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.

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This thesis, consisting of four chapters, explores female alienation and subjectivity as described by post-war French women writers. The first chapter will focus on critical and theoretical approaches to female alienation. Through feminist and Marxist criticism, I explore the condition of women as a dominated class. The second chapter examines literary strategies such as irony, humor, parody and satire used by the authors of my corpus to undermine and question gender stereotypes which they inherited from the tradition of the French novel. The third chapter is devoted to the issue of women novelists' uses of the figure of the naive female narrator. Through their reworking of this stereotype, they perform a political act of providing agency to a figure who was traditionally deprived of all agency. The fourth chapter analyzes the question of the female body. By playing with the concept of the grotesque female body and its representation, the novelists whom I study, attempt to liberate their female narrators from the status of an object and the influence of the beauty myth. What interests me most is the potential of feminist literature to create alternative representations of women in French literature. In the novels studied here, narrators move from a position of naivety and alienation to an unexpected sense of agency and subjectivity. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis examines the evolution of the representation of female alienation and female identity in the postwar French novel, as well as the textual strategies of resistance used by three postwar French women novelists to subvert and rework the trope of the naive female narrator. My research project highlights the emergence of female agency in the French novel in recent decades through the examples of novels by Christiane Rochefort, Marie Redonnet and Marie Darrieussecq. The novels studied in this dissertation feature the point of view of female narrators who move beyond their initial naivety and passivity to discover unexpected forms of agency.

The thesis consists of three main sections: the Introduction, the text (with apparatus), and the Commentary. The Introduction begins with a survey of the available evidence for the poem’s date and authorship, before moving on to consider its generic affiliations and influences, focusing on two particular areas: its links with the ill-defined genre of παρῳδία, and its relationship to animal-narratives elsewhere in ancient literature (particularly fable) and visual art. This is followed by a detailed analysis of the poem’s style and metre, a brief tour of its Nachleben up to the 13th century, and a summary of the notoriously tangled manuscript tradition. The text is new, and differs substantially from both that of Allen (in the OCT) and of West (the most recent English edition). The apparatus, as explained in more detail on p. 117, is somewhere between the two: it takes into account the readings of only nine MSS from the 80-100 extant, and does not attempt to represent every single textual variation even among these nine, but it is much fuller than the minimalist apparatus of the Loeb. It aims to provide a useful source for scholars interested in the poem’s many and serious textual cruces, while remaining more succinct and user-friendly than the dense and sometimes baffling apparatus of Ludwich’s monumental 1896 edition. The text is followed by an English prose translation: this makes no claims to beauty, and is simply intended as a relatively literal guide to the sense of the Greek. The Commentary, finally, is twofold. Any commentary on the Batrachomyomachia will inevitably spend much space and ink on purely textual issues, and on the fundamental task of unearthing meaning from the dizzying range of wild and nonsensical variants available. Interspersed with these textual points, however, this commentary includes considerations of the poem not as a mechanics problem but as a sophisticated Hellenistic work of art – exploring its intertextualities, its characterisation, its dramatic effects, its dry sense of humour, and subjecting it to the serious literary analysis it has often been denied.

Les perspectives de recherche de cette étude s'organisent autour d'un axe thématique qui ouvre la dimension littéraire japonaise contemporaine au débat critique international : l'un des enjeux de notre analyse est de comprendre, par la comparaison d'un nombre limité d'œuvres exemplaires, la spécificité de l'expérience de la réécriture parodique du canon au Japon. Par ailleurs, tout en définissant de façon ponctuelle et rigoureuse le champ d'investigation, cette analyse permet de réfléchir au problème complexe de l'utilisation, devenue paradigmatique, des formes intertextuelles dans la littérature "postmoderne". S'agit-il d'une façon pour préserver ou déconstruire ? Est-il possible de considérer la relecture parodique comme une forme de traduction du canon? Dans cette perspective, on se propose de conduire une analyse directe et comparative des œuvres d'auteurs divers mais qui se sont tous intéressés à des textes-source communs : en particulier on prend en considération le cas exemplaire des parodies des textes de Kawabata Yasunari (1899 – 1972) réalisées par Ogino Anna (1956), Inoue Hisashi (1934-2010) et Shimizu Yoshinori (1947) (respectivement dans "Watashi no aidokusho", 1991 ; "Bun to Fun", 1970 et "Kirikirijin", 1981 ; "Ese monogatari", 1991). Face aux œuvres immortelles du grand maître de la modernité, tous trois ont réalisé des parodies qu'on peut lire comme des traductions dans un langage nouveau d' hypotextes célèbres ("Yukiguni", "Izu no odoriko") ; ou, en même temps, comme des parodies de la traduction, qui révèlent les fragments d'un jeu cassé, moyens utiles à la réflexion metatextuelle. / The overall aim of my research is to investigate whether and, if so, how the use of intertextual tropes like parody and pastiche have been a determining factor in the “translation” of the modern canon in contemporary Japanese literature. In order to investigate these aspects, I have explored as a case study three works completely different in terms of style and themes, but that share a common hypotext: in fact, I analyse in this research the parodies of Yukiguni, the worldwide renowned masterpiece of Kawabata Yasunari, realized by Ogino Anna, Shimizu Yoshinori and Inoue Hisashi (respectively in Watashi no aidokusho　『私の愛毒書』, 1991; Ese monogatari 『江勢物語』, 1991; Kirikirijin, 『吉里吉里人』, 1981).Through a comparative examination of the chosen texts, but also considering the critical discourse on the “canonization” of the works of Kawabata and the non-negligible role of their translations for the western audience, I try to demonstrate the strategic importance of intertextual practices in contemporary Japanese literary scene: the exploration of the use of parody and pastiche in postmodern Japanese context highlight the challenging perspective of a literature that reflect on itself by reflecting itself. / Le prospettive di ricerca di questo studio si concentrano attorno ad un asse tematico che apre la dimensione letteraria giapponese contemporanea al dibattito critico internazionale : nucleo essenziale del nostro percoso è infatti la proposta di un'analisi, realizzata attraverso la messa in relazione di un corpus di testi esemplari, dell'esperienza della riscrittura parodica del canone letterario moderno nel Giappone contemporaneo.In particulare, il caso di studio analizzato è quello delle riscritture realizzate da tre autori contemporanei (Ogino Anna, Shimizu Yoshinori, Inoue Hisashi) che hanno in commune ipotesti estremamente celebri : Yukiguni ("Il paese delle nevi") e Izu no odoriko ("La ballerina del paese delle nevi"), di Katawabe Yasunari, primo Nobel giapponese per la letteratura.

The aim of this dissertation is to study the evolution of the Russian anti-utopian literary genre in the new post-Soviet environment in the wake of the defunct Soviet socialist utopia. The genre has gained a renewed importance during the 2000s, and has been used variously as a means of dealing satirically with the Soviet past, of understanding the present, and of pondering possible courses into the future for the Russian Federation. A guiding question in this study is: What makes us recognize a novel as anti-utopian at a time when the idea of utopia may appear obsolete, when the hegemony of nation states has been challenged for several decades, and when art has been drawn towards the aesthetics of hybridity? The main part of the dissertation is comprised of detailed analyses of three novels: The Slynx (Kys', 2001) by Tatyana Tolstaya; Homo Zapiens/Babylon (Generation ‘P’, 1999) by Viktor Pelevin; and Ice Trilogy (Ledianaia Trilogiia, 2002−2005) by Vladimir Sorokin. The further development of the genre is subsequently discussed on the basis of seven novels published in the past decade. A main argument in the dissertation is that the genre has been modified in ways which can be seen as a response to social and political changes on a global scale. The waning power of the nation state, in particular, and its broken monopoly as the bearer of social projects marks a new context, which is not shared by the classic works of the genre. Analysis of this evolution in post-Soviet anti-utopian novels draws on sociological as well as literary studies. The dissertation shows how the analysed novels use the possibilities of the genre to problematize various forms of societal discourse, and how these discourses work as mutations of utopia. Prominent among these are historical discourses, which reflect the increasing importance of historical narratives in public political debates in the Russian Federation.

The aim of the Master thesis "The Transformation of Czech political satire in TV broadcasting after year 1989" is to capture and describe changes of political satire in television shows over last 25 years on sample of six selected shows: Česká soda, Gumáci, S politiky netančím, Politické harašení, Stalo se and 168 hodin. Theoretical part of this work is trying to explain idea of satire itself and to introduce of the topic into more general historical context. Practical part is then, using semiotic analysis, aiming at what expression/aesthetic and thematically variables create satiric constructions in the level of visual picture, press and graphics, language level and music component. Last chapter is dedicated to offer political satire in TV broadcasting after 2010. This work is then connecting results of the analysis and findings from the theoretical part in the conclusion.

This thesis seeks to determine whether or not the inclusion of an explicit parody exception would be beneficial for EU trade mark law. The thesis presents all the variables that need to be taken into account in the decision, putting a special emphasis in the importance of considering the negative effects that a hypothetical inclusion can have on the consumers of the parodied reputed trade marks as this variable has been widely disregarded among scholars. Moreover, in this thesis it is considered that an explicit inclusion of the parody exception in EU trade mark law might be recommended for cases of non-commercial expression and mixed expression but not for cases of merely commercial expression.

Esta pesquisa investiga o diálogo das produções cinematográficas cômicopopulares denominadas chanchada brasileira com os meios de comunicação nos anos 50. Tomando como referências teóricas o princípio dialógico de Mikhail Bakhtin, a Análise do Discurso e a Narrativa Cinematográfica, examina o diálogo dessas produções com a Imprensa, o Rádio, a TV e o próprio Cinema, mostrando as vozes que permeavam e retratavam a sociedade brasileira daquele período. Tais vozes respondem umas às outras ou polemizam entre si numa época em que a mídia passa por um processo de profundas transformações, rumo à lógica mercadológica da sociedade de consumo. Nesse sentido, este estudo busca evidenciar como se processa a interação das redes interdiscursivas entre os meios de comunicação. / This research aims to investigate the dialogue of the popular comical cinematographic productions called Brazilian chanchada with the means of communication in the 1950s. Taking as theoretical references Mikhail Bakhtin´s dialogic principle, the Discourse Analysis and the Cinematographic Narrative, it examines the dialogue of those productions with the Radio, the Cinema, the Press and the TV, bringing to the surface the voices which pervaded and portrayed the Brazilian society of that period. Such voices respond to each other or raise polemics between themselves in an epoch when the media is undergoing a process of thorough transformation, en route to the marketing logics of the consumer society. In this sense, this study seeks to provide evidence of how the interaction of the interdiscursive networks among the means of communication is processed.