Performing sinners: The Asobi and the Buddhist discourse of Tsumi

This essay addresses how Oprah's book choices are inevitably affective but not necessarily feminist. By reading Oprah's book choices as highly individualistic, I analyze how her choices might be more aggressive and more complex, thereby offering a sense of community rather than the power of individuality to her huge audiences. My argument is based on a belief in Oprah's communicative power, and especially if her book choices were invested with more complications than individual resolutions.     

论《孟子》的幽默风格

对《孟子》散文艺术的幽默风格的研究,学者关注较少,仅少数专家点到为止。详细讨论了《孟子》散文的比喻和引人入彀的幽默手法,并与苏格拉底风格作了比较研究。     

The critical problem of cynical irony meaning what you say and ideologies of class and gender

ABSTRACT

Critical theorists such as Slavoj ?i?ek have for some years discussed the ideological significance of cynical or “blank” irony in fairly general terms. Less attention has been paid to the practical implications of such irony for critical semiotic analysis. With this in mind, this paper discusses the problems that sexist and “classist” jokes – specifically jokes about “chavs” – pose for the critical analyst. On the one hand, they seem to be saying deeply ideological things. On the other, their ironic nature means that they evade the claim that they are really saying, asserting, meaning anything. Theirs is a kind of blank irony which can be identified in all kinds of contemporary semiotic practice and is therefore an important phenomenon for critical analysts to get to grips with. The paper attempts to get to grips with it by outlining some semiotic clues to blank irony, and, more importantly, by suggesting some ways in which we might try to bring a critical perspective to bear in cases of cynical irony.     

Laughing with / at the national self: Greek television satire and the politics of self-disparagement

This study engages with the cultural consequences of the self-disparaging politics of television satire. It focuses on an emblematic program of Greek television fiction, Oi Afthairetoi (MEGA channel, 1989–1991) and the ways it both constructs and ridicules a particular version of the Greek self, the “Neoellinas”. By proposing a wider understanding of the political side-effects of television satire, which have so far been mainly addressed within the study of political satire, it turns the attention toward the role of satirical discourse in a public’s view on its national self in times of change or transition. More specifically, while it recognizes the contradictory impact that satire can have on society, it applies the concept of “satiric misfire” as a means to understand satirical endeavors which reinforce rather than counter the problematics they set out to fight against in the first place.     

The truth in Almodóvar’s melodramatic moment: the curious interplay between melodrama and reality in High Heels

This article attempts to show how Almodóvar’s melodrama treats both reality and melodrama as if they belonged to the same ontology and destroys the boundaries between them. The essay is an effort to locate both the emotionality and the irony of Almodóvar’s melodrama, and particularly of his High Heels, in the intricate relationship between the notion of reality and the genre of melodrama, and to demonstrate how the ironic and the melodramatic modes supplement and reinforce each other despite their apparent opposition. It uses Peter Brooks’ and Henry James’ observations on nineteenth-century melodrama as a launching pad for a discussion of the ways in which Almodóvar revises the genre of melodrama at the junction between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The second half of the essay is dedicated to an analysis of High Heels, which illustrates the ambivalent relationships between reality and performance and between ironic and melodramatic spectatorship.