Guia Academica - Facultad de Filología - Universidad de Salamanca

403 FACULTAD DE FILOLOGÍA GUÍA ACADÉMICA 2009-2010
• Identify techniques of comedy including irony, satire, hyperbole, wit, epigram, incongruity, inconsistency of character, plot devices, and
physical comedy;
• Recognise the interplay of parody, satire and irony;
• Appreciate the various functions of parody;
• Isolate the methods of parody;
• Analyse the satiric techniques available to the authors of satire;
• Distinguish satire as a discrete literary form in contradistinction to the comic;
• Understand what irony is, how it functions, and what its effects are;
LEARNING OUTCOMES
The specific goals of the class are as follows:
• Grounding students in the literary methods or tools used by writers of humor and satire, such as irony, sarcasm, exaggeration, understatement,
hyperbole, allusion;
• Exploring the uses of satire in many forms –including prose, poetry, drama, and visual texts such as film and political cartoons– and from
diverse periods and cultures;
• Strengthening students’ ability to read insightfully, to think critically, and to communicate effectively in discussions and writing;
• Enhancing students’ understanding of the ways that satire works in particular cultural contexts –that is, why it emerges when it does and
what it targets;
• Enabling students to explore their own humanity by trying to discover how they react to comedy, and what that reaction says about them.
COURSE SYLLABUS
I. Introduction to the course.
1. Principal concepts and their definitions: laughter, humour, the comic
2. Relationships between humour and laughter, comedy and satire, irony and parody
II. Theories of laughter and humour (early theories; 19 th and 20 th century theories)
III. Comedy: “Comedy awakens thoughtful laughter” (G. Meredith)
1. Comic modes, genres and techniques
2. The comic vision: types of comedy, the comic hero, the comic pattern
3. Theories of comedy
4. Glossary: terms associated with comedy
IV. Satire: “A sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own” (J. Swift)
1. Background, concepts and writers
2. Targets and victims of satire
3. Forms of satire: types, characteristics and techniques
4. Glossary: terms related to satire
V. Parody: “A relatively polemical allusive imitation of a cultural production or practice” (Dentith)
1. Comic aspects of parody, attitudes of the parodist
2. Related forms: burlesque, travesty, pastiche, satire, irony, metafiction
3. Late-modern and modern uses of parody: Bakhtin and carnival laughter
4. Postmodern uses of parody: intertextuality
5. Glossary: essential terms defined
UNIVERSIDAD DE SALAMANCA