Department or Program

English

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the satirical works of Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson and Karl Kraus’ The Last Days of Mankind. The thesis, examining the locality of satire and the particularities of each individual text, asks whether satire ever transcends time and geographical barriers, or whether it necessarily remains local and confined within a particular time period. Beerbohm wrote in Oxford in 1911 and Kraus in Vienna in 1918, and the thesis contends that satire must be grounded in the period the satirist is writing in. It then questions whether or not there can be specific elements of the texts that can be deemed universal. Such social parameters as power structures, acquiescence, and complicity provide the ground to probe methodologically at the works of Foucault, Russell, Bakhtin, and Hutcheon.

Level of Access

Open Access

First Advisor

Freedman, Sanford

Date of Graduation

Spring 5-2013

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Number of Pages

122

Open Access

Available to all.

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