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Satirical Inquiry, Gina Henderson Prescott

English Theses

Satire might not inspire physical action—the physical act of picking up a sign to picket the government—but it moves an audience towards a state of mental action by confronting audiences with the interdictions and iniquities it fears the most. The rhetorical qualities of satire need to be acknowledged to fully understand how satire functions. To look at an example of contemporary satire, like The Onion, and see how it functions as a tool to create knowledge, three concepts can be borrowed from the rhetorical tradition: (1) Plato’s dialectic as a rhetorical model for Donald Griffin’s “Rhetoric of inquiry and provocation” …