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This thesis analyzes the ways in which Banksy’s street art installations are used to critique sociopolitical injustices. The street has long existed as a platform for social and political movements. In particular, street art offers unique opportunities for voicing criticisms in pioneering ways that have been proven successful in upsetting normative power structures. Anne Theresa Demo’s analysis on the Guerilla Girls’ comic politics of subversion offers an appropriate conceptual lens to analyze Banksy’s employment of perspectives by incongruity as strategies for subversion. Therefore, this thesis analyzes how Banksy’s subversive satire is rhetorical by examining three techniques that have successfully exposed hegemonic institutions: mimicry, revision, and juxtaposition. Further, I argue that Banksy’s street art gallery, Better Out Than In, utilized these techniques in a global, revolutionary manner to bolster access and widen audience participation. Banksy’s street art both spotlights contemporary injustices and provides a frame to interpret the artist’s critical perspectives. By analyzing the ways in which Banksy uses satire as subversion, this thesis illustrates how visual rhetoric can offer liberation for victims of sociopolitical injustice.

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The existence of a metaphoric female standing in for poetic style was only plainly discussed in a paper from 1987 concerned with Roman elegiac poetry. This figure is given the title of scripta puella or written woman, since her existence depends solely on the writings of an author. These females often appear to have basis in reality; however there is insufficient evidence to allow them to cross out of the realm of fantasy. The term scripta puella in poetry refers to a perfected poetic form, one the author prefers over all others, and a human form creates the illusion of a mistress. Using this form, usually described in basic terms which create an outline of a woman, a poet easily expresses his inclination towards specific poetic styles and elements. While other scholars recognize the scripta puella in elegiac poetry, little research has been done into other genres. For this thesis, the focus is on the genre called Latin verse satire. The genre contains four recognized authors: Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal. In order to prove her existence, each collection of satires is examined in its original language and analyzed with heavy emphasis on recognizing key phrases and attributes of scriptae puellae. Her appearances can be difficult to determine, as some examples will show, yet the existence of scriptae puellae enrich modern understanding of ancient texts. In addition to the four authors, articles and books dealing with women, satire, and women in satire are consulted to aid in explanation and support. With this body of proof, scriptae puellae are shown to exist within the Latin verse satirists' texts; they act as a link between the four authors and as a link to Greek poetry, which has been considered a possible predecessor for satire. This knowledge allows for a better explanation of satire as a genre and opens up the possibilities for further study in other genres which contain women of various forms.

An interdisciplinary study of women satirists of the Progressive and Jazz eras, the dissertation investigates the ways in which early modernist writers use the satiric mode either as an elitist mask or as a site of resistance, confronts the theoretical limitations that have marginalized women satirists in the academic arena, and points to the destabilizing, democratic potential inherent in satiric discourse. In the first chapter, I introduce the concept of signifying caricature, an exaggerated characterization that carries with it broad social, political, and cultural critique. Edith Wharton uses a signifying caricature in The Custom of the Country where the popular press, middlebrow literature, and the democratization of language is under attack. Several of Wharton’s satiric stories also ridicule the New Woman, revealing Wharton’s anxiety over women functioning in the public arena. The second chapter features recovery work of May Isabel Fisk, an internationally known comic monologist whose work has been lost to scholars. This chapter examines Fisk’s monologues, paying particular attention to her use of the eiron and alazon comic figures. The dissertation then moves on to Dorothy Parker’s biting satires of Jazz era decadence, the sexual double standard, and the oppressive norms of feminine beauty promoted in mass culture. The study concludes with an analysis of Jessie Fauset’s Comedy: American Style, a novel using a signifying caricature to chastise America’s failed racial policies and an essentialist theory of race. Comedy: American Style is an overlooked Depression era satire that challenges notions of a fixed American cultural nationalism even as it presages the idea of race as a floating signifier.

This essay will analyze a selection of characters from Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times. Characterizations will be analyzed by using a Marxist theoretical framework, e.g., characters’ relations to Marxist concepts such as class struggle, alienation, and stratification will be studied. The purpose of this essay is to use Marxist concepts in order to understand Dickens’ satire and critique of capitalism. This is done by applying a theory criticizing capitalism, namely Marxist theory, to some of the novel’s characters and analyzing these characters according to their relations to the main features of Marxist theory. A few characters are selected for analysis, to distinguish characteristics or traits that satirize society. Moreover, the essay will investigate whether the author alludes to Marxist concepts when satirizing contemporary society. The characters portrayed in the novel are all exposed to a society characterized by hardship, inequality, and class struggle. These concepts are all features of a society that Marxism critiques. Accordingly, the thesis is that Marxist concepts are implicit in the text and do play a role in Dickens’ satirizing of his contemporary, capitalist, industrialized society, despitenot being mentioned explicitly.