Behind the Stakes, Between the Lines, Beyond the Pun: A Critical Deconstruction of Humor in William Shakespeare\u27s A Midsummer Night\u27s Dream, and Other Popular Comedies

Humor is a powerful rhetorical device employed at all levels of human discourse—from casual banter to political debate. Still, despite humor’s global prevalence, its historical transgressiveness, and its distinct potential both to neutralize and critically engage highly fraught issues, humans do not often pause to ask how humor works. And what does its working tell us about our humanness? This thesis explores the operation of humor in literature and performance, using tools provided by structuralist, deconstructive, and postmodern critical arenas, to reveal how humor’s fundamental structures invite humans to entertain new perspectives and practice empathy. The study considers irony, the performance of stakes, wordplay, departure from form, timing, metatheatrics, and cross-dressing. William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ca. 1595) serves as a key text, but films and television series including Star Wars (20th Century Fox, 1977, 1983), Young Frankenstein (20th Century Fox, 1974), and Doctor Who (BBC,1963- ), are employed among other popular examples to demonstrate diverse types of humor

Social Inequity in Memories of Shakespeare: The Fetishizing Power of the Globe Theatre

William Shakespeare’s works are widely regarded as the pillar of English literature in Western society. An understanding of Shakespearean literature is a form of symbolic or cultural capital, and a lack thereof signals that a person is uncultured, uneducated. However, in his own time, Shakespeare was not so highly regarded. To fully understand the evolution that Shakespeare and his works have undergone, one must consider the modern memory politics that reify the contemporary interpretation of Shakespeare in the Western world at liex de memoire (places of memory), which are shaped by the tumultuous sequence of historical movements that formed Shakespeare’s image. The Globe Theatre is a powerful place where the writer’s memory is actively curated to cement his legacy into a cohesive narrative. This narrative is selective by nature, unable to include all aspects of Shakespeare’s history. To fetishize means that a person, idea, or narrative, is first objectified, then given power as a fixed object of fascination. This fetishization also solidifies its reputational politics. As a fetishized object, any nuance is stripped away, and we are discouraged from understanding the inner workings of how it is reified and normalized. Because of this fetishization, a simple, unproblematic narrative is created. My main research question concerns the fetishization of Shakespeare, and the role that the Globe Theater plays in retelling, performing, and normalizing this fetish. How and to what extent does The Globe fetishize Shakespeare to create one narrative? To what degree is the modern Western gender and sexuality binary– the strict division of male versus female based on genitalia, and the attraction to the ‘opposite’ gender– upheld or critiqued? How is race and class portrayed at The Globe? I address these questions in a discourse analysis that explores how the Globe’s Research Bulletins, Such Stuff podcast, YouTube channel, and social media work to create and spread this fetish, as well as how this fetish both critiques and upholds ideas of gender identity, sexuality, class stereotypes, and racial biases. I conclude this thesis with suggestions on how the Globe might move forward to incorporate more diverse views to leverage this fetish as a means of social progression rather than repression

An Analysis of speech functions in the jumanji: welcome to the jungle movie by Jake Kasdan

included: the objectives, methods, and media they used. In previous studies, some researchers examined speech functions in comics, novels, twitter's terms of service, traditional shopping centers, teacher's talk in English classrooms, and others. However, studies analyzing speech functions employed in movie are limited. To address this gap, this study aims to analyze the types of speech function which is dominantly used by the characters in the movie. The method of this research was the qualitative approach and used the descriptive design. The data obtained through documentation of the script of the movie; downloaded and divided into a sentence. The researcher analyzed the speech function in all the utterances of the characters of the movie by using Halliday theory. There were 1,265 sentences in the Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle movie by Jake Kasdan, comprise speech functions and their responses. This study’s research finding of this study presented that speech functions in the Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle movie comprise four types; offer with 0%, command 20%, statement 50%, and question with 30%. Besides, the speech function has responses those are acceptance 0%, compliance 8%, acknowledgement 21%, answer 42%, disclaimer 9%, rejection 0%, refusal 9%, and contradiction 11%. The contribution of this research is that the speech functions using in the learning and teaching process. Speech function is significant for communication between teacher and student, student and student, or others. By knowing the speech function, the teacher can gives the material to the students without obstacle because the information can delivery correctly. Moreover, the movie is an appropriate medium in studying speech function because the student can directly analyze the conversation of each character. Therefore, the speech function in the Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle movie can be a choice to be a material in teaching

A brief history of software engineering

Abstract We present a personal perspective of the Art of Programming. We start with its state around 1960 and follow its development to the present day. The term Software Engineering became known after a conference in 1968, when the difficulties and pitfalls of designing complex systems were frankly discussed. A search for solutions began. It concentrated on better methodologies and tools. The most prominent were programming languages reflecting the procedural, modular, and then object-oriented styles. Software engineering is intimately tied to their emergence and improvement. Also of significance were efforts of systematizing, even automating program documentation and testing. Ultimately, analytic verification and correctness proofs were supposed to replace testing. More recently, the rapid growth of computing power made it possible to apply computing to ever more complicated tasks. This trend dramatically increased the demands on software engineers. Programs and systems became complex and almost impossible to fully understand. The sinking cost and the abundance of computing resources inevitably reduced the care for good design. Quality seemed extravagant, a loser in the race for profit. But we should be concerned about the resulting deterioration in quality. Our limitations are no longer given by slow hardware, but by our own intellectual capability. From experience we know that most programs could be significantly improved, made more reliable, economical and comfortable to use. The 1960s and the Origin of Software Engineering It is unfortunate that people dealing with computers often have little interest in the history of their subject. As a result, many concepts and ideas are propagated and advertised as being new, which existed decades ago, perhaps under a different terminology. I believe it worth while to occasionally spend some time to consider the past and to investigate how terms and concepts originated. I consider the late 1950s as an essential period of the era of computing. Large computers became available to research institutions and universities. Their presence was noticed mainly in engineering and natural sciences, but also in business they soon became indispensable. The time when they were accessible only to a few insiders in laboratories, when they broke down every time one wanted to use them, belonged to the past. Their emergence from the closed laboratory of electrical engineers into the public domain meant that their use, in particular their programming, became an activity of many. A new profession was born; but the large computers themselves became hidden within closely guarded cellars. Programmers brought their programs to the counter, where a dispatcher would pick them up, queue them, and where the results could be fetched hours or days later. There was no interactivity between man and computer. 2 Programming was known to be a sophisticated task requiring devotion and scrutiny, and a love for obscure codes and tricks. In order to facilitate this coding, formal notations were created. We now call them programming languages. The primary idea was to replace sequences of special instruction code by mathematical formulas. The first widely known language, Fortran, was issued by IBM (Backus, 1957), soon followed by Algol (1958) and its official successor in 1960. As computers were then used for computing rather than storing and communicating, these languages catered mainly to numerical mathematics. In 1962 the language Cobol was issued by the US Department of Defense for business applications. But as computing capacity grew, so did the demands on programs and on programmers: Tasks became more and more intricate. It was slowly recognized that programming was a difficult task, and that mastering complex problems was non-trivial, even when -or because -computers were so powerful. Salvation was sought in "better" programming languages, in more "tools", even in automation. A better language should be useful in a wider area of application, be more like a "natural" language, offer more facilities. PL/1 was designed to unify scientific and commercial worlds. It was advertised under the slogan "Everybody can program thanks to PL/1". Programming languages and their compilers became a principal cornerstone of computing science. But they neither fitted into mathematics nor electronics, the two traditional sectors where computers were used. A new discipline emerged, called Computer Science in America, Informatics in Europe. In 1963 the first time-sharing system appeared (MIT, Stanford, McCarthy, DEC PDP-1). It brought back the missing interactivity. Computer manufacturers picked the idea up and announced time-sharing systems for their large mainframes (IBM 360/67, GE 645). It turned out that the transition from batch processing systems to time-sharing systems, or in fact their merger, was vastly more difficult then anticipated. Systems were announced and could not be delivered on time. The problems were too complex. Research was to be conducted "on the job". The new, hot topics were multiprocessing and concurrent programming. The difficulties brought big companies to the brink of collapse. In 1968 a conference sponsored by NATO was dedicated to the topic (1968 at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany) [1]. Although critical comments had occasionally been voiced earlier Programming as a Discipline In the academic world it was mainly E.W.Dijkstra and C.A.R.Hoare, who recognized the problems and offered new ideas. In 1965 Dijkstra wrote his famous Notes on Structured Programming Furthermore, in 1966 Dijkstra wrote a seminal paper about harmoniously cooperating processes Of course, all this did not change the situation, nor dispel all difficulties over night. Industry could change neither policies nor tools rapidly. Nevertheless, intensive training courses on structured programming were organized, notably by H. D. Mills in IBM. None less than the US Department of Defense realized that problems were urgent and growing. It started a project that ultimately led to the programming language Ada, a highly structured language suitable for a wide variety of applications. Software development within the DoD would then be based exclusively on Ada UNIX and C Yet, another trend started to pervade the programming arena, notably academia, pointing in the opposite direction. It was spawned by the spread of the UNIX operating system, contrasting to MIT's MULTICS and used on the quickly emerging minicomputers. UNIX was a highly welcome relief from the large operating systems established on mainframe computers. In its tow UNIX carried the language C [8], which had been explicitly designed to support the development of UNIX. Evidently, it was therefore at least attractive, if not even mandatory to use C for the development of applications running under UNIX, which acted like a Trojan horse for C. From the point of view of software engineering, the rapid spread of C represented a great leap backward. It revealed that the community at large had hardly grasped the true meaning of the term "high-level language" which became an ill-understood buzzword. What, if anything, was to be "high-level"? As this issue lies at the core of software engineering, we need to elaborate. Abstraction Computer systems are machines of large complexity. This complexity can be mastered intellectually by one tool only: Abstraction. A language represents an abstract computer whose objects and constructs lie closer (higher) to the problem to be represented than to the concrete machine. For example, in a high-level language we deal with numbers, indexed arrays, data types, conditional and repetitive statements, rather than with bits and bytes, addressed words, jumps and condition codes. However, these abstractions are beneficial only, if they are consistently and completely defined in terms of their own properties. If this is not so, if the abstractions can be understood only in terms of the facilities of an underlying computer, then the benefits are marginal, almost given away. If debugging a program -undoubtedly the most pervasive activity in software engineeringrequires a "hexadecimal dump", then the language is hardly worth the trouble

More than Men in Drag : gender, sexuality, and the falsetto in musical comedy of Western civilization

"Throughout history the socially constructed concepts of gender and sexual desire have played a vital role in the inter-connectedness of human cultures. Nowhere is this more evident than in the performing and visual arts, which act as a looking glass for society as a whole. Within the realm of theater alone, one finds ample representation of gender and sex norms. The genre of comedy casts incisive light on societal norms due to the unwritten license of the author and actors to comment subversively on matters that would otherwise be taboo. In musical comedy the issue of the male singing in his falsetto-a mature male singing in a female's range-inherently problematizes gender. It magnifies the intrinsic differences between masculine and feminine while simultaneously referring to the norms of a society. This study parallels the history of the comic falsetto-singing male in Western culture with the history of gender and sexuality in order to see the relationship that exists between them. The use and appreciation of the comic falsettist, or lack thereof, has typically been a direct reflection of a culture's attitude toward gender and sexuality. This paper provides representative examples of repertoire for the comic falsettist from different time periods and interprets them contextually within their respective cultures. Examples from a play by Aristophanes and from a Baroque intermezzo exemplify the predominantly patriarcal society in which women and men with same-sex desire existed in the pre-modern age. A discussion of the absence of the male falsettist in the 18th and 19th centuries explores the relationship between this voice type, the beginnings of sexual identity, and a more rigid concept of gender roles. Finally, there is a discussion of several comic falsetto roles, written in the 20th and 21st centuries, which mirror the evolution of Western culture's views toward gender and sexuality since 1900."--Abstract from author supplied metadata

The Montclarion, May 05, 1988

Student Newspaper of Montclair State Collegehttps://digitalcommons.montclair.edu/montclarion/1539/thumbnail.jp

J R R Tolkien\u27s lecture On Fairy -Stories : The qualities of Tolkienian fantasy

Tolkien\u27s 1939 lecture, On Fairy-stories, is viewed by fantasy critics as a statement of Tolkien\u27s aesthetics, rather than a critical framework for interpreting Tolkienian fantasy. This work will attempt to show that this lecture by Tolkien actually creates a framework for interpretation, the four qualities of Tolkienian fantasy, that will be applied later on to four contemporary fantasies by David Eddings, Roger Zelazny, Stephen R. Donaldson, and J. K. Rowling, along with Tolkien\u27s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; After surveying fantasy criticism from George MacDonald\u27s late 19th Century essay to the present, we look at Sir Philip Sidney\u27s Defence of Poesy and his place in fantasy criticism. Following the lead of Italian humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Sidney responds to critics of his day, arguing that the poet should not be subject to the restraints reality, but rather, should be free to go as far as his or her imagination will carry him or her. He also borrows from neo-Platonist ideas as also Aristotle, creating a space for the poet to operate outside of the limits of our world. Joseph Addison\u27s Spectator essays on the pleasures of the imagination, expands upon Sidney, noticing the power of words to create images of things not present, requiring a reader of equal imagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria, posits that this ability to create on the part of the author is a reflection of the creative act of the divine creator who made man. Oscar Wilde\u27s essay, The Decay of Lying, defends imaginative literature against the realists of his day, arguing for a return to the art of lying, which is the creation, through art, of beautiful, untrue things. Tolkien seems to respond to Wilde\u27s challenge, picking of the threads of Sidney and Coleridge to explain his idea of sub-creation on the part of the author, who creates through writing secondary worlds that contain fragments of the truth, which is, for Tolkien, the truth of his Catholic beliefs in God and his creation of man. If the author does his work well then he creates in the reader secondary belief in the secondary world of the narrative, taking up Addison\u27s ideas and taking exception to Coleridge\u27s willing suspension of disbelief. The reader believes the created world is real, in the sense that it exists while the reader is inside the narrative world; These ideas lead Tolkien to give the four qualities of a fairy-story, as he names them, fantasy, recovery, escape, and consolation. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Shakespeare and the Uses of Comedy

In Shakespeare\u27s hand the comic mode became an instrument for exploring the broad territory of the human situation, including much that had normally been reserved for tragedy. Once the reader recognizes that justification for such an assumption is presented repeatedly in the earlier comedies—from The Comedy of Errors to Twelfth Night—he has less difficulty in dispensing with the currently fashionable classifications of the later comedies as problem plays and romances or tragicomedies and thus in seeing them all as manifestations of a single impulse. Bryant shows how Shakespeare, early and late, dutifully concerned himself with the production of laughter, the presentation of young people in love, and the exploitation of theatrical conventions that might provide a guaranteed response. Yet these matters were incidental to his main business in writing comedy: to examine the implications of an action in which human involvement in the process of living provides the kind of enlightenment that leads to renewal and the continuity of life. With rare foresight, Shakespeare presented a world in which women were as capable of enlightenment as the men who wooed them, and Bryant shows how the female characters frequently preceded their mates in perceiving the way of the world. In most of his comedies Shakespeare also managed to suggest the role of death in life\u27s process; and in some—even in plays as diverse as A Midsummer Night\u27s Dream, As You Like It, and The Tempest—he gave hints of a larger process, one without beginning or end, that may well comprehend all our visions—of comedy, tragedy, and history—in a single movement. J.A. Bryant Jr., is professor of English at the University of Kentucky and author of other studies in comedy, including The Compassionate Satirist: Ben Jonson and His Imperfect World. Joseph Bryant, Jr. writes serenely, and with great southern urbanity and courtesy, of Shakespeare\u27s comedies as portrayals of human life as it always will be and as the expression of eternal values. —Yale Review The distillation of many years\u27 study and teaching by a scholar who has produced distinguished and influential books on the drama of the Renaissance period. . . . A stimulating book. —Shakespeare Quarterlyhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/1096/thumbnail.jp

‘Writing Now’

This chapter considers the themes and forms that characterise women’s writing in the new millennium. Post-9/11, self-representation has become a particularly urgent task for Muslim writers such as Monica Ali and Leila Aboulela. A concern with refugees, asylum seekers, and modern forms of slavery becomes increasingly prominent, not only in fiction – for example, Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma (2007) and Monica Ali’s In the Kitchen (2009) – but also in the theatre: Kay Adshead’s The Bogus Woman (2000), Sonja Linden’s Crocodile Seeking Refuge (2005), Christine Bacon’s Rendition Monologues (2008), Rukhsana Ahmad and Oladipo Agboluaje’s Footprints in the Sand (2008), Natasha Walter's Motherland (2008), and Gbemisola Ikumelo’s Next Door (2010). The impact of global capitalism, consumerism, and branding are explored in novels such as Scarlett Thomas’ Popco (2004), Ali Smith’s Girl Meets Boy (2007), and Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007). Ageing is another major theme. Long a pre-occupation of Doris Lessing, it features also in Liz Jensen’s War Crimes for the Home (2002) and Alison Fell’s Tricks of the Light (2003). Anxieties about climate change and environmental apocalypse are addressed through dystopia in Maggie Gee’s The Ice People (1998) and The Flood (2004), Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), Sarah Hall’s The Carhullen Army (2007), and Liz Jensen’s The Rapture (2009). Following Suniti Namjoshi’s pioneeringly collaborative Building Babel (1996), the use of multimedia in Maya Chowdhry’s digital poetry, Kate Pullinger’s ‘networked’ wikinovel Flight Paths (2005-), and the ‘visual novel’ (an interactive fiction game), gives literature an entirely new shape