Art Attack
Names in Satire
by
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FICTIVE NAMES IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY COMEDY, BURLESQUE AND SATIRE NOTE ON NAMES IN SATIRIC VERSES THE LAPIDARY LUNACY OF S. J. PERELMAN SIMPLE SATIRE: THE ONOMASTICS OF THE SATIRICAL IN MICHAEL WHARTON’S "PETER SIMPLE" --THE WAY OF THE WORLD COLUMNS IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
"NAMES ARE AWFULLY IMPORTANT": THE ONOMASTICS OF CRITICAL COMMENT IN MARTIN AMIS’ MONEY: A SUICIDE NOTE SHARPE CRITICISM: ONOMASTICS OF TOM SHARPE’S SATIRES OF SOUTH AFRICA "UP TO A POINT": ONOMASTIC DEVICES EVELYN WAUGH’S SCOOP VIDEO GAMES ANTHONY BURGESS’ SATIRIC POWERS HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD: ONOMASTIC TECHNIQUES IN BEMELMANS’ DIRTY EDDIE
30 TECHNIQUES OF NAME SATIRE AND SOME CONCLUSIONS ON THE GENRE
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About the Book
Satire is especially interesting because it connects literature to reality
and comments upon and raises questions about morality, psychology,
and social dynamics. It creates dual audiences, the attacked and the
attackers but also those who get the joke and those who do not--.
from the Preface
In ART ATTACK you will learn how to get the joke when names are sticks and stones to break the bones in prose and verse and drama. You will see all the many techniques at work (with hilarious examples) in the works of such American writers as Ludwig Bemelmans and S. J. Perelman and such British satirists as Evelyn Waugh, Tom Sharpe, Anthony Burgess, and Martin Amis (whose terrorist attack on New York in Money was devastating). Art Attack ranges from squibs and newspaper columns ("Peter Simple") to major works of eighteenth-century comedy to modern literature. You will see satire in long and short novels, parody and burlesque, even vulgar folklore, what Philip Roth calls "moral outrage transformed into comic art" in a variety of attacks and techniques.
I have long shared [Ashley’s] recognition of the fact that the use of
significant names is one of the most efficient and effective rhetorical
techniques that an author can use to make points--.Ashley’s excellent
book [shows]--authors are ready, willing, and with the use of names
and other devices very able to warn us of error and threaten us with
dire consequences if we do not listen to their warnings.
--Prof. Don L. F. Nilsen (Arizona State University),
Executive Secretary, International Society for Humor Studies
Art Attack is not only about a wonderful selection of great wits but it is
written by a great wit. I learned a lot but most of all I laughed loud and long.
-- Louis A. de Montluzin
About the Author
Leonard R. N. Ashley, Ph.D. (Princeton), LHD (Columbia Theological, Hon.), is Professor Emeritus of Brooklyn College of The City University of New York, where he taught for nearly thirty-five years. He was earlier on the faculties of The University of Utah, The University of Rochester, and (part time) The New School for Social Research. He spent several years in The Royal Canadian Air Force where, as second assistant to The Air Historian, he wrote (for NORAD) the top-secret report on The Air Defense of North America. His published works range from military history (collaboration on A Military History of Modern China, authorship of Ripley’s "Believe It Or Not" Book of The Military) and critical biography (Colley Cibber and George Peele) to literary history (Authorship and Evidence in Renaissance Drama and Elizabethan Popular Culture) and linguistics (What’s in a Name? and co-editorship of the proceedings of half a dozen conferences he has directed for The American Society of Geolinguistics – of which he has been repeatedly elected president since 1991). He is the author of numerous textbooks and anthologies such as Other People’s Lives, Mirrors for Man, Nineteenth-Century British Drama, and Tales of Mystery and Melodrama. Recently he has written a series of ten books on the occult published by Barricade Books (New York) and reprinted by several British publishers and in Dutch and German translations. These books are: The Complete Book of Superstition, Prophecy, and Luck; The Complete Book of Magic and Witchcraft; The Complete Book of Devils and Demons; The Complete Book of the Devil’s Disciples; The Complete Book of Spells, Curses, and Magical Recipes; The Complete Book of Vampires; and The Complete Book of Werewolves, The Complete Book of Dreams and What They Mean, and The Complete Book of Sex Magic. He has published poetry in more than sixty "little magazines" and anthologies, more than 150 scholarly articles in journals on a variety of subjects (in 2001, for instance, he wrote on Anaïs Nin, on Hamlet, on the ethics of book reviewing, on Spanish in America, and geolinguistics, etc.). He has published especially in Names (the journal of The American Name Society, to whose executive board he has been continually re-elected for more than two decades and of which society he has been twice elected president). His regular chronique, reviewing books on The Renaissance, has been for more than twenty years a feature of Bibliothéque d’Humanisme et Renaissance (Geneva). His Dictionary of Sex Slang, in preparation for more than twenty years, is now in press, and it will show that the English-speaking world’s vocabulary is full of wit as well as vulgarity and even obscenity, aspects hardly touched upon in the staid pages of Art Attack. His own satiric gifts have been seen in college musicals, light verse, and literary criticism in journals, in the Encyclopedia of British Humorists, and in other reference books whenever the subject called not for pedantry but wit. Art Attack has companion volumes from this author called Names in Literature, Names in Popular Culture, and Names of Places.