the beginnings of why satire doesn’t work

I initially thought satire would be my entry into the rhetorical mode the videos used to comment on “political discourse” (whatever that is…), but have since moved away from it.

My understanding of satire puts it as an umbrella term around all of the rhetorical modes used to point out the folly of something by advocating the opposite.  But the actual advocating is done by more specific devices, like irony, parody, and appropriation.  The actual devices lend themselves to postmodern interpretation a lot better than general satire, so I went after that pretty quickly.  Linda Hutcheon’s been pretty solid.  She focuses mostly on parody as the mode/device used by postmodernism, but I think irony is really the place to go.

But, that’s getting ahead of myself: most of the books I found about satire focused on it as a historically based rhetorical form that got its modern flavor from Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, aka totally 18th century, modernist stuff.  Which isn’t to say that we don’t use satire today, or that its use is outdated (I think fake news a la The Onion and The Daily Show/Colbert Report are modern examples), but that the modernist dialectic is unavoidable when you talk about satire.  If Critical Reintroduction says differently, I might have to reconsider that position, though.

I just grabbed a few of the (overdue) library books scattered on my floor and flipped through them to see if anything supports my position.  Rosenblum, in “The Satirist’s Art” (1972):

“If satire’s reflexiveness, its concern with its own form, makes it seem like a genre congenial to modern taste, the rhetorical view of satire makes it seem old-fashioned in that it runs counter to a view of the relation of poetry to the real world that has become orthodox in many influential poetics. …….. The satirist is interested in his work primarily for its power to move his audience; no matter how inventive the personae or ingenious the metaphors, these literary devices exist only the persuade the audience.”  (p. 31)

This didn’t really serve my purpose super well because I don’t see my videos as in direct opposition to the dominant paradigm.

~ by Gabriel on June 27, 2008.