mode of oppositional consciousness crucial for the emancipationist project of African American literary studies.