Invective Form in Popular Media Culture: Genre – Mode – Affordance

The following article outlines a way to conceptualize invective form in popular culture that is particularly interested in accommodating the range, fluidity, and slipperiness that define pop-cultural invectivity. It is an approach that draws on one very well-established concept of formal criticism – that of mode – and one concept that has recently been brought to the fold of formalist inquiry – that of affordance. I will argue that conceiving of invective form in popular culture as a mode and as an affordance allows to address the diversity and range of external forms by which pop-cultural invectivity operates. In addition, it brings into focus the fluidity that marks the repertoire of invective popular culture, its paradoxical tendency to gravitate toward routinization in more set conventions, only to conspicuously push against these conventions’ boundaries. Finally, to conceive of the invective valence of the mode’s repertoire not as a fixed property but as an affordance helps talk about the volatility and dynamism of invective performances in popular culture, the way in which their invective effects are contingent on the social positionality from and for which they realized, and the way in which their invective valence is open for resignification.

‚Rasse‘ – zur sprachlichen Konstruktion einer Ausgrenzungsstrategie

Racism is a social practice not only of present days. It has a long tradition. Regarding the history of racism, it is obvious that its concept is not based on biological knowledge and perception. Quite the contrary, it is the result of a verbal and social construction that appeared in the 18th century at the latest. This article focuses on the way this construction was and still is implemented in discourses of modern societies. Especially “degradation ceremonies” (Garfinkel, below) will be taken into account when observing historical examples.

Ars invectiva und artifizielle Mündlichkeit: Schmähungen in Rom zwischen Schulbuch und scheinbarer Spontaneität

This paper starts from the question of how the perception of an invective in Late Republican Rome is influenced, when it follows strictly the rules of the ars rhetorica. Since speaker and audience will have undergone the same rhetorical training, both sides have clear ideas about the rules of the genre, as they can be reconstructed from the surviving textbooks. At the same time, it can be shown on the basis of ancient evidence that insults were perceived not only more effective, but also as socially more acceptable if they arose unprepared from the situation – or if they gave exactly this impression. In the case of invective, thus, a speaker must make a special effort not to let his preparation become visible. For this purpose, he can, on the one hand, resort to the technique of artificial orality and apparent spontaneity and, in this way, take the usual dissimulatio artis to extremes. On the other hand, he can deliberately deviate from the rules of textbooks, resulting in a strong tendency of invective to a permanent innovation. This will be demonstrated by the example of some passages from Cicero's speech pro Caelio from 56 BC.

Invektive Affordanzen der Kommunikationsform Flugschrift

This paper deals with the so-called ‘Flugschrift’ (i. e. pamphlet) as a specific medial arrangement resp. form of communication in early modern age, which not only allowed a wide and rapid spread of popular texts, but also provided increased opportunities for follow-on communications and interactive debate. Interactivity is an essential dimension of invective communication. It is argued that the ‘Flugschriften’ afforded the escalative dynamics of invective, which shaped the early modern public sphere. These dynamics entailed furthermore distinctive connections and transformations of visual and rhetorical genres and practices in pamphlet literature. These correlations will be demonstrated by the examples of the Reuchlin-Pfefferkorn debate and Luthers invectives against the papal bull ‘Exsurge Domine’.

Wutreden und andere invektive Gattungen zwischen Rekonstruktion und Aneignung

This paper deals with ‘Wutreden’ (rants) as an invective genre in digital media. It is argued that the generic aspects of rants are not due to the formal and functional features of the speech events alone, but should be described as the result of the practices of doing genre. Digital media with its affordances to recontextualization and serialization allow to reframe disparate speech events as instances of one generic scheme. As a result, the emerging concept of rants as a genre enables the production of new instances. In order to grasp this genre in the making, a discursive concept of genre is needed, which then can also be applied to other invective genres such as shitstorms and hate facts.

„Das mustu gleuben, oder der Teufel bescheisset dich.“ Die invektiven Paratexte der protestantischen Lügenden und ihre gattungskommunikative Funktion

The article deals with the Protestant genre ‘Lügende’ (word combined from ‘Legende’ [legend] and ‘Lüge’ [lie]) as a disparagement of Roman Catholic legends in the 16th century. The investigation concentrates on paratextualisation as elementary invective mode of ‘Lügenden’. The analytical focus on titles, marginalia and so called ‘reminders’ (‘Erinnerungen’) shows the correlation between the generic term ‘Legende’ resp. ‘Lügende’ and the invective pattern of language use ‘Lügende’. According to this, the article discusses ‘Lügende’ as a communicative genre. Furthermore, by understanding ‘Lügende’ as a meta genre, whose paratexts are its basic elements of metaization, paratexts refer to text transgressions. Therefore, they are specified as secondary forms of religious communication during the denominational conflicts and negotiation processes in the 16th century.

Über artivistische Interventionen. Invektivität, Medien, Moral

On the basis of two aesthetic interventions of Christoph Schlingensief and the Center for Political Beauty (ZPS) this article analyses the relationship between artivism and invectivity. In each case the underlying theatrical dispositifs are being discussed. With this, the article inquires into the respective procedures of disturbing the audience and the public. Whereas Schlingensief’s politics of form aims at creating a sphere of ambiguity, the ZPS is all about stimulating moral indignation. This also reflects the diametrically opposed capabilities of artivistic art: Controversy on the one hand, partisanship on the other.

Die deutsche Bildparodie im 16. Jahrhundert. Ihre Anfänge, Formen und Funktionen

Image parodies emerge at the same time as Erasmus of Rotterdam’s text In Praise of Folly from 1511, which also exerted great influence on painters. Thus it is obvious to connect the first parodies by artists like Albrecht Dürer or Urs Graf with the literary fashion of the paradoxical encomium. In this context, both the success of the Erasmian text and the spread of parodic pictorial procedures that began in Northern Europe are connected to the possibility of open and hidden criticism. Erasmus allows himself simple jokes, but at the same time he criticizes the image cult of the Catholic Church or a misunderstood Marian piety. Image parodies are also accompanied by an open genre structure of varying character, which can be ironic in the sense of paradoxical encomium and polemical with reference to satire and the Reformation disputes.

Das Pasquill im frühneuzeitlichen Deutschland. Ein Kommunikationsmedium zwischen Schmähung und Kritik

The text deals with the genre ‘pasquill’ from the 16th to the 18th century in the German speaking world. Two strands of tradition can be ideally distinguished, which only gradually merge with each other. Originally, as in other regions of Europe, the Roman figure of the shoemaker Pasquino is adapted, who comments on actual politics or famous persons in mocking, more or less literary dialogues. This figure appears in printed works from the middle of the 16th century, mostly written by Protestants. At about the same time, the term ‘pasquill’ began to become synonymous with the mostly handwritten, anonymous libel, which is now increasingly criminalized by the authorities. The article characterises the early modern pasquill as a very special medium of communication, which served not only for personal defamation but also for objective criticism.

Die Satire als invektive Gattung

A discussion of satire as borderline case of invectivity will be presented in this paper. The particular focus lies on literary debates in eighteenth-century Britain and in Germany. British satirists like Dryden, Haywood or Pope described ridicule and sarcasm as main features of satire, however, it was viewed as necessary to uphold the distinction between satire and libel resp. lampoon. This distinction was explained by concepts of urban wit or raillery. In German literature Wieland introduced the concept of wit in his satirical writings, however, since romanticism it was replaced with the opposition between sarcasm and ‚Humor‘.