Satire, Humor and the Construction of Identities conveys how satire can contribute to the construction of social subjects’ identities. It attempts to provide a theoretical ground for a novel understanding of the relationship between satire and identity by finding their common denominator, namely opposition, in order to explain the mechanism through which satire can form identities. After establishing the role of opposition in satire and identity construction through a detailed analysis of various theories, it will be argued that satire can contribute to the construction of racial, ethnic, national, religious, and gender identities. Several examples from British, Persian, ancient Roman literary traditions, and different epochs illustrate the theoretical discussions. The prevalence of satire and the challenges that identity has encountered in our contemporary world guarantee the significance of this study and its socio-political implications.

Explores the Eastern German literary trend of the 1990s employing humor and satire to come to terms with socialism's failure and a difficult unification process. This title surveys ten novels including, works by Brussig, Schulze, and Hensel. These contemporary texts help define Germany today from a specific, East German perspective.

Satire, Humor, and Environmental Crises explores how satire and humor can be employed to address and mitigate ecological crises at individual and collective levels. Besides scientific and technological endeavors, solutions to ecological crises must entail social and communicative reform to persuade citizens, corporations, organizations, and policymakers to adopt more sustainable lifestyles and policies. This monograph reassesses environmental behavior and messaging and explores the promises of humorous and satiric communication therein. It draws upon a solid and interdisciplinary theoretical foundation to explicate the individual, social, and ecospheric determinants of behavior. Creative works of popular culture across various modes of expression, including The Simpsons, Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and The New Yorker cartoons, are examined to illustrate the strong if underappreciated relationship between humor and the environment. This is followed by a discussion of the instruments and methodological subtleties involved in measuring the impacts of humor and satire in environmental advocacy for the purpose of conducting empirical research. More broadly, the book aspires to participate in urgent cultural and political discussions about how we can evaluate and intervene in the full diversity of environmental crises, engage a broad set of internal and external partners and stakeholders, and develop models for positive social and environmental transformations. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars interested in environmental humanities, communication science, psychology, and critical humor studies. It can further benefit environmental activists, policymakers, NGOs, and campaign organizers.

Based on approaches from discourse analysis and sociolinguistics, this study proposes an analytical model focusing on the linguistic and discursive means narrators use to construct a variety of identities in everyday stories. This model is further exploited in language teaching to cultivate students' cultural sensitivity and critical literacy.

The present publication has been conceived as a critical reflection, in different disciplinary fields, on the social, institutional, and cultural impact of the recent COVID-19 pandemic in Asia and Africa. The issues presented here were first discussed as part of a larger research project at two conferences, held in Rome in June and October 2022. After extensive revision, these results have now been collected as fully developed articles in the current two volumes: the first focuses on the cultural, artistic, and media-related facets of the pandemic; the second on its social and institutional implications. This Volume I examines the effects of the traumatic events brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic on various cultural phenomena, artistic expressions, and social media communication, analysing among other themes the creation of new narratives and the modalities of personal and collective responses. The articles cover vast geographical areas, spanning from the Middle East to the Indian Subcontinent and East Asia, and aim at making their multiple visions converge in one compact perspective of empathic connection.

Postcolonial Satire: Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire positions postcolonial South Asian satiric fiction in both the cutting-edge territory of political resistance writing and the ancient tradition of Menippean satire. Postcolonial Satire aims to disrupt the relationship between postcolonial literature and magic realism, by discussing the work of writers such as G. V. Desani, Aubrey Menen, Salman Rushdie, and Irwin Allan Sealy as one movement into the entirely subversive realm of satire. Indian fiction, and the fiction of other colonized cultures, can be re-construed through the lens of satire as openly critical of a broad spectrum of political and cultural issues. Employing the strengths of postcolonial theory and criticism, Postcolonial Satire expands upon the postcolonial works of these authors by analyzing them as satire, rather than magical realism with satirical elements.

This is the first book in English to survey the Eastern German literary trend of employing humor and satire to come to terms with experiences in the German Democratic Republic and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. As sophisticated attempts to make sense of socialism’s failure and a difficult unification process, these contemporary texts help define Germany today from a specific, Eastern German perspective. Grounded in politics and history, ten humorous and satirical novels are analyzed for their literary aesthetics and language, cultural critiques, and socio-political insights. The texts include popular novels such as Thomas Brussig’s Helden wie wir, Ingo Schulze’s Simple Storys, and Jens Sparschuh’s Der Zimmerspringbrunnen, as well as lesser-known but equally relevant works like Schlehweins Giraffe by Bernd Schirmer and Katerfrühstück by Erich Loest. A broad spectrum of humor and satire theories is applied to probe texts from various angles and suggest multi-layered answers to the question of how these literary modes function in postwall Germany to construct a specifically Eastern German identity. Interviews the author conducted with five of the satirists are appended as primary sources and contribute to the interpretation of the texts.