Cornering the Snarket: Sarcasm in Medieval and Renaissance Literature

Sponsoring Organization(s)

Southeastern Medieval Association (SEMA)

Organizer Name

Alan Baragona

Organizer Affiliation

James Madison Univ.

Presider Name

Alan Baragona

Paper Title 1

Encountering Snarks in Anglo-Saxon Translation: One Translator's Top Ten List

Presenter 1 Name

Rick McDonald

Presenter 1 Affiliation

Utah Valley Univ.

Paper Title 2

Sarcasm and the Disruption of Social Order in the Fabliaux

Presenter 2 Name

Patricia Sokolski

Presenter 2 Affiliation

LaGuardia Community College, CUNY

Paper Title 3

The Taming of the Snark: Medieval Shrew Plays and the Question of Sarcasm

Presenter 3 Name

Joe Ricke

Presenter 3 Affiliation

Taylor Univ.

Paper Title 4

Lorenzo Valla's "Intellectual Violence": Personal Feuds and Appropriated Sarcasm

Presenter 4 Name

Scott O'Neil

Presenter 4 Affiliation

Univ. of Rochester

Start Date

17-5-2015 8:30 AM

Session Location

Fetzer 1005

Description

There is a long tradition of scholarship on the use of irony in medieval and Renaissance literature but much less on sarcasm, which is harder to pin down in a text because it relies so much on tone. Papers in this session examine how sarcasm can be identified by signals within the text and context of a given work and the importance of this rhetorical color to the literature. Topics range from Old English poetry to French fabliaux to Middle English drama to an Italian Renaissance oration.

Alan Baragona