"Don't go all earnest on us": Metamodern Satire in George Saunders's "Brad Carrigan, American"

IF 0.9 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY

Studies in American Humor Pub Date : 2021-03-25 DOI:10.5325/STUDAMERHUMOR.7.1.0039

Chesters

引用次数: 1

Abstract

ABSTRACT:In the overlapping periods of postmodernism and resurgent modernism, a new mode of satire has emerged—what this article calls metamodern satire—that bridges the gap between the modernist objective of correction and postmodernist subversion of metanarratives. George Saunders's short story "Brad Carrigan, American" (2006) is an exemplar of this hybrid mode, as it critiques the entrenchment of neoliberalism through the symbolic metanarrative of television. Drawing on characteristics of both sitcoms and reality television, Saunders's work subverts an economic theory that promotes the free market and hypercompetition, one in which individualism and self-interest are celebrated. Following this destabilization, the story offers a correction that encourages the proliferation of cultural empathy and a rejection of neoliberalism's valuation of people foremost as economic actors.

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“别对我们太认真了”:乔治·桑德斯《美国人布拉德·卡里根》中的元现代讽刺

摘要:在后现代主义与复兴的现代主义交叠时期，出现了一种新的讽刺模式——元现代讽刺，它弥合了现代主义的纠正目标与后现代主义对元叙事的颠覆之间的鸿沟。乔治·桑德斯的短篇小说《布拉德·卡里根，美国人》(2006)是这种混合模式的典范，因为它通过电视的象征性元叙事批评了新自由主义的根深蒂固。利用情景喜剧和真人秀电视的特点，桑德斯的作品颠覆了一种提倡自由市场和超级竞争的经济理论，在这种理论中，个人主义和自我利益受到推崇。在这种不稳定之后，这个故事提供了一种纠正，鼓励文化同理心的扩散，并拒绝新自由主义将人首先视为经济行动者的评价。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Studies in American Humor HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY-

CiteScore

1.40

自引率

90.00%

发文量

期刊介绍： Welcome to the home of Studies in American Humor, the journal of the American Humor Studies Association. Founded by the American Humor Studies Association in 1974 and published continuously since 1982, StAH specializes in humanistic research on humor in America (loosely defined) because the universal human capacity for humor is always expressed within the specific contexts of time, place, and audience that research methods in the humanities strive to address. Such methods now extend well beyond the literary and film analyses that once formed the core of American humor scholarship to a wide range of critical, biographical, historical, theoretical, archival, ethnographic, and digital studies of humor in performance and public life as well as in print and other media. StAH’s expanded editorial board of specialists marks that growth. On behalf of the editorial board, I invite scholars across the humanities to submit their best work on topics in American humor and join us in advancing knowledge in the field.