Comic Provocations


Book Description

This collection explores how Old French fabliaux disrupt literal and figurative bodies. Essays cover theoretical issues including fragmentation and multiplication, social anxiety and excessive circulation, performative productions and creative formations, to trace the competing consequences that arise from this literary body's unsettling capacity.




The Provocative Colette


Book Description

Movie "Colette" coming in September starring Keira Knightley! From her marriage at the age of 20, until her divorce, this snapshot of Colette's life focuses on her formative years. Incredibly complex, powerfully determined, truly gifted, Colette challenged herself to reinvent her life and assert herself as a free woman. In her day, her behavior scandalized and vexed the establishment. But in the end, she helped to free women in their thinking and became member and then president of France's prestigious Académie Goncourt, among many other honors as one of France's preeminent authors. For mature readers.




Provocauteurs and Provocations


Book Description

Twenty-first century media has increasingly turned to provocative sexual content to generate buzz and stand out within a glut of programming. New distribution technologies enable and amplify these provocations, and encourage the branding of media creators as "provocauteurs" known for challenging sexual conventions and representational norms. While such strategies may at times be no more than a profitable lure, the most probing and powerful instances of sexual provocation serve to illuminate, question, and transform our understanding of sex and sexuality. In Provocauteurs and Provocations, award-winning author Maria San Filippo looks at the provocative in films, television series, web series and videos, entertainment industry publicity materials, and social media discourses and explores its potential to create alternative, even radical ways of screening sex. Throughout this edgy volume, San Filippo reassesses troubling texts and divisive figures, examining controversial strategies—from "real sex" scenes to scandalous marketing campaigns to full-frontal nudity—to reveal the critical role that sexual provocation plays as an authorial signature and promotional strategy within the contemporary media landscape.




Peter Cannon: Thunderbolt #1


Book Description

His level of genius is matched only by his heroics, and in humanity’s darkest hour, he’s the hero they need the most—alas, poor humanity. Peter Cannon—the man known as Thunderbolt—is only too happy to leave civilization to face its end. Kieron Gillen (The Wicked + the Divine) teams up with powerhouse artist Caspar Wijngaard (Doctor Aphra) as he returns to the superhero genre with a dark, humorous and relentless love song to the genre. Well, "Love Song" in a Leonard Cohen Love Song kind of way. Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt: saving a world he hates.




Comic Medievalism


Book Description

The role of laughter and humour in the postmedieval citation, interpretation or recreation of the middle ages has hitherto received little attention, a gap in scholarship which this book aims to fill. Examining a wide range of comic texts and practices across several centuries, from Don Quixote and early Chaucerian modernisation through to Victorian theatre, the Monty Python films, television and the experience of visiting sites of "heritage tourism" such as the Jorvik Viking Museum at York, it identifies what has been perceived as uniquely funny about the Middle Ages in different times and places, and how this has influenced ideas not just about the medieval but also about modernity. Tracing the development and permutations of its various registers, including satire, parody, irony, camp, wit, jokes, and farce, the author offers fresh and amusing insight into comic medievalism as a vehicle for critical commentary on the present as well as the past, and shows that for as long as there has been medievalism, people have laughed at and with the middle ages. Louise D'Arcens is Associate Professor in English Literatures at the University of Wollongong.




Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Feminist Origins of the Arthurian Legend


Book Description

Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Feminist Origins of the Arthurian Legend provides the first feminist analysis of both the Arthurian section of The History of the Kings of Britain and The Life of Merlin .




Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Translation of Female Kingship


Book Description

Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Translation of Female Kingship provides the first feminist analysis of the part of The History of the Kings of Britain that most readers overlook: the reigns before and after Arthur's.




Holy F*ck


Book Description

Sister Maria has recruited two horny drug-fueled weirdos to stop the apocalypse. Their names? Jesus and Satan. Can these biblical frenemies help this nun with a gun defeat an army of pissed off mythological gods? Only one thing's for sure -- it's gonna be a wild ride Collecting the controversially-contagious Holy F*ck #1-4.




Exploring the Sociopragmatics of Online Humor


Book Description

This monograph explores the diverse sociopragmatic functions and meanings of humorous discourse in various online contexts affecting its use. To this end, an analytical model is proposed which takes into consideration the aspects of context which are relevant to the production and reception of humor, and hence to its sociopragmatic analysis. The model is employed for addressing research questions such as the following: Why may an utterance/text be intended and perceived as humorous by some speakers and fail for others? How and why may speakers attempt to regulate language use through humor? Why and how may the same humorous utterance/text engender diverse and contradictory interpretations? How do speakers create social groups and project social identities through humor? How could the sociopragmatic analysis of humor form the basis for teaching about humor within a critical literacy framework?




Abolishing Freedom


Book Description

Pushing back against the contemporary myth that freedom from oppression is freedom of choice, Frank Ruda resuscitates a fundamental lesson from the history of philosophical rationalism: a proper concept of freedom can arise only from a defense of absolute necessity, utter determinism, and predestination. Abolishing Freedom demonstrates how the greatest philosophers of the rationalist tradition and even their theological predecessors--Luther, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Freud--defended not only freedom but also predestination and divine providence. By systematically investigating this mostly overlooked and seemingly paradoxical fact, Ruda demonstrates how real freedom conceptually presupposes the assumption that the worst has always already happened; in short, fatalism. In this brisk and witty interrogation of freedom, Ruda argues that only rationalist fatalism can cure the contemporary sickness whose paradoxical name today is freedom.




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