CLAS 230
Making Fun at Rome: The Origins and Influence of Satire Spring 2014
Division I
Cross-listed COMP 230
This is not the current course catalog

Roman satire has exerted an influence on later literature that is entirely disproportionate to its brief life as a genre and its small number of practitioners. What was the secret to satire’s success? As we attempt to answer that question we will examine issues of genre, gender, reception and innovation, satirical personas and the abject stance, inclusion and exclusion, sublimated violence, subversion and containment, theories of humor and laughter, and the Bakhtinian grotesque. We will consider the development of this most capacious and omnivorous genre from its precursors in the Greek comic poets and iambic lampooners through its heyday in the late Republic and early empire. We will then turn to considering how its very capaciousness allowed satire to rise above its generic constraints and flourish as a mode within other genres. Readings will include works by Aristophanes and from the Greek iambic tradition of invective; the Roman satire of Lucilius, Horace, Perseus, and Juvenal; and short selections from some of the most famous English-language successors of the Roman satirists, including Chaucer, Swift, Pope, More, Johnson, Byron, Butler, Twain, Mencken, Lehrer, and Stewart and Colbert.