Article published in:
Changing Genre Conventions in Historical English News Discourse
Edited by Birte Bös and Lucia Kornexl
[Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 5] 2015
► pp. 223–250

Playing upon news genre conventions

The case of Mark Twain’s news satire

Mark Twain’s famous hoax articles, such as “Petrified Man” (1862) and “A Bloody Massacre near Carson” (1863), are forerunners of a genre – news satire – which blends together social criticism, humour and intentional deception. Unlike the present-day fake news press, represented e.g. by the British satirical magazine Private Eye or the American spoof newspaper The Onion, most of these inaugural forms were not based on actual events. Instead, they created entirely imaginary situations so as to feed the readers’ thirst for shocking sensations while satirising their manias. Interestingly, Twain’s made-up stories propagated massively due to the readers’ credulity. This paper aims at examining this particular facet of the great American writer’s production, in particular the linguistic and discursive strategies he uses in mixing fact and fiction, in playing with frames of reference and in exploiting the readers’ interpretive expectations. For this purpose, a Model of News Satire is applied to a corpus of spoof news articles by Twain in order to test the occurrence of three components – the intertextual, the critical, and the comic. In particular, the model offers an analysis of the structure and style of the texts, of the butts they target, and of the script oppositions they trigger, the overall combination of which amounts to a specific textual genre: that of news satire.
Keywords: 19th-century news satire, comic incongruity, hoax, humour, Mark Twain
Published online: 24 July 2015
https://doi.org/10.1075/ahs.5.09erm
References

References

Primary sources

Twain, Mark
1979 [1851–1864] Early Tales & Sketches. Vol. 1: 1851–1864 (The Works of Mark Twain 15). Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
1979 [1864–1865] Early Tales & Sketches. Vol. 2: 1864–1865 (The Works of Mark Twain 15). Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
1863 I take it all back. Territorial Enterprise 29 October 1863.Google Scholar
1868 Letters from Washington, No. IX. Territorial Enterprise 7 March 1868.Google Scholar
1870 A couple of sad experiences. Galaxy No. 9. June 1870 858–859.Google Scholar

Secondary sources

Aristotle
[1959] Rhetoric. Trans. W.D. Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Attardo, Salvatore
1994 Linguistic theories of humour. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Attardo, Salvatore & Victor Raskin
1991 Script theory revis(it)ed: Joke similarity and joke representation model. Humor 4. 293–347. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Beattie, James
1764/1971 An essay on laughter and ludicrous composition. In James Beattie, Essays, 583–705. New York: Garland Publishing.Google Scholar
Bergson, Henri
1900/1978 Le rire: Essai sur la signification du comique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.Google Scholar
Catalan, Zelma
2009 The politics of irony in Thackeray’s mature fiction. Sofia: St. Kliment Ohridski University Press.Google Scholar
Chambers, Robert
2010 Parody: The art that plays with art. New York: Lang.Google Scholar
Cicero, Marcus Tulius
[1948] De oratore. Trans. E.W. Sutton & H. Rackham. 2 vols. London: Heinemann.Google Scholar
Cogan, Brian & Tony Kelso
2009 Entertaining news and political news satire. In Brian Cogan & Tony Kelso (eds.), Encyclopedia of politics, the media, and popular culture, 112–123. Westport: Greenwood.Google Scholar
Day, Amber
2011 Satire and dissent: Interventions in contemporary political debate. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Dentith, Simon
2000 Parody. New York: Routledge. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
DeVoto, Bernard
1986 Mark Twain and the great valley. In Harold Bloom (ed.), Mark Twain, 9–32. New York/Philadelphia: Chelsea House.Google Scholar
Duval, Edwin M.
2007 Rabelais and French Renaissance satire. In Ruben Quintero (ed.), A companion to satire, ancient and modern, 70–85. Oxford: Blackwell. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Dyer, Gary
1997 British satire and the politics of style, 1789–1832. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Elliott, Robert C.
2004 Satire. In Encyclopaedia Britannica. http://​www​.britannica​.com​/EBchecked​/topic​/524958​/satire.
Ermida, Isabel
2008 The language of comic narratives: Humor construction in short stories. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2011 Losers, poltroons and nudniks in Woody Allen’s Mere anarchy: A linguistic approach to comic failure. In Marta Dynel (ed.), The pragmatics of humour across discourse domains, 335–352. Amsterdam: Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
2012 News satire in the press: Linguistic construction of humour in spoof news articles. In Jan Chovanec & Isabel Ermida (eds.), Language and humour in the media, 187–213. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Escarpit, Robert
1960 L’Humour. Paris: P.U.F.Google Scholar
Evrard, Franck
1996 L’Humour. Paris: Hachette.Google Scholar
Florence, Don
1995 Persona and humor in Mark Twain’s early writings. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund
1905/1991 Jokes and their relation to the unconscious. Trans. James Strachey. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Gissing, George
1898/2001 Satiric portraiture. Chapter 6 of Charles Dickens: A Critical Study. New York: Adegi Graphics [repr. of the first ed. 1898].Google Scholar
Gowers, Emily
2005 The restless companion: Horace, Satires 1 and 2. In Kirk Freudenburg (ed.), The Cambridge companion to Roman satire, 48–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Gray, Jonathan Alan, Jeffrey P. Jones & Ethan Thompson
(eds.) 2009 Satire TV: Politics and comedy in the post-network era. New York/London: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Gum, Coburn
1969 The Aristophanic comedies of Ben Jonson. Berlin: Mouton. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Hutcheon, Linda
1985 A theory of parody: The teachings of twentieth-century art forms. New York: Methuen.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel
1790/2007 Critique of judgement. Trans. John Henry Bernard. New York: Cosimo.Google Scholar
Koestler, Arthur
1964 The act of creation. London: Pan Books.Google Scholar
Kristeva, Julia
1969/1986 Word, dialogue and novel. Trans. Alice Jardine, Thomas Gora & Leon Roudiez. In Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva reader, 34–78. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
McKay, Jenny
2007 Defoe’s The Storm as a model for contemporary reporting. In Richard Keeble & Sharon Wheeler (eds.), The journalistic imagination: Literary journalists from Defoe to Capote and Carter, 15–28. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Müller, Beate
1997 Introduction. In Beate Müller (ed.), Parody: Dimensions and perspectives, 1–10. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
Nabokov, Vladimir
1973 Strong opinions. New York: McGraw-Hill.Google Scholar
Nash, Walter
1985 The Language of humour: Style and technique in comic discourse. London/New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Norrick, Neal
1989 Intertextuality in Humour. Humor 2. 117–139. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Quintero, Ruben
2007 Understanding Satire. In Ruben Quintero (ed.), A companion to satire, ancient and modern, 1–12. London: Blackwell. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Quintilian
[2006] Institutio oratoria. Ed. Tobias Reinhardt & Michael Winterbottom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Raskin, Victor
1985 Semantic mechanisms of humour. Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster: Reidel.Google Scholar
Raskin, Victor, Christian F. Hempelmann & Julia M. Taylor
2009 How to understand and assess a theory: The evolution of the SSTH into the GTVH and now into the OSTH. Journal of Literary Theory 7. 345–365.Google Scholar
Rich, Carole
2010 Writing and reporting news: A Coaching Method. 6th ed. Boston, MA: Wadsworth.Google Scholar
Roscoe, Jane & Craig Hight
2001 Faking it: Mock-documentary and the subversion of factuality. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Rose, Margaret A.
1993 Parody: Ancient, modern, and post-modern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rossen-Knill, Deborah F. & Richard Henry
1997 The pragmatics of verbal parody. Journal of Pragmatics 27. 719–752. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Schopenhauer, Arthur
1818/1966 The world as will and representation. Trans. E.F.J. Payne. 2 vols. New York: Dover Publications.Google Scholar
Simpson, Paul
2003 On the discourse of satire: Towards a stylistic model of satirical humour. Amsterdam: Benjamins. CrossrefGoogle Scholar
Stahl, John Daniel
1994 Mark Twain, culture and gender: Envisioning America through Europe. Athens/London: University of Georgia Press.Google Scholar
Starkman, Miriam Kosh
1962 Gulliver’s Travels and other writings by Jonathan Swift. New York/Toronto/London: Bantam Books.Google Scholar
Vann, J. Don
1994 Comic Periodicals. In J. Don Vann & Rosemary T. van Arsdel (eds.), Victorian periodicals & Victorian society, 284–285. Aldershot: Scholar Press.Google Scholar
Walasek, Helen
2009 The best of Punch cartoons. New York: Overlook Press.Google Scholar
Willis, Jim
2010 100 media moments that changed America. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood.Google Scholar