This paper seeks to reclaim irony as more than a way of humorously pointing out that the times we live in are out of joint or coming to an end, instead emphasizing its potential as a productive force and method in both educational thinking and teaching practice. By interrogating the educative potential of irony as method and humorous experience in…

Language play is a key component of many children's popular graphic novels. The authors analyze the sound and word play in Dav Pilkey's illustrated Captain Underpants series. They argue that Pilkey's literary devices fall into two main areas of hyperbole and linguistic creativity and that Pilkey's language shifts the reader into a carnivalesque…

This book brings applied linguistics and translation studies together through an analysis of literary texts in Chinese, Hindi, Japanese and Korean and their translations. It examines the traces of translanguaging in translated texts with special focus on the strategic use of scripts, morphemes, words, names, onomatopoeias, metaphors, puns and…

The article deals with the analysis of the addressee's factor foregrounding in the limerick discourse. The study demonstrates that the limerick discourse is characterised by an addresser-writer's and an addressee-reader/listener's reciprocality via idiosyncratic protagonists portrayed by an addresser-writer. A limerick presents a laconic…

This article was prepared for the Critical Media Literacy Conference in Savannah, Georgia in 2016. The central argument of the article is that Donald Trump's candidacy emerges from a new strategy: branding. The author explores the decade prior to Trump's rise and his political forebears, as well as consults critical marketing and television…

The paper brings into focus how Syed Manzoorul Islam, in his three-decade-long literary career, has mastered a narrative style that sets him apart from many of his Bengali contemporaries. It demonstrates all the traits unique to his storytelling: blurring of boundaries between dream and reality, self-reflexivity, irony, and humor. The research…

Previous research has demonstrated that children with autism often have difficulty using and understanding non-literal language ("e.g.," irony, sarcasm, deception, humor, and metaphors). Irony and sarcasm may be especially difficult for children with autism because the meaning of an utterance is the opposite of what is stated. The current study…

The occasional role of humor as a vehicle for moral criticism is investigated. I begin by distinguishing between this particular role and the other kinds of ways in which humor and amusement might be regarded through a moral lens, consider historical approaches to humor that corroborate the kind of role for it on which my investigation focuses,…

This article examines a group of five ink, pen and wash drawings produced by the Anglo-Swiss artist Henry Fuseli in the mid-eighteenth century in Zurich. The drawings were produced for a "Narrenbuch" (Book of Fools) uniting visual images of folly with humorous slogans. The drawings are significant in that they imitate sixteenth-century…

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether effective coping strategies play an important role to reduce burnout levels among sexual or substance abuse counselors. The authors examined whether coping strategies mediated or moderated relations between job stress and burnout in a sample of 232 abuse-specific counselors. Results indicated…

Argues that since technical and prose writing are both rhetorical discourse, technical writers should use the same devices as prose writers (such as metaphor and humor) and should be as aware of the political, ethical, and moral context of their writing as writers of prose. (ARH)

On a daily basis, American television and radio audiences are subjected to a stream of broadcast Public Service Announcements (PSAs), each promoting "some kind of social or economic action deemed beneficial" (Stridsberg, 1977). Often, these announcements employ humor as a presentational device to help stimulate the behavioral change…

Humor is an excellent teaching tool because, in addition to preventing classroom boredom and monotony, it introduces lateral aspects of language such as irony, sarcasm, mockery, elision, ellipsis, and euphemism. Humor in language can be approached interactively or structurally through a variety of activities. It can be used to expand vocabulary,…