Menippean satire
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Menippean satire is a term employed broadly to refer to prose satires that are rhapsodic in nature, combining many different targets of ridicule into a fragmented satiric narrative, similar to a novel.
The form is named after the Greek cynic Menippus, whose works, now lost, influenced the works of Lucian and Marcus Terentius Varro. Indeed, such satires are sometimes termed Varronian satire. Though Varro's own 150 books of Menippean satires survive only as quoted snippets, the genre was continued by Seneca the Younger. His Apocolocyntosis, or "Pumpkinification," is the only near-complete classical Menippean satire to survive. Later, Menippus' tradition can be recognized in portions of Petronius' Satyricon, in the banquet scene "Cena Trimalchionis," where epic, tragedy, and philosophy are combined in verse and prose. It is also seen in Apuleius' Golden Ass, a combination of Menippean satire and the comic novel.
The term has been used by classical grammarians and by philologists to refer to satires in prose; compare the verse Satires of Juvenal and his imitators. Menippean satire moves rapidly between styles and points of view. Such satires deal less with human characters than with the single-minded mental attitudes, or "humours", that they represent: the pedant, the braggart, the bigot, the miser, the quack, the seducer. "The novelist sees evil and folly as social diseases, but the Menippean satirist sees them as diseases of the intellect," Northrop Frye observed (1974, p. 309), and instanced Squire Western in Tom Jones as a character rooted in the realism of the novel, but the tutors Thwackum and Square as figures of Menippean satire. Contemporary scholars including Frye classify Swift's A Tale of a Tub or Gulliver's Travels, Thomas Carlysle's Sartor Resartus, François Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel or Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland as Menippean satires.
[edit] See also
- Satire Ménippée (1594) - a satirical work in France during the Wars of Religion
[edit] Bibliography
- Kirk, Eugene P. Menippean Satire: An Annotated Catalogue of Texts and Criticism. New York: Garland, 1980.
- Boudou, B., M. Driol, and P. Lambercy. "Carnaval et monde renverse." Etudes sur la Satyre Menippee. Ed. Frank Lestringant and Daniel Menager. Geneva: Droz, 1986. 105-118.
- Vignes, Jean. "Culture et histoire dans la Satyre Menippee." Etudes sur la Satyre Mennippee. Ed. Frank Lestringant and Daniel Menager. Geneva: Droz, 1985. 151-99.
- Kharpertian, Theodore D. A Hand to Turn the Time: The Menippean Satires of Thomas Pynchon. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson U P, 1990.
- Kharpertian, Thomas D. "Of Models, Muddles, and Middles: Menippean Satire and Pynchon's V." Pynchon Notes 17.Fall (1985): 3-14.
- Courtney, E. Parody and Literary Allusion in Menippean Satire. Philologus 106 (1962): 86-100.
- Tristram Shandy, Digressions, and the Menippean Tradition. Scholia Satyrica 1.4 (1975): 3-16.
- Payne, F. Anne. Chaucer and the Menippean Satire. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1981.
