Satire, ideology, and dissonance in American Revolutionary culture.

Format:

Book

Thesis/Dissertation

Author/Creator:

Yerkes, Amy Marie.

Contributor:

Weissberg, Liliane, advisor.

University of Pennsylvania.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature.

United States--History.

United States.

History.

0337.

0591.

Penn dissertations--Comparative literature and literary theory.

Comparative literature and literary theory--Penn dissertations.

Local Subjects:

Penn dissertations--Comparative literature and literary theory.

Comparative literature and literary theory--Penn dissertations.

0337.

0591.

Physical Description:

104 pages

Contained In:

Dissertation Abstracts International 62-02A.

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

text file

Summary:

The historiography of the American Revolution unfolds as an almost constant recovery of ideological or discursive contexts for the events that occurred between 1765 and 1783. Few studies, however, have explored the dissonances that emerged in revolutionary culture at the intersection of these often competing ideologies and discourses. Exploring these dissonances reveals the Revolution as a time of challenge and transgression, of reaction and mobilization, of the crossing, blurring, and re-drawing of bounds that had long defined colonial and trans-Atlantic British culture.

To uncover a sense of this transgression, I turn toward a source that directly participates in and prompts such crossings: satire. Revolutionary satire is a domain where competing discourses intersect, creating points of antagonism that enact rich and powerfully symbolic dissonances. Such dissonance provides a record of political, social, and cultural anxiety, and reveals the force necessary to make the Revolution's hegemonic discourses operate with the appearance of 'naturalness'. What Terry Eagleton said of Bakhtin's carnivalesque might as well be applied to satire: it provides a "temporary retextualizing of the social formation that exposes its 'fictive' foundations" (1981, 149). Several key formative processes I examine in this dissertation are the changing definitions of citizenship and patriotism, evolving notions of public authority and representation, and what some eighteenth-century observers saw as the breakdown of print culture.

This dissertation examines the satires of such well known figures as Benjamin Franklin, Mercy Otis Warren, and Jonathan Trumbull, as well as satiric songs, images, public rituals, and "mob" action. I read the satires broadly as acts of "expressive behavior which invert, contradict, abrogate, or in some fashion present an alternative to commonly held cultural codes" (Babcock 14). So doing reveals these satiric "acts" as more than symbolic challenges to prevailing political ideologies and social institutions: they were also real and immediate threats to those orders. Such satiric acts present the Revolution as a more open, fluid, and anxious process than is visible when focused on its political discourses and ideologies alone.

Notes:

Thesis (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory) -- University of Pennsylvania, 2001.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 62-02, Section: A, page: 0578.

Supervisor: Liliane Weissberg.

Local Notes:

School code: 0175.

ISBN:

9780493134659

Access Restriction:

Restricted for use by site license.