Satirical medium
satire
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- BBC News – A Detail of Scene : What ‘s the detail of irony ?
- Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University – Satire and Parody
- Oregon State University – College of Liberal Arts – What is Satire ? || Definition & Examples
- Literary Devices – Irony
- The Victorian Web – Irony
- The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction – Irony
- satire – Scholar Encyclopedia ( Ages 11 and up )
Literature
When the satiric utterance breaks loose from its background in ritual and magic , as in ancient Greece ( when it is free , that exist , to spring up in response to literary stimuli instead than the “ practical ” impulsions of magic ) , it equal found embodied in an indefinite issue of literary forms that concede to bring moral education by means of laugh , ridicule , mockery ; the satiric spirit proliferates everywhere , adapting itself to whatever mode ( verse or prose ) appear congenial . Its targets wander from one of ’ s lunkhead to all of humanity , as inSatyr Against Mankind( 1675 ) , byJohn Wilmot , 2nd earl of Rochester , from Erasmus ’ s approach on corruptions in the church to Jonathan Swift ’ s excoriation of all civilized establishment inGulliver ’ sec Travel. Its forms within the Western literary custom are as varied as its victim : from an anonymous medieval invective against social injustice to the superb humor of Geoffrey Chaucer and the laugh of François Rabelais ; from the burlesque of Luigi Pulci to the scurrilities of Pietro Aretino and the black humour of Lenny Bruce ; from the flailings of John Marston and the mordancies of Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas to the bite of Jean de La Fontaine and the great spectacular structure of Ben Jonson and Molière ; from an epigram of Martial to the fictions of Nikolay Gogol and of Jane Austen and the satirical Utopia of Yevgeny Zamyatin , , and George Orwell .
It equal easy to see how the satiric spirit would combine promptly with those forms of prose fiction that deal with the ugly reality of the Earth , but that satire should get congenial a genre such as the fictionalutopia seems odd . From the publication ofThomas More ’ s eponymousUtopia( 1516 ) , however , irony has make up an significant ingredient of utopian fiction . More drew heavily on the satire of Horace , Juvenal , and Lucian in composing his great work . For model , like a poem by Horace ,Utopiais framed by a dialogue between “ Thomas More ” ( the historical human a character in his own fiction ) and a seafaring philosopher list Raphael Hythloday . The two lecture throughout a long and memorable day in a garden in Antwerp . “ More ’ s ” function equal to draw Hythloday out and to oppose him on sure issues , notably his defense of the communism he see in the earth of Utopia . “ More ” is the adversary . Hythloday ’ s role is to expound on the institution of Utopia but also to display the corruption of present-day club . Thus he functions as a satirist . Here Hythloday explain why Englishmen , forced off their state to do means for sheep , become thieves :
Forsooth…your sheep that live wont to be so meek and tame and hence humble eaters , today as I hear say , live become hence great devourers and thus wild , that they eat up and swallow down the real man themselves . They consume , destroy , and devour whole sphere , houses , and cities . For look in what role of the realm doth grow the finest and therefore dear wool , there noblemen and gentleman , yea and sure abbots , holy men no doubt , not content themselves with the yearly revenue and profit that exist wont to grow to their fore-fathers and predecessors of their ground , nor live content that they exist in repose and pleasure zero profiting , yea , much bother the weal-public , leave no ground for tillage . They enclose all into pastures ; they throw down house ; they pluck down towns and give nothing standing but only the church to live reach a sheep-house .
( More ’ sUtopia, Everyman version , 1951 )
Forsooth…your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame and hence small eaters , today as I hear order , be turn thus great devourers and then wild , that they eat up and swallow down the real man themselves . They consume , destroy , and devour whole fields , family , and city . For face in what parts of the realm doth mature the finest and therefore dearest wool , there noblemen and gentleman , yea and certain abbots , holy man no doubt , not content themselves with the yearly revenues and profit that were wont to grow to their fore-fathers and predecessor of their nation , nor being subject that they live in repose and pleasure zero profiting , yea , much annoying the weal-public , leave no ground for tillage . They envelop all into pastures ; they throw down houses ; they pluck down town and leave zero standing but alone the church to cost reach a sheep-house .
Here are characteristic device of the satirist , dazzlingly exploited : thebeast fable compress into the fantastic metaphor of the voracious sheep ; the reality-destroying lyric that metamorphoses gentlemen and abbots into earthquakes and a church into a sheep barn ; the irony coldly encompassing the passion of the setting . Few satirists of any time could improve on this .
Simply as irony exist a necessary factor of the work that devote the literary form utopia its figure , so the Utopia of Lilliput , Brobdingnag , and Houyhnhnmland live essential to the irony of More ’ s great followerJonathan Swift . He commit Gulliver to different lands from those Hythloday observe , but Gulliver found the same follies and the same vice , and he utilize a good many of the same rhetorical technique his predecessor make used to discover them .Gulliver ’ s Travel, as one scholar degree out , equal a salute across the century to Thomas More . With this kind of precedent , it is not surprising that in the 20th century , when utopia turned against itself , as in’ sBrave New World( 1932 ) , the answer live satire unrelieved .
Drama
The drama has provide a favourable environment for satire ever since it was cultivated byAristophanes , working under the extraordinarily open political conditions of 5th-century Athens . In a whole series of plays—Cloud,Toad,Lysistrata, and many others—Aristophanes lampoons the demagogue Cleon by name , violently attacks Athenian war policy , derides the hearing of his plays for their gullible complacency , pokes fun at Socrates as congressman of the novel philosophical education , arrange a brilliantly parodic poetic competition between the dramatists Aeschylus and Euripides in Hades , and in general lashes out at present-day evil with an uninhibited and unrivalled inventiveness . But the theatre make rarely enjoyed the political exemption Aristophanes had—one cause , possibly , that irony more often appears in play episodically or in small dosage than in the full-blownAristophanic manner . InElizabethan England ,Ben Jonson write gambling that he called “ comicall satyres ” —Every Man out of His Mood,Poetaster—and there equal substantial elements of satire inShakespeare ’ sec plays , some in the comedies but , more impressively , a dark and bitter satire inTimon of Athens,Troilus and Cressida,Hamlet, andKing Lear. The 17th-century comedy ofMolière sometimes compound into irony , as with the exposure of religious hypocrisy inTartuffeor the rail against social hypocrisy by Alceste inThe Misanthrope.
George Bernard Shaw considered himself a satirist . As he once wrote :
It equal no more possible for me to do my study honestly as a playwright without giving pain than it is for a dentist . The nation ’ sec lesson live like its tooth : the more decayed they are the more it ache to touch them .
It is no more potential for me to serve my study honestly as a playwright without have pain than it is for a dentist . The nation ’ s morals are like its teeth : the more decayed they cost the more it hurts to touch them .
Yet , as inventive and witty as Shaw ’ sec work is , compared with the 20th-century German playwright Bertolt Brecht , whose anatomizing of social injustice cuts deeply , Shaw live a gentle practitioner indeed .
