MENSURA INCOGNITA QUEER KINSHIP, CAMP AESTHETICS, AND JUVENAL’S NINTH SATIRE by Michael Broder Adviser: Professor Craig Williams The dissertation addresses four problematic aspects of scholarship on Juvenal 9. The first two are matters of reception history: first, the poem has been understudied; and second, most major extant studies of the poem have been grossly or subtly homophobic. The other two problems are matters of literary criticism: Juvenal’s ninth satire has traditionally been read as an attack on homosexuality, when in fact it is neither an attack, nor is it about homosexuality. The current study addresses each of these problems, reassessing the ninth satire in the context of queer theory and camp aesthetics. Chapter One traces the homophobic tendencies in the modern reception of Juvenal 9 across reception modalities including expurgation, biographical criticism, and persona theory. Chapter Two reviews relevant concepts in queer theory and the discourse of camp. Queer theory emphasizes the performative dimensions of sex, gender, and kinship. Camp is a counter-normative discourse in which incongruous situations and juxtapositions are presented in a theatrical manner for humorous effect, expressing the relationship of sex, gender, and kinship deviants to dominant discourses of normativity and embracing the stigmatized identity of the deviant, marginalized other. Chapter Three reviews the debate over Juvenal’s moralism among scholars of satire beginning in the 1960s. This debate serves as an unwitting proxy for a debate about camp aesthetics by emphasizing the role iv

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Taking laughter seriously

Mensura Incognita Queer kinship, camp aesthetics, and juvenal's ninth satire

This study aimed to investigate the explanations of 80 kindergarten children on pictorial humor. The children were asked to observe and describe a specific visual stimulus, and say whether they considered it as funny providing their rationale. The study was developed on the basis of humor being an incongruity thus the data were examined against McGhee’s stages of humor development and Brown’s categories of Visual Humor. Findings suggest that kindergartners are capable of recognizing the main and/or minor incongruities in a funny picture and providing reasoning for it. Moreover, there are no gender differences in reference to these variables. These findings come to broaden the specific developmental approaches provided by McGhee and Brown, and suggest a new category to frame children’s responses to pictorial humor, the Multiple Conceptual Visual Incongruities category. It is also suggested that the use of visual stimuli with multiple incongruities provides an excellent forum for investigating children’s conceptual abilities.

Young Children’s Explanation of Pictorial Humor

This study examined humor production in relation to attachment dimensions and interaction goals. Participants (N = 172) completed measures of attachment dimensions (anxiety, avoidance), humor production (affiliative humor, aggressive humor), and primary and secondary goals. Anxiety was negatively related to affiliative humor, whereas avoidance was positively related to aggressive humor. Affiliative humor was related to effectiveness and being playful in the interaction, as well as the secondary goals of arousal management and clarity. Aggressive humor was not related to any of the goals.

background

Affiliative and Aggressive Humor, Attachment Dimensions, and Interaction Goals

This paper focuses on the benefits and utilisation of humour in digital game‐based learning. Through the activity theory framework, we emphasise the role of humour as a mediating tool which helps resolve contradictions within the activity system from conjoining educational objectives within the computer game. We then discuss the role of humour within the digital game and its advantages for the learning process, in sustaining emotional and cognitive engagement, as well as stimulating social presence. We argue that humour makes the game experience more enjoyable, through emotional and persuasive arguments and characters that are more believable and interesting, thus in turn stimulating affective learning. We hope that through designing an engaging role‐play, we can sustain personalised knowledge that encourages critical thinking.

Humour in game‐based learning

Non-verbal speech cues serve multiple functions in human interaction such as maintaining the conversational flow as well as expressing emotions, personality, and interpersonal attitude. In particular, non-verbal vocalizations such as laughters are associated with affective expressions while vocal fillers are used to hold the floor during a conversation. The Interspeech 2013 Social Signals Sub-Challenge involves detection of these two types of non-verbal signals in telephonic speech dialogs. We extend the challenge baseline system by using filtering and masking techniques on probabilistic time series representing the occurrence of a vocal event. We obtain improved area under receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve of 93.3% (10.4% absolute improvement) for laughters and 89.7% (6.1% absolute improvement) for fillers on the test set. This improvement suggests the importance of using temporal context for detecting these paralinguistic events.

Taking laughter seriously

Citations

Mensura Incognita Queer kinship, camp aesthetics, and juvenal's ninth satire

Young Children’s Explanation of Pictorial Humor

Affiliative and Aggressive Humor, Attachment Dimensions, and Interaction Goals

Humour in game‐based learning

Paralinguistic event detection from speech using probabilistic time-series smoothing and masking.

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