Assignment Task

1. Satire has traditionally had a public function, and its public orientation remains. Although the satirist may arraign God and the universe. He usually seems to believe - at least to hope - that change is possible. (Patricia Mayer Spacks) With reference to one or two of the literary satires in Module One, consider how satiric condemnation is used in the service of positive social change.

2. In large parts of the world, whiteness is positioned as the normative, normalized, supposedly netural or natural subject position-the universal baseline for human experience- from which difference and deviance are measured. (Martin Lund) With reference to Hughes’s Slave on the Block and/or Parker’s Arrangement in Black and White, discuss how satire is used to critique whiteness as the presumed normal and/or universal way of being.

3. The power of satire lies not in its unambiguous moral target, but in its propensity to force us to make a choice about what that target (or those targets) might be. (Sharon McCoy) With reference to Kafka’s Report to an Academy, discuss how Kafka satirically targets one (or more) of the following:

a) Assimilation;

b) Colonialism;

c) The ideals of civility and civilization;

d) The education or self-creation of the individual;

e) The treatment of migrants;

f) Any other possible satiric targets.

4. Satire is the literary form least governed by rules of genre … it is open to revisionary feminist experimentation that contests those formulaic literary codes that proceed by exclusion’ (Katharine Ryder) With reference to Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, discuss how Angela Carter uses satire to contest the formula of fairy tales.

5. ‘The satirist, either explicitly or implicitly, tries to sway us toward an ideal alternative, toward a condition of what the satirist believes should be.’ (Ruben Quintero) 2 With reference to one or two of the literary satires in Module One, consider how satire is used to try to persuade the reader to adopt a particular ideal (or ideals). What is the ideal in question? And how does the satirist try to sway the reader towards it?