In this innovative book, David E. Low examines the multifaceted role of humor in critical literacy studies. Talking about how teachers and students negotiate understandings of humor and social critique vis-à-vis school-based critical literacy curriculums, the book co-examines teachers’ and students’ understandings of humor and critique in schools. Critical literacy centers discussions on power and social roles but often overlooks how students use transgressive humor as a means to interrogate power. Through examples of classroom interactions and anecdotes, Low analyzes the role of humor in classroom settings to uncover how humor interplays with critical inquiry, sensemaking, and nonsense-making. Articulated across the fields of literacy studies and humor studies, the book uses ethnographic data from three Central California high schools to establish linkages and dissonances between critical literacy education and adolescents’ joking practices. Adopting the dialectic of punching up and punching down as a conceptual framework, the book argues that developing more nuanced understandings of transgressive humor presents educators with opportunities to cultivate deeper critical literacy pedagogies and that doing so is a matter of social justice. Essential for scholars and students in literacy education, this book adds to the scholarship on critical literacy by exploring the subversive power of humor in the classroom.

This collection is the first to focus on the transgressive and transformative power of American female humorists. It explores the work of authors and comediennes such as Carolyn Wells, Lucille Clifton, Mary McCarthy, Lynne Tillman, Constance Rourke, Roz Chast, Amy Schumer and Samantha Bee, and the ways in which their humor challenges gendered norms and assumptions through the use of irony, satire, parody, and wit. The chapters draw from the experiences of women from a variety of racial, class, and gender identities and encompass a variety of genres and comedic forms including poetry, fiction, prose, autobiography, graphic memoir, comedic performance, and new media. Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers will appeal to a general educated readership as well as to those interested in women’s and gender studies, humor studies, urban studies, American literature and cultural studies, and media studies.

This is an updated edition of Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke, published in 2006. Using a combination of interview materials, survey data, and historical materials, it explores the relationship between humor and gender, age, social class, and national differences in the Netherlands and the United States. This edition includes new developments and research findings in the field of humor studies.

Humor in the Classroom provides practical, research-based answers to questions that educational researchers and language teachers might have about the social and cognitive benefits that humor and language play afford in classroom discourse and additional language learning. The book considers the ways in which humor, language play, and creativity can construct new possibilities for classroom identity, critique prevailing norms, and reconfigure particular relations of power. Humor in the Classroom encourages educational researchers and language teachers to take a fresh look at the workings of humor in today’s linguistically diverse classrooms and makes the argument for its role in building a stronger foundation for studies of classroom discourse, theories of additional language development, and approaches to language pedagogy.

In this new book, Julie Cross examines the intricacies of textual humor in contemporary junior literature, using the tools of literary criticism and humor theory. Cross investigates the dialectical paradoxes of humor and debunks the common belief in oppositional binaries of ‘simple’ versus ‘complex’ humor. The varied combinations of so-called high and low forms of humor within junior texts for young readers, who are at such a crucial stage of their reading and social development, provide a valuable commentary upon the culture and values of contemporary western society, making the book of considerable interest to scholars of both children’s literature and childhood studies. Cross explores the ways in which the changing content, forms and functions of the many varied combinations of humor in junior texts, including the Lemony Snickett series, reveal societal attitudes towards young children and childhood. The new compounds of seemingly paradoxical high and low forms of humor, in texts for developing readers from the 1960s onwards, reflect and contribute to contemporary society’s hesitant and uneven acceptance of the emergent paradigm of children’s rights, abilities, participation and empowerment. Cross identifies four types of potentially subversive/transgressive humor which have emerged since the 1960s which, coupled with the three main theories of humor – relief, superiority and incongruity theories – enables a long-overdue charting of developments in humor within junior texts. Cross also argues that the gradual increase in the compounding of the simple and the complex provide opportunities for young readers to play with ambiguous, complicated ideas, helping them embrace the complexities and contradictions of contemporary life.

"Proceedings of the twenty-second annual symposium of the Klutznick Chair in Jewish Civilization - Harris Center for Judaic Studies, October 25-26, 2009" -- P. [i].

This is the first book dedicated exclusively to presenting the current state of scholarship on multilingual development and language use among adolescents. Drawing upon the fast-growing interdisciplinary field of youth studies, the book provides a detailed examination of the linguistic, cognitive, and literacy development of multilingual teenagers in home, school, community, and global contexts.Areas covered include: • effective needs analysis • using the CEFR as a resource for course planning • writing scenarios for classroom teaching and assessment • triangulating course objectives, materials, and learners’ goals • key terminology Extra resources are available on the website: www.oup.com/elt/teacher/lcp Brian North is a co-author of the CEFR and of its companion volume, and was Chair of Eaquals from 2005 to 2010. Mila Angelova is the Academic Vice Chair of Eaquals and Head Director of Studies at AVO Language and Examination Centre, in Sofia. Elzbieta Jarosz is a member of the Eaquals Certification Panel and is the Academic Director of Gama College, in Krakow. Richard Rossner is a co-founder of Eaquals, and a co-author of the European Profiling Grid and the Eaquals Framework.

This book studies the intersection of language and social privilege in education in India. Drawing on rich ethnographic detail and primary data, it introduces a conversation of privilege, specifically contemporary configurations of caste and socioeconomic class in India, to the fields of South Asian studies and sociolinguistic educational studies. The author examines how and why education at the pre-primary, secondary, and higher education levels in India remains largely segregated by socioeconomic class and caste through the lens of language. She advances fields of study of multilingual education, language ideologies, and complexities between language and identity to contribute to work on language and privilege in education by providing a novel and contemporary case from India. The book also critiques contemporary caste configurations in India that uphold urban middle-class Brahmins as the socially privileged purveyors of social and linguistic norms. Mother Tongue Prestige parses out threads of motivation, perceptions of education, and aspirations tied to language use and learning that shape generations of students in an educational system preparing them for a globalized workforce and urban, multilingual livelihoods in India and abroad. It will be an indispensable resource for students and researchers of education, language, sociology, sociology of education, linguistics, sociolinguistics, and South Asian studies.

If, as some suggest, American literature began with Huckleberry Finn, then the humorists of the Old South surely helped us to shape that literature. Twain himself learned to write by reading the humorists’ work, and later writers were influenced by it. This book marks the first new collection of humor from that region published in fifteen years—and the first fresh selection of sketches and tales to appear in over forty years. Thomas Inge and Ed Piacentino bring their knowledge of and fondness for this genre to a collection that reflects the considerable body of scholarship that has been published on its major figures and the place of the movement in American literary history. They breathe new life into the subject, gathering a new selection of texts and adding Twain—the only major American author to contribute to and emerge from the movement—as well as several recently identified humorists. All of the major writers are represented, from Augustus Baldwin Longstreet to Thomas Bangs Thorpe, as well as a great many lesser-known figures like Hamilton C. Jones, Joseph M. Field, and John S. Robb. The anthology also includes several writers only recently discovered to be a part of the tradition, such as Joseph Gault, Christopher Mason Haile, James Edward Henry, and Marcus Lafayette Byrn, and features authors previously overlooked, such as William Gilmore Simms, Ham Jones, Orlando Benedict Mayer, and Adam Summer. Selections are timely, reflecting recent trends in literary history and criticism sensitive to issues of gender, race, and ethnicity. The editors have also taken pains to seek out first printings to avoid the kinds of textual corruptions that often occur in later versions of these sketches. Southern Frontier Humor offers students and general readers alike a broad perspective and new appreciation of this singular form of writing from the Old South—and provides some chuckles along the way.

In this fresh, accessible, and beautifully illustrated book, his third to examine an aspect of Roman visual culture, John R. Clarke explores the question, "What made Romans laugh?" Looking at Laughter examines a heterogeneous corpus of visual material, from the crudely obscene to the exquisitely sophisticated and from the playful to the deadly serious—everything from street theater to erudite paintings parodying the emperor. Nine chapters, organized under the rubrics of Visual Humor, Social Humor, and Sexual Humor, analyze a wide range of visual art, including wall painting, sculpture, mosaics, and ceramics. Archaeological sites, as well as a range of ancient texts, inscriptions, and graffiti, provide the background for understanding the how and why of humorous imagery. This entertaining study offers fascinating insights into the mentality of Roman patrons and viewers who enjoyed laughing at the gods, the powers-that-be, and themselves.