Yahoo Search Busca da Web

Resultado da Busca

  1. en.wikipedia.org › wiki › SatireSatire - Wikipedia

    Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of exposing or shaming the perceived flaws of individuals, corporations, government, or society itself into ...

    • Overview
    • Historical definitions
    • GeneratedCaptionsTabForHeroSec

    satire, artistic form, chiefly literary and dramatic, in which human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings are held up to censure by means of ridicule, derision, burlesque, irony, parody, caricature, or other methods, sometimes with an intent to inspire social reform.

    Satire is a protean term. Together with its derivatives, it is one of the most heavily worked literary designations and one of the most imprecise. The great English lexicographer Samuel Johnson defined satire as “a poem in which wickedness or folly is censured,” and more elaborate definitions are rarely more satisfactory. No strict definition can encompass the complexity of a word that signifies, on one hand, a kind of literature—as when one speaks of the satires of the Roman poet Horace or calls the American novelist Nathanael West’s A Cool Million a satire—and, on the other, a mocking spirit or tone that manifests itself in many literary genres but can also enter into almost any kind of human communication. Wherever wit is employed to expose something foolish or vicious to criticism, there satire exists, whether it be in song or sermon, in painting or political debate, on television or in the movies. In this sense satire is everywhere.

    The terminological difficulty is pointed up by a phrase of the Roman rhetorician Quintilian: “satire is wholly our own” (“satura tota nostra est”). Quintilian seems to be claiming satire as a Roman phenomenon, although he had read the Greek dramatist Aristophanes and was familiar with a number of Greek forms that one would call satiric. But the Greeks had no specific word for satire, and by satura (which meant originally something like “medley” or “miscellany” and from which comes the English satire) Quintilian intended to specify that kind of poem “invented” by Gaius Lucilius, written in hexameters on certain appropriate themes, and characterized by a Lucilian-Horatian tone. Satura referred, in short, to a poetic form, established and fixed by Roman practice. (Quintilian mentions also an even older kind of satire written in prose by Marcus Terentius Varro and, one might add, by Menippus and his followers Lucian and Petronius.) After Quintilian’s day, satura began to be used metaphorically to designate works that were satirical in tone but not in form. As soon as a noun enters the domain of metaphor, as one modern scholar has pointed out, it clamours for extension, and satura (which had no verbal, adverbial, or adjectival forms) was immediately broadened by appropriation from the Greek satyros and its derivatives. The odd result is that the English satire comes from the Latin satura, but satirize, satiric, etc., are of Greek origin. By about the 4th century ce the writer of satires came to be known as satyricus; St. Jerome, for example, was called by one of his enemies “a satirist in prose” (“satyricus scriptor in prosa”). Subsequent orthographic modifications obscured the Latin origin of the word satire: satura becomes satyra, and in England by the 16th century it was written satyre.

    Elizabethan writers, anxious to follow Classical models but misled by a false etymology, believed that satyre derived from the Greek satyr play: satyrs being notoriously rude, unmannerly creatures, it seemed to follow that the word satyre should indicate something harsh, coarse, rough. The English author Joseph Hall wrote:

    The Satyre should be like the Porcupine,

    That shoots sharpe quils out in each angry line,

    And wounds the blushing cheeke, and fiery eye,

    Of him that heares, and readeth guiltily.

    Satire is a literary and dramatic form that uses ridicule, irony, or other methods to criticize human or individual vices, follies, abuses, or shortcomings. Learn about the history, types, and examples of satire from ancient to modern times.

    • Robert C. Elliott
  2. Learn what satire is, how it works, and why it matters. Explore the different types of satire, the literary devices used in satire, and the examples of satire in literature and media.

  3. An overview of satire as a literary mode, its history, features, and criticism. Explore the rhetorical and ethical traditions of satire, the distinction between Horace and Juvenal, and the Menippean satire.