Comedy Reference library
Yi-Hsin Hsu
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory
...in “vulgar buffoons”—could easily make this abuse “shameful” because it implies a lapse of rational restraint and nonchalance toward the victim of the joke. 29 Thomas Hobbes further introduces the element of pride and self-comparison to the superiority theory. Laughter arises when men feel self-satisfaction via “comparison with another man’s infirmities or absurdity.” 30 Although the drive to achieve superiority over others is a natural condition of mankind, the false satisfaction attained through laughter is not needed in self-sufficient “great...
Discourse Analysis Reference library
Andrea Macrae
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory
...linguistics distinguishes between experiential, interpersonal, and textual metafunctions of language, each of which creates a kind of meaning (simultaneously with the others). The experiential function (sometimes referred to as the ideational function) is the use of language to present experience and worldview. In analysis of the experiential function, Halliday focuses on patterns of transitivity, looking at the selection and portrayal of participants, processes, and circumstances. The interpersonal function is the means by which authors express and...
Pedagogy Reference library
Philip Mead and Brenton Doecke
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory
...Barnes, Becoming an English Teacher , (Sheffield, UK: National Association for the Teaching of English, 2000), 47; Barnes’s vision of culture as inhering “in the interpersonal and social interaction” of the classroom is akin to Raymond Williams’s vision of “culture as ordinary,” which was likewise enunciated in reaction to Leavis’s understanding of culture. See Doecke et al. (2014) for a comparison of Barnes and Williams. 46. See Stephen Ball, Anthony Kenny, and D. Gardiner, “Literacy, Politics and the Teaching of English,” in Bringing English to Order: The...
Sympathy and Empathy Reference library
Rae Greiner
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory
...30 Empathy (if we can call it that) is both “pre-reflective” and selfish, a form of self-love rather than altruistic care. In the mid- 20th century , psychological experiments attempted to peel apart the idea of sympathetic projection from empathetic sociality and interpersonal relations. As Susan Lanzoni points out, psychologists began to differentiate “true” empathy, defined as the accurate appraisal of another’s thoughts or feelings, from what they called “projection.” In 1955 , Reader’s Digest defined the term, which was new to the public outside...
Reception in the Digital Era Reference library
DeNel Rehberg Sedo
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory
...Long, Claire Squires, Shafquat Towheed, Rosalind Crone, and Katie Halsey, among others, illustrate that reading has been always a socially embedded process. 12 The “social infrastructure” of books and reading is “a network composed of intersecting material, technical, interpersonal, institutional, and discursive relations.” 13 Shared reading is at once a social process and a social formation. 14 In the first instance, when analyzing a reader’s individual reading practice, accounting for the social structures that bring a book into the hands of a...
Sublime Reference library
Ian Balfour
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory
...they hardly conform to any set pattern or standard shape. The sublime seems much harder to achieve in prose than in poetry, despite the sovereign fictions of a Flaubert, an Austen, or a Tolstoy, either with the immense canvas of War and Peace or the psychological and interpersonal intensities of Anna Karenina . If the sublime does surface in extended fictions, it usually does so as a momentary eruption only to be contained by the encompassing plot. Gothic fiction constitutes something of a counterexample to this tendency, as notoriously in the...
From Nationalist Movements to Transnational Solidarities: Comparative and Pan-Latina/o Literary Studies Reference library
Marta Caminero-Santangelo
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latina and Latino Literature
...interaction and socialization—although once again differences in background (Puerto Rican versus Cuban exile) and the political differences those backgrounds largely shape divide any coherent panethnic Latina community, serving this time as an actual flashpoint of interpersonal violence between the Cuban American narrator and her Puerto Rican girlfriend (an advocate for Puerto Rican independence from the United States). In Dominican American writer Junot Díaz’s debut (and semiautobiographical) short story cycle Drown ( 1996 ), one of the stories,...
Queer of Color Critique and Queer Asian North American Women’s Literature Reference library
Martin Joseph Ponce
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Asian American Literature and Culture
...to trauma, though in highly unsentimental ways. 84 The text addresses issues that also surface in the works of Kitty Tsui, Merle Woo, Shani Mootoo, and Kai Cheng Thom—colonialism, migration, political activism, intergenerational continuity and conflict, state-generated and interpersonal trauma—but engages with queer female sexualities in unprecedented ways. Castillo largely leaves aside the construction of racialized gender-sexual deviancy and stereotypes through colonial, national, and popular culture discourses and concentrates more on the mercurial...
