Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2019, French

For my thesis, I chose to investigate the history of the satirical press in France, with a special emphasis on caricature and political satire. I was inspired to do so after seeing the massive reaction in France to the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting. I was fascinated by the passion that the French people had for such a violently political and often offensive sect of the press. Through my research, I discovered the answer. For almost a century, the French people fought to instate a republican government in their country. As new governments rose and fell, the freedoms of expression, assembly, and the press were most closely linked to the struggle for popular representation. Censorship came and went several times over the course of the 19th century and each time it returned, the satirical press was the first to feel its effects. As a result, this sarcastic and caustic area of journalism became almost a symbol of those freedoms they were fighting for; not because the French always agreed with what they said, but because their right to say what they wanted was at the heart of the issue. The pioneers of satire in the 19th century gave way to a new generation in the 20th, starting with Le Canard enchaine (which is still thriving today) and soon Hara-Kiri, the predecessor to Charlie Hebdo.

Committee: Lois Vines Dr. (Advisor) Subjects: Foreign Language; History; Journalism; Political Science

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 1960, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2023, Communication

People sometimes misunderstand satiric news, mistaking its fictional claims for truth (Poulsen et al., 2023). This results in audiences holding misperceptions, or beliefs not supported by the best available evidence (Kuklinski et al., 2000), which can have detrimental consequences for participatory democracies. While significant scholarly attention has been paid to how to reduce misperceptions from non-satiric sources (Walter & Murphy, 2018), little work examines how to reduce satire-based misperceptions. Given that how people form misperceptions is affected by whether their origin is satiric or non-satiric (Poulsen et al., 2023), strategies to reduce misperceptions may too need to consider their origin to best address them. Therefore, this dissertation strives to identify how to best reduce satire-based misperceptions. Two online experiments were conducted to meet this goal. Study 1 (n = 410) addresses concerns that one effective strategy—flagging—may have an undesirable effect on satire's perceived funniness. I argue instead that flagging will improve satire's funniness by helping people recognize and understand satire. Study 2 (n = 392) tests two strategies—prebunking and debunking—to identify if, contrary to expectations for non-satiric misperceptions, prebunking will reduce satire-based misperceptions more than debunking. I expect that learning a message is satire before reading it, i.e., prebunking, will be more effective than learning a message is satire after reading it, i.e., debunking, because the advantages of prebunking and disadvantages of debunking will be more prominent when applied to satire. Results from both studies reveal important insights as to how to best reduce satire-based misperceptions. There is no evidence that flagging harms satire's funniness—in fact, flagging satire had positive effects on perceived funniness for some satire messages, suggesting that there is little concern that flagging will harm the enjoyment of satire. Yet, t (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: R. Kelly Garrett (Committee Chair); Emily Moyer-Gusé (Committee Member); Jason Coronel (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1962, English

Committee: Frederick W. Eckman (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1959, English

Committee: Morris Golden (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1959, English

Committee: Lowell P. Leland (Advisor) Subjects: British and Irish Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, English

This dissertation will present a novel corpus of eighteenth-century medical satires to perform a reparation on the secular epistemological terrain of the eighteenth-century Medical Enlightenment. It employs an allegorical method of interpretation informed by syncretic-feminist theology to a collection of eighteenth-century Enlightenment literature to demonstrate how the satirical mode was used to push back against the bodily technologies of the medical profession. This project helps us to identify the characteristic features of these topical satires, which voice a deep epistemological discomfort with the principles, methods, and practices of the emergent secular medical field. Medical satires feature narrators and targets that elide the figures of the physician and the satirist as humoral healers, scientific methodologies applied to absurd and bawdy topics, and a considerable amount of human and animal suffering resulting from poorly-applied medical treatments. This dissertation then reads Laurence Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy as a virtuosic representative of the medical satire subgenre whose narrator thoroughly foils both his own and a reader's attempt to rationalize and unify his creation and circumstance. This project hopes to offer literary and medical scholars an allegorical perspective into medicine's literary origins and entanglements to support the gradual recovery and revitalization of pre-Medical Enlightenment medical wisdom.

Committee: Sandra Macpherson (Advisor); Jennifer Higginbotham (Committee Member); David Brewer (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Music (MM), Bowling Green State University, 2022, Music Composition

In partial fulfillment of the Master of Music degree in Composition, I completed a short opera in three scenes, State of the Union. It has three characters: Jon Stewart (baritone), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (mezzo-soprano), and Ted Cruz (tenor). The opera is eighteen minutes long in three scenes: Introduction, Debate, and Finale Chorus. Librettist Gabby Harrison and I wrote the story as a comedic and satirical experience on the current political climate in the United States of America. The first scene brings the audience into a taping of a typical late night political talk show. Stewart introduces himself and the show with a sung and spoken monologue, focusing on cultural and political events that transpire on Twitter. Ocasio-Cortez and Cruz introduce themselves, and their respective political views, to the audience and Cruz is accompanied by the hymn My Country, ‘Tis of Thee. Ocasio-Cortez begins an online political battle over Twitter and Cruz responds but is quickly cut off by Stewart to transition to the next scene. Stewart's lines in the first scene are set in a swung tune that loops the same few chords while Ocasio-Cortez and Cruz's lines are straight and direct. This differentiation shows the dynamic between the characters and how they are portrayed to the audience with their respective political ideologies. In scene two Stewart moderates a debate between Ocasio-Cortez and Cruz. They begin with the topic of racism in the American criminal justice system and eventually pivot to climate change. The debate spirals out of control on the last topic- healthcare. Tension builds in a stretto section that ends with Stewart coming to the realization that these politicians are not doing their jobs to help the American people. In this catharsis, Stewart's accompaniment transitions from recitative to a sinister tango in an odd meter of 7/4. Scene two transitions directly into scene three and the sinister music turns into a fast-paced comic march. This finale chorus is (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Christopher Dietz Ph.D. (Advisor); Marilyn Shrude D.M. (Committee Member) Subjects: Music

Bachelor of Arts, Wittenberg University, 2020, English

Jonathan Swift's travel narrative, Gulliver's Travels, addresses a middle-class Englishman sailing around the world and encountering new populations with unique features. Published in 1726, when British colonization was rampant, Swift's story confronts the effects of colonization on previously untouched civilizations. This paper touches on two of Gulliver's journeys, to Brobdingnag and to the land of the Houyhnhnms. Citing the works of Aime Cesaire and Homi Baba, two prominent scholars in the field of post-colonial theory, this paper examines how colonization harms the parties involved, both those who are colonizing and those who have been colonized. Countering the contemporary view that colonization would benefit any civilization that receives contact, the paper notes how it rather leaves destruction in its course.

Committee: Cynthia Richards (Advisor); Rick Incorvati (Committee Member); Timothy Wilkerson (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature

Master of Fine Arts, Miami University, 2019, English

If You See Something, Say Something is a story collection that explores what it means to be stuck—whether in a physical location, a mindset, a job, a relationship, a broken system—and the forces that actively try to keep us there. The varied socio-economic worlds these spaces exist in include graduate school seminars, forklift rodeos, semi-truck cabins, and underground cities, moving from traditional dirty realism into aspects of satire, fabulism, and auto-fiction. The collection re-imagines the author's time as a young warehouse foreman, then writer, then father, and the tone of the stories, which represents the general mood and outlook of this time, tries to contain a number of contradictions, feeling simultaneously light and pensive, humorous and strange, violent and compassionate.

Committee: Joseph Bates (Committee Chair); TaraShea Nesbit (Committee Member); Margaret Luongo (Committee Member) Subjects: Fine Arts

Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing, Cleveland State University, 2018, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

This play has come a long way. This play started off as a series of sketch scenes about an incompetent magician, his lovely assistant, and dim, but loveable stage hand named Bosco. At some point as a writer, I became fascinated with obsession, and what people will do when they are obsessed with something. Over time, this play became an examination of duality. Specifically the difference between art versus commerce, craft versus fame, surface level versus what goes on below that surface. And because every play that I write will, in part, be inspired by a need for me to run around a theater in fancy costumes with my friends, I wanted to set it in a place, and in a time, that was, itself very theatrical. And the period of time during which the Vaudeville stage gave way to the movie screen is a fascinating period in arts history. Art, and creative expression have always gone hand in hand with changes and evolution in societal culture. Throughout history we see mainstream fads make way for the tastes of one counter- cultural movement of another. But with the slow death of Vaudeville, corresponding with the meteoric rise of film, we see two non-mainstream aspects of culture vying for prominence. Film and vaudeville vying for significance in the eyes of the public at large gave this era an excitement that is quite unique, and I wanted to take advantage of that unique energy when I wrote this play. Overall with this play, I wanted to create an experience for theater goers. I wanted to create something you couldn't see in movies, and I wanted to create something audiences couldn't see at a typical night at the theater.

Committee: Mike Geither (Committee Chair) Subjects: Fine Arts

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, English

Modes of the Flesh considers the ways that literary form—mode, in particular—shapes the representation of the human body in British literature from approximately 1660-1800. Focusing on the allegorical, satirical, pornographic, and gothic modes, this project aims to expand our conception of literary embodiment, establish the represented body as a formal element, and make embodiment central to our understanding of the textual representation of human beings. Because modally-inflected literary bodies engage the same kinds of ontological and epistemological questions entertained by this period's empiricist philosophy, I argue that mode offers its own kind of philosophy of the body. But, because modal bodies engage these questions with a very different set of tools, the results are often provocatively at odds with mainstream philosophical discourse. Existing scholarship on the literary body tends either to analyze the way a body is represented in order to better understand the work's themes or meanings, or to argue that the way a body is represented reflects historical or theoretical models of embodiment. This dissertation differs from the first tendency by offering a theory of the represented body, and therefore taking the body as an object, not an instrument, of study. It diverges from the second tendency by arguing that the way bodies are presented in literature has as much to do with the kind of text they appear in as with scientific, theological, social, or other extra-literary understandings of the body. In each chapter, I focus on a significant mode of Restoration and eighteenth-century literature, and a particular aspect of literary embodiment. The first chapter, on the allegorical mode and bodily matter, thinks about the function of materiality in a mode commonly associated with abstraction and interpretation. The second chapter, which considers the satirical mode and bodily form, explores the role of abstract form in satirical conceptions of personhood an (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Sandra Macpherson (Advisor); David Brewer (Committee Member); Robyn Warhol (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature

MA, Kent State University, 2017, College of the Arts / School of Art

This thesis looks at artist Yinka Shonibare's satire of three iconic works in the history of western art. Through parody, Shonibare creates sculptures and photographs that expose the stereotypes that westerners contribute to and deal with in the social structure of 2017. By analyzing what Shonibare's work communicates about social stereotypes, insights about social normatives emerge, which is an activism that the artists work carries. This thesis analyzes how Shonibare creates social activism.

Committee: John-Michael Warner (Advisor) Subjects: African History; African Studies; Art History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, History

My dissertation analyzes Algerians' use of humor during the country's civil war of the 1990s. While a conflict that leaves 200,000 people dead is no laughing matter, Algerians persisted in producing comedy throughout the war. Twenty months of consulting media archives and conducting oral interviews in Algeria and France revealed that jokes and cartoons constituted an important discourse through which various actors defined their position in the war. Informed by theories of culture and power, this project advances humanistic understanding of humor as a means of navigating postcolonial and intercultural identities as well as an instrument of war or peace and an historical source.

Committee: Ousman Kobo (Advisor); Ahmad Sikainga (Committee Member); Sabra Webber (Committee Member) Subjects: History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1976, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1975, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1954, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1964, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1963, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Theater

Bachelor of Arts, University of Toledo, 2016, English

Nelson George's notion of the "post-soul aesthetic"--defined as the artistic vision of black artists who come of age after the Civil Rights and Black Power/Arts Movements of the 1960s and 70s--provides many African American writers and scholars with a vehicle for critically examining contemporary African American literature and culture. In his 1996 debut novel "The White Boy Shuffle," poet Paul Beatty parodies and examines many spheres of contemporary black culture, among them the facade of "white" multiculturalism, the queerness of black masculinity, and the globalization of black popular culture. I argue that the formal structure of the novel replicates Beatty's exploration and subversion of post-soul discourses on blackness. By simultaneously rejecting yet working within the category of "post-soul," "The White Boy Shuffle" evinces a post-soul sensibility that maintains the fluidity and playfulness inherent to the post-soul generation, illustrating Greg Tate's definition of post-soul as the "African American equivalent to postmodernism." Through the protagonist Gunnar Kaufman, a young black poet, I believe that the novel's form prioritizes poetry, which disrupts the fictional genre. Also, by employing particular racial nomenclature and consistent querying from Gunnar which satirizes past racial discourses, the novel signifies on the timeline of "America's never-ending discussion of race" and brings them forward for the post-soul generation to examine.

Committee: Melissa Gregory PhD (Committee Chair); Kimberly Mack PhD (Advisor); Parama Sarkar PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; American Literature; Literature