Browsing by Subject "cognitive studies"
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(2018)Tina Fey’s Bossypants, Amy Poehler’s Yes Please, Lena Dunham’s Not that Kind of Girl, and Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? are four rather understudied female comedic memoirs. This thesis first explores the problematic nature of defining the genre of these texts and how aspects of their ideology and fictionality affect not only the authors, but the readers as well. Secondly, the humor presented in these texts are analyzed from a cognitive perspective, mainly using Lisa Zunshine’s theory of mind. Classic humor theories such as incongruity, superiority, and relief are all critical in rendering fruitful analysis of these texts. Contrarily to some scholars, I argue that humor and amusement function actively in the mind. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler, the two comedians with the most experience in this thesis, tend to use humor as a way to seek permission to speak about uncomfortable topics that encompass the female experience. Some of these topics include female body standards, sex, marriage, motherhood, and work. As younger comedians, Mindy Kaling and Lena Dunham expand on some of these topics in similar ways, but they speak more boldly and directly about certain topics compared to their older counterparts. Fey and Poehler’s clever use of incongruous humor allowed Kaling and Dunham to write more openly about the female experience and to use humor in interesting, versatile ways. Because I argue that humor functions in the mind in potentially activating ways, I finally analyze how all four authors use humor as a tool to express feminist rhetoric. The results of the analysis show the ambiguous nature of postfeminism, and the possible emergence of a fourth wave of feminism. As comedic veterans, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler pave the way for Lena Dunham and Mindy Kaling in using humor to express different aspects of feminism. I explore the many layers of feminism, and how humor can work with feminism as powerful tool in engaging everyone, men and women, in a dialogue about feminism.
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(2018)The written word in fiction does not only reflect reality but communicates in a complex way. In fact, literary language achieves its greatest potential when communicating through both that which is written and that which is implied. Literary language evokes and makes evident through devices like irony or metaphor, etc. It is a discourse that can communicate a message which escapes the boundaries of language, since it can rely on the unsaid to communicate the reality it constructs to readers. Thus, my focus in this thesis is the way readers comprehend the unsaid information of the literary text when reconstructing the experience of characters in fiction. My primary material is Sherwood Anderson’s short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio (1919), where the communal experience of the people in this fictitious town is presented as fragments of truth, and the impossibility for characters to express themselves in the town’s conventional speech turns them into “grotesques.” Because of the grip conventionality has over the common people in an early twentieth century American town, I start my analysis by an aesthetic approach analyzing the novel’s language and its relation to essence. Then, in order to study the ways in which the literary language makes use of the unsaid to communicate the fictional experience to readers, I make use of cognitive studies, focusing on how enacting the embodied experience, reading the mind of the characters, and empathizing with them affect the way readers reconstruct the unsaid information. My thesis shows how the absent information in literary discourse can make itself evident to readers, and that it is possible to identify textual evidence that helps readers reconstruct the fictional experience through interpreting the unsaid.
Now showing items 1-2 of 2