The seventeenth-century Neapolitan painter and satirist Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), long regarded as a harbinger of the ideals of professional independence that characterize the artists of the Romantic era, is here returned to the social circumstances of his own time. This dissertation argues that Rosa’s personal and professional identity of autonomy and his pursuit of an original, distinctive persona were facilitated by male friendship. A key component of the philosophical ideal to which Rosa and his friends subscribed, friendship is defined by a standard of egalitarianism that permits its practitioners to be at once dependent and independent. In his adoption and cultivation of the rituals and discourses of friendship – especially academic friendship – Rosa found a strategy for navigating the obligatorily socially-delineated parameters of self-fashioning in seicento Florence and Rome. Friendship permeated the most vital elements of Rosa’s career: his early theatrical practice in Rome, his private academy in Florence, and his business tactics as a painter and printmaker in Rome. This dissertation aims to open up an area of insight into Rosa as both unique among and representative of his contemporaries, and to expand upon the existing scholarly knowledge of an artist on the cusp of an important development in the history of the visual artist’s identity.

This thesis examines Chappelle's Show’s use of racial satire to challenge dominant stereotypes and the effectiveness of that satire as a tool to achieve perspective by incongruity. I use a variation of D’Acci’s circuit of media study model to examine the institutional challenges and limitations on the show due to the context in which it was created, produced, and distributed; to interrogate the strategies employed by the show’s writers/creators to overcome these challenges through the performance of race; and to analyze the audience’s understanding of the use of racial satire through a reception study of the show’s audience. I argue that using satire often has the unintended consequence of crossing the line between “sending up” a behavior and supporting it, essentially becoming that which it is trying to discount, though this is not to say that its intrinsic value is therefore completely negated.

Satire might not inspire physical action—the physical act of picking up a sign to picket the government—but it moves an audience towards a state of mental action by confronting audiences with the interdictions and iniquities it fears the most. The rhetorical qualities of satire need to be acknowledged to fully understand how satire functions. To look at an example of contemporary satire, like The Onion, and see how it functions as a tool to create knowledge, three concepts can be borrowed from the rhetorical tradition: (1) Plato’s dialectic as a rhetorical model for Donald Griffin’s “Rhetoric of inquiry and provocation” ; (2) Aristotle’s means of persuasion and Han Tzu’s recognition of the imbalanced power-dynamics inherent in discussing dissentient views to see how satire’s audience and its controversial or unmentionable content is inextricably intertwined, making humor a satirist’s primary mean of persuasion; and lastly, (3) the Sophists’ understanding of situational truths and how it informs the cultural standards and institutions that satire contends. A satirist wishes to create, through the use of laughter, a space for questioning the worst qualities of society and humanity, provoking inward reflection in order to challenge the cultural rationalization that informs societal behavior.

The effects of knowing or not knowing the satirical nature of a piece of humor were examined and compared to the effects of disparaging humor. One hundred and twenty-six heterosexual undergraduate students (male: n = 43; female: n = 83) were randomly assigned a satirical or an offensive comic about gay men. Some of those who read the satirical piece were told of the satirical intentions of the author. Some of the predicted hypotheses were partially supported. Low SDO participants found the satirical comic, regardless of whether the author’s satirical intentions were explicitly told or not, less humorous and more offensive than high SDO participants. On the other hand, high SDO participants found the disparaging comic to be more humorous and less offensive than low SDO participants. The implications of these findings as well as the difficulties with measuring the effects of satire are addressed.

The seventeenth-century Neapolitan painter and satirist Salvator Rosa (1615-1673), long regarded as a harbinger of the ideals of professional independence that characterize the artists of the Romantic era, is here returned to the social circumstances of his own time. This dissertation argues that Rosa’s personal and professional identity of autonomy and his pursuit of an original, distinctive persona were facilitated by male friendship. A key component of the philosophical ideal to which Rosa and his friends subscribed, friendship is defined by a standard of egalitarianism that permits its practitioners to be at once dependent and independent. In his adoption and cultivation of the rituals and discourses of friendship – especially academic friendship – Rosa found a strategy for navigating the obligatorily socially-delineated parameters of self-fashioning in seicento Florence and Rome. Friendship permeated the most vital elements of Rosa’s career: his early theatrical practice in Rome, his private academy in Florence, and his business tactics as a painter and printmaker in Rome. This dissertation aims to open up an area of insight into Rosa as both unique among and representative of his contemporaries, and to expand upon the existing scholarly knowledge of an artist on the cusp of an important development in the history of the visual artist’s identity.

À la lecture du blogue intitulé Jon Swift, ainsi que des suites du visionnement de plusieurs émissions télévisées parodiant les méthodes d'autres émissions conventionnelles (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, Saturday Night Live, etc.), force nous a été de constater que l'utilisation de la satire prenait un nouvel essor au sein des médias contemporains. Nous arrêtant plus précisément au blogue Jon Swift, agrégat en ligne de textes satirisant la politique américaine, nous nous sommes donné pour tâche d'évaluer l'espace qu'occupe l'énoncé satirique au sein du discours public contemporain. Pour ce faire, nous avons échafaudé un processus en trois étapes, s'appuyant sur l'hypothèse que la satire nous offre une tentative de lecture du monde et donc, ne peut se lire qu'en regard d'un contexte précis. La première étape consistait donc, selon cette hypothèse, à mettre en place le contexte d'émergence de la satire contemporaine : la dégradation des standards journalistiques, les dérives intellectuelles du discours politique, ainsi que la mise en place d'une infrastructure médiatique originale (internet) ouvrant de nouvelles portes à l'énonciation satirique à proprement parler. Nous avons ensuite analysé les mécanismes de fonctionnement de la satire classique, en utilisant quelques ouvrages choisis de Jonathan Swift, l'inspiration démontrable du blogue Jon Swift. Plusieurs des éléments constitutifs fondamentaux de la satire swiftienne - persona, attaques et distorsions rhétoriques - ont subséquemment été retrouvés dans le blogue Jon Swift. Combinant ces aspects classiques aux possibilités originales offertes par le web et la culture du web, nous avons, dans un troisième mouvement, exploré l'influence qu'exerce la satire sur le discours publique en général. Sans pouvoir arriver à une conclusion définitive quant à l'impact de l'énoncé satirique, il a été possible de démontrer comment celui-ci peut servir d'outil propre à déconstruire les fictions ayant cours au sein des sphères médiatique, politique et culturelle. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : satire, blogues, Jonathan Swift, médias, politique, journalisme.

This study presents an attempt to understand the political and aesthetic relationship between two of Modernism’s most enigmatic authors, Wyndham Lewis and Ford Madox Ford by examining their novelistic practice in light of their writings on politics and social criticism. A close look at the use of ironic distance, a hallmark feature in our understanding of modernist fiction, in Tarr (1918) and The Good Soldier (1915) reveals both authors conscious effort to distance themselves from their novel’s subjects, Fredric Tarr and John Dowell respectively. In light of both novels’ satirical element, a scathing attack on bourgeois narcissism caused by the wealthier class’ persistent attempts to identify with hollow and self serving social roles through the sham-aristocratic prestige created by England’s pre-war commodity culture, and the fact that both Fredric Tarr and John Dowell are artist figures that somehow resemble their creators, this project reinterprets Ford and Lewis’ ironic distance as an instance of self-distanciation. From this we can infer that both Ford and Lewis were invested in the modernist idea of impersonality, not just as a artistic or literary technique, but as the artist’s only means of escaping the narcissistic and slothful trap of modern subjectivity, and that, along with the production of modernist art, they saw a continual self-effacement as the price of authenticity, therefore inspiring in them the conviction to live as “uncelebrated stylists.”

Thesis--Salzburg. / Summary and vita in German. Includes bibliographical references (p. 220-242).

From the beginning of her career, Virginia Woolf moves beyond the perspective of her inherited class position to challenge a damaging class system. She increasingly recognizes the extent of her own complicity in the creation and maintenance of class structures supporting patriarchy, war, and British imperialism. Highlighting ambiguities inherent in the very category of class, she acknowledges the limiting "boxes" of language itself in attempts to rethink class. For Woolf, class is not monolithic but internally differentiated by gender and race. Examining Woolf's early work in relation to class theory shows that throughout her career Woolf interrogates the imbrication of gender and race in class politics. She finds class difference a fertile source of satire, and subjects her own class position to satirical scrutiny. At the same time, a certain psychology of class operates in Woolf: vulnerable to the dissolution of ego boundaries because of her mental illness, she at times shores up her sense of identity by reaffirming class boundaries that were otherwise repugnant to her. Thus Woolf vacillates between perceiving class as necessary to "civilization" and championing egalitarian views. Theoretical points of reference for this study include cultural materialism, feminist standpoint theory, psychoanalysis, and theories of class advanced by Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Max Weber, Gary Day, David Cannadine, Beverly Skeggs, and Rosemary Hennessy.

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