Subversive Humor as Art and the Art of Subversive Humor

This article investigates the relationships between forms of humor that conjure up possible worlds and real-world social critiques. The first part of the article will argue that subversive humor, which is from or on behalf of historically and continually marginalized communities, constitutes a kind of aesthetic experience that can elicit enjoyment even in adversarial audiences. The second part will be a connecting piece, arguing that subversive humor can be constructed as brief narrative thought experiments that employ the use of fictionalized scenarios to facilitate an open, playful attitude, encouraging a space for collaborative interpretation. This interaction between humorist and audience is an aesthetic experience that is enjoyable in and of itself, as the feelings of mirth are intrinsically valuable. But connected to the “Ha-ha!” experience of these sorts of humorous creations is an “Aha!” or potentially revelatory experience that is a mixture of cognitive comprehension and motivated (emotional) response. The third part of the article will attempt to go beyond the consciousness-raising element with an account of how such possible worlds created in the realm of imagination through subversive humor can bleed into the real world of flesh and blood people. Finally, an example of subversive humor will be analysed.

Narrative Therapy and Shame: A Testimony View

This article provides the clinician with an overview of how narrative thought can create spaces for possibilities and hope midst shame. As a part of an integrative practice, it is important for the therapist to acknowledge the impact various ideas have on the people who consult them. This testimony and other literature will be used to make a case that the existence of shame is contingent on structural assumptions of the self.

The influence of television stories on narrative abilities in children

This research explores the narrative abilities demonstrated by children aged between 8 and 12 in the production of television stories. The results reveal that not all television stories viewed by children foster the informal education process. One type of story, termed narrativizing, enables children to produce coherent stories which clearly articulate the causal, temporal and motivational relations, as well as the means-end structures, the proximal relations of the intrigue and the distal relations of the plot. Other television stories, denarrativizing stories, tend to induce disarrangements and incoherence at all structural levels of the stories produced by children. This in turn hampers the development of their narrative abilities, which are necessary to the correct development of narrative thought. These results indicate the need to exercise social control over this latter type of fictional television narrative, to which children are exposed throughout their development within the framework of informal education.

Adventures in Malley Country: Concerning Peter Carey's My Life as a Fake

Contemporary anxieties around cloning and genetic modification have deep roots in a nineteenth- and twentieth-century tradition of narrative thought-experiments about the artificial reproduction of human life. In the ‘strange wickedness’ to which HG Wells’s narrator refers—as good a condensation of the tradition’s topic as any—strangeness has always been as prominent as wickedness. In that tradition the myths of Prometheus and Faust, of the golem and the doppelgänger, together with fables and fictions concerning automata and scientifically produced monsters and/or reflections on the real and the illusory, have con- verged to define a problematics of the sorcerer’s apprentice. We will see that such a problematics reflects a powerful fear of artifice, or more accurately a phobia: a fear of artifice as great as the attraction it also exerts.