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Critics have long recognized the capacity of the Tudor interlude to present its largely aristocratic audiences with political counsel. John Heywood’s Play of the Wether (ca. 1533) is an exa...

This article aims to conceptualize the interplay between sarcasm, scatology and writing in Darija (Moroccan Arabic or Al-Maghribia) on the web in a post-uprising era. It focuses on the new Darijoph...

Taboo terms are intensifiers which flavor our speech. The different outlooks of each society towards these expressions due to religious, political and social attitudes makes translating them difficult. Knowing the frequency of application of translation strategies for translating these terms can be of help to other translators. This study investigated the types of taboo terms and strategies applied in their translation in the novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. This book has been banned in the home for its taboo terms. For the purpose of this study Cabrera's (2014) categorization of taboo terms and Davoodi's (2007) strategies for translating them were applied. Concerning the 150 found taboos in the novel the types of taboo terms in order of appearance were sexual reference/body part (55.92%), psychological/physical condition (11.84%), violence (9.21), animal name (6.57%), drugs/excessive alcohol consumption (6.57%), urination/scatology (3.94%), filth (1.97%), profane/blasphemous (1.31%) and death/killing (0%). The applied strategies in order of appearance were substitution (35.33%), taboo for taboo (26%), censorship (23.33%) and euphemism (15.33%). The 61% application of substitution and taboo for taboo strategies shows the tendency of the translator to maintain the force of effect of taboo terms than eliminating their force through censorship and euphemism by 38.66% application.

Dans le contexte festif de la culture comique populaire, les chansons scatologiques et obscenes sur l’anus presentent une ambivalence qui associe a l’exaltation du plaisir materiel la degradation operee par l’immonde : on y joue a jeter a terre le tabou et a mettre sous terre les sujets satirises, non pour faire negativement affront mais pour que la joie par le terrestre et le charnel renaisse renouvelee : la nourriture, le sexe, la vie.

Francisco de Quevedo used in Gracias y desgracias del ojo del culo the paradox and the setting of the pseudo-praise to show his wit and an approach towards the laughable world through scatology. For many scholars, behind the joke and this show of wit, we can find other interpretations, including a satire of his society. Obviously, the scatology serves as a degrading instrument, and satirical topics of those times are present in this work, but it seems that the priority is the achievement of laughter. The search for other interpretations seems risky and perhaps the result of ideological prejudices about Quevedo, specially in the critics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, temporally and contextually distant and possibly with a less permissive value system on this subject.

In 1723, following an opera production in Florence, two sets of medals were made there in honour of the singer Faustina Bordoni. Among the reactions to these medals in Bologna were satirical poetry and a set of ceramic chamber pots that carried depictions of the medals and a scathing Latin text. The article analyses these artefacts, the various descriptions and drawings of them and reports about them for what they can tell us about the intertwined issues of celebrity, the status of (female) singers, the circulation of information and the interaction between objects and words in early eighteenth-century Italy.

Virtually nothing is known for certain about Sophokles' satyr playSalmoneus. However, a number of extremely probable deductions may be made on the basis of the few surviving fragments and the mythographic testimony about its eponymous villain (the iconographical record is totally unhelpful, or almost so). This article adds some further suggestions about the implications of the three most substantial fragments, which, if they do not quite share that level of extreme probability, it is hoped have a high degree at least of plausibility, and some significance for (meta-)dramatic and thematic aspects of the play as a whole. I shall argue that a reference to the malodorous quality of the thunderbolt draws attention to the gross physicality of the thunder-machine orbronteion(βροντεῖον) which Salmoneus has invented and constructed out of ox-hides. This has both a metatheatrical dimension, since thebronteionwas probably part of the stage-machinery of 5th-century drama, and a thematic one, since it emphasises the low, corporeal nature of Salmoneus' thunder in contrast to the sublime weapon of Zeus which it imperfectly mimics. The established parallelism between thunder and farting adds another level to the debasing of Salmoneus’ invention and concomitant deflation of his pretensions. Finally, I shall suggest that another fragment relating to the sympotic game ofkottabosmay have drawn a similarly deflating parallel between the hurling of the wine-lees and that of the tyrant's ersatz thunderbolts.

This article proposes that the heteronormatively sexy female comic body can derive or enhance its comic proposal via the incongruity of its designated unfunniness. Performances by practitioners Ursula Martinez, Olivia Cote, Tig Notaro, and Olivia Lee are analysed in order to illuminate and confound potentially heteronormative conceptions of humour and the comic body. The potentiality of a ‘sexy scatology’ is revealed.

Intellectual trends in the study of scatology have all tended to agree on the subversive character of scatological rhetoric and representation for social, political, institutional, religious, literary, and artistic discourses. This article offers a brief overview of these trends in order to situate an aspect of Holocaust narrative that has attracted far less attention than other polemical subjects such as the relationship between fiction, history, and memory, or sexuality and violence. The study takes as its focal point the critically neglected novel L’Anus du monde (1996) by the French writer Daniel Zimmermann, in which the scatological, though constituting an excremental assault on the reader’s literary and moral sensibilities, functions against its usually subversive intent. By tracing the novel’s anti-hero on his journey from Drancy to Auschwitz and Treblinka, Zimmermann links the scatological to the themes of gastronomy and anthropophagy, leading ineluctably to the novel’s deeply unsettling conclusion, which in fact has less to do with the scatological than with the Christological overtones of sacrifice and redemption.

This article examines Antonio Ros de Olano's 1868 story, 'Maese Cornelio Tacito: origen del apellido de los Palomino de Pan-Corvo' in the context of contemporary historiographical debates. Arguing that the representation of the process of naming in the story hovers between a tale of redemption and an elaborate scatological pun, the article suggests that Ros de Olano deliberately distorts the possible meanings of the main character's transfor- mation from 'Cornelio del Espiritu Santo' to 'Cornelio Tacito' to 'Cornelio de los Palomino de Pan-Corvo'. Through an examination of the terms of contemporary debates about historiography, in particular writings by Campoamor, Moreno Nieto and Menendez y Pelayo, it is suggested that this distortion undermines grandiose claims to establish categorical truth. In the place of epistemological certainty and indisputable relevance, the trivial and the anecdotal proliferate. This is reinforced by the specific representation of forms of distortion and disproportion found within the text, alongside uncertainty of meaning and the disturbance of linear narrative.

Building on the work of Stewart Crehan, Joshua D. Esty, and others, this paper "queers" Armah's canonical novel of disillusionment with the African nation state, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born , by tracing sublimated and explicit expressions of homoerotic desire through the text. The protagonist's scatology is seen not just as a metaphor for the postcolonial predicament, but also as a psychological defense mechanism holding at bay a taboo form of sexual expression—a desire implicit in the protagonist's self-sacrificing and profound love for Koomson. Reread this way, The Beautyful Ones is understood as an allegory for the need for African nationalism to embrace same-sex desire and human rights for sexual minorities.

The Wife of Bath's Prologue contains more references to urine than any other text produced by Geoffrey Chaucer. It is not, however, Chaucer's most scatological or disgusting work: while it abounds in urine, it makes no mention of feces. This essay examines how a surplus of urine in the absence of fecal matter affects the tone of the Wife's prologue. Chaucer associates the Wife of Bath with urine because antifeminist traditions often represented females as liquid, dripping creatures and because urine functioned as a deceptive medical signifier. The urine in her prologue thus makes the Wife vulnerable to a misogynistic interpretation. But fecal matter is better suited to aggressive satire than urine. The absence of feces in the Wife's urinary discourse preserves the lighthearted tone of the prologue: rather than becoming the object of satiric scorn, the Wife reposes as devious caricature who teasingly reveals the absurdity of misogynistic paranoia. In order to establish the different rhetorical effe...

In his classic study, The Dialectics of Creation, Michael Lieb foregrounds the myriad ways in which Milton uses scatology throughout Paradise Lost to describe the depravity of the devil. But Satan is not the only character in the epic to be associated with excretion. Milton's angels and Milton's God are also implicated in the operations of the lower bodily stratum. In these instances, however, allusions to the evacuative functions attest to an exalted divinity rather than a disgusting diabolism. Evacuation in Paradise Lost is thus a highly complex signifier. Not simply a pejorative pointing inevitably at a damnable degradation, scatology can also signal a sublime goodness. This essay draws upon humoral theory and socio‐cultural studies of manners to both emphasize and account for the richly multivalent meaning of evacuation in Milton's epic.

This project begins with a familiar linguistic question: did early modern English locution allow for a pun between the words ass and arse? The OED says no; it points to an 1860 text as the first recorded instance of the pun, and it provides no etymological connection between the words.1 A number of critics of early English literature, drama in particular, sense a pun nonetheless. For example, Gail Kern Paster, discerning a comic "scatological imperative" in A Midsummer Night's Dream footnotes the OED's claim that a "pun on bottom /ass ... is not present in Elizabethan locution," yet she proceeds to argue for a "somatic troping on Bottom's name" by tracing the logic of purgation that structures the ass-headed Bottom's love affair with Titania.2 Likewise, in her essay on Shakespeare's use of the ass motif in Midsummer and The Comedy of Errors, Deborah Baker Wyrick allows the pun as a consequence of Renaissance pronunciation; for her, as for Paster, the pun is purely homonymie.3 Perhaps the most emphatic assertion of the pun's presence in Shakespeare belongs to Frankie Rubenstein, who boldly proclaims in her Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and Their Significance, "Shakespeare never used 'arse'; like his contemporaries, he used 'ass' to pun on the ass that gets beaten with a stick and the arse that gets thumped sexually, the ass that bears a burden and the arse that bears or carries in intercourse."4 Annabel Patterson agrees with Rubinstein's assessment, and she reads the translated Bottom as "a political allegory of status inversion and corporal punishment."5 Finally, Mario DiGangi argues that the pun can be heard outside Shakespearean contexts in the homoerotic relation of masters to asses in seventeenth-century city comedies.6 Taking a cue from this critical consensus that early modern English locution did at least allow for a homonymie pun between ass and arse, I suggest that the pun reverberates within larger networks of wordplay that contribute to Falstaff 's comic transformation into an ass at the end of The Merry Wives of Windsor. In comic terms, the ass is the butt of the joke: the object of humiliation whose etymological roots lie in the use of butt (from the Old French) to refer to a target or a hunter's mark.7 The word butt is itself absent from The

The bawdiest of the Canterbury Tales have always been problematic for the critics, as the responses documented by Peter Beidler—which range from apologetics to effacement and outright dismissal—attest. 1 The fact that someone has documented the reception of Chaucer's scatology does imply, however, that the door to this aspect of Chaucerian satire has begun to open. Furthermore, that scatology has already become a legiti- mate domain in literary criticism of other periods is given witness by such recent critical collections as Fecal Matters in Early Modern Literature and Art: Studies in Scatology. 2 Although it is evident from the superabun- dance of dirty humor in medieval texts that medieval readers ("readers" in the broad sense of cultural cryptographers) knew well how to parse scatological figures, knowledge of the satiric function—that is, the poet- ics—of scatology has to a great extent fallen away, particularly within the academy. As Beidler shows in the case of the Miller's Tale, taking Chaucer's dirty parts seriously restores them to their integral place within the narrative and poetic framework and produces satisfying read- ings of individual tales that have been traditionally bowdlerized or ignored. One such tale is the Summoner's Tale. Its fierce scatology has not, to my knowledge, been approached in close study. The crudeness of this tale, with its sustained meditation upon a fart, has received two main interpre- tations. The first recognizes the rivalries between the Canterbury pilgrims and sees the Summoner's awful joke as a "low blow" to the Friar, whose tale has just targeted him. The second view interprets the fart's scatology insofar as it participates in the medieval fabliau tradition of bawdy humor and inversion. It is not my goal to discount either interpretation, as both offer insights into the complex ethos and generic tradition of the Canterbury Tales. 3 Still, neither a dramatic nor a historicist account explains how the satire—with its (literally) fundamental scatology—works. Why, for instance, in a satire on greed, does the Summoner choose a fart to

Jason McElligott explores the prevalence of sexual libel in the royalist newsbooks published secretly in London during the s, arguing that it was only one of several political and linguistic strategies deployed in these publications for discrediting the Parliamentarians. He notes that historians disdained to consider the newsbooks because of a preoccupation with smut and scatology in these publications; recent attention to sexual libel, however, may give it too dominant a position in royalist discourse. He analyzes the patterns of this material as well as the way it exploited known facts to show what sort of weapon it was in the royalist propaganda arsenal, but he also demonstrates, by analyzing the figurative treatment of the natural world and the Bible, that sexual libel was only a prominent part of a broader strategy to exploit popular belief and prejudice.        This content downloaded from 157.55.39.104 on Sun, 19 Jun 2016 05:56:45 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Two popular entertainments, the South Park cartoon show and The Blue Man Group theatrical performance, are analyzed as symptomatic of a new configuration of masculinity in the contemporary United States. This masculinity is shaped by young men's ambivalent resistance and accommodation to the consumer culture. It manifests itself in an expulsive anality unlike the bourgeois character traits described by Freud or the polymorphously sensual scatology that Bakhtin ascribes to folk culture. Not the breadwinner masculinity of the post-World War II era, this market masculinity is simultaneously childish, creative, homoerotic, homophobic, racist, cynical, and paranoid. It reflects young men's difficulties in maintaining individual autonomy both against the impersonal authority of the law of the father and against the more seductive power of corporate advertising, which might be called the market of the mother. This analysis furthers feminist efforts toward socially contextualized, nondualistic understandings of masculinity.

This quotation from The Unnamable points to the areas with which this paper will be concerned: excrement, die end and elimination. The "right word" for the purposes of this paper is Krapp. I will begin by focusing on the etymology of the word Krapp and the ways in which the associated meanings of this word can help to illuminate aspects of play. Krapp's Last Tape. I will also be looking at other related areas such as scatology and bananas. But first of all, like the protagonist of the play in search of the meanings of "viduity", I have turned to the dictionary in order to trace the semantic resonances of this word, Krapp. The dictionary states that crap is derived from the Dutch words krappe and krappen, with the meaning "to pluck off, to "cut off. There is also the old French word crappe with the meaning of "sittings". These meanings can be related to the word "last" in the title; this will be Krapp's last birthday, his last tape: death is imminent. He is approaching the time when he will be "plucked off or "cut off by death. The "sittings" relate to the idea of judgment: he is sifting through the taped records of his Life. There is the idea of the Day of Judgment: the sifting or winnowing, or as thirty-nine-year-old Krapp himself expresses it: "separating the grain from the husks."1 Krapp goes on to gloss this: "The grain, now what I wonder do I mean by that, I mean ... (hesitates) ... I suppose I mean those things worth having when all the dust has ? when all my dust has settled. I close my eyes and try to imagine them (CSP, 56). In Middle English crap does mean "the husk of grain". This gives the sense of the Day of Judgment after a life is over and also the sense of residue, the waste that is to be discarded: the grain will be retained; the husk thrown away. This sense of waste runs throughout the play: Krapp is like an empty husk at the end of his life, and he is sifting through his recorded past in a way which is strongly at variance with the way the younger Krapp assessed the events he recorded. Sixty-nine-year-old Krapp discards the

The aim of this essay is to investigate the intersections between masculinity, shame, art, anality, the abject and embodiment by focusing on a particular period of the British art duo Gilbert & George's work in the 1990s. In their series The Naked Shit Pictures (1994), The Fundamental Pictures (1996) and The Rudimentary Pictures (1999), the duo's artistic self-performance opens a scatological narrative territory where the male body encounters its own abject fluids strategically magnified. Situating itself within the boundary between queer theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis with a particular focus on the phallus and the abject, this essay argues that Gilbert & George's art-works mentioned above could be regarded as visual commentaries on and queer interventions into bodily anxieties of normative masculinities. It thus reads the artists’ visual discourse of performative hypervisibility as a queer/ing one where the conventional male masculinity confronts simultaneously its ejaculatory bliss and its fear of anal penetration.

Genet, Beckett and Vinaver reveal, in The Screens, Endgame, and Par-dessus bord, through different uses of scatology and representations of the body, the fundamental anality they see in man andjor society. Genet's anality is still mainly a response to and a sublimation of the anxiety of death, while Beckett' s infinitely repeats it ; but Vinaver connects anality to life and creativity., Évrard Franck. Scatographies dans le théâtre français contemporain (Genet, Beckett, Vinaver). In: Littérature, n°89, 1993. Désir et détours. pp. 17-32.

Thoreau's puns reflect the widespread philosophic interest in language that flourished in midcentury America. Some of his wordplay is covertly scatological. Though he explicitly defends excrement as natural, philological speculation encourages him to view it as poison. Excremental symbolism bolsters vegetarian ideals and subserves a philosophy where body contaminates spirit. Thoreau's ambivalent anality, evident in his fastidious cleanliness, helps explain his distaste for women, since female biology makes birth unclean and sex dirty. Excremental symbology also colors his view of emotion as a function of the bowels. Unctuous affection seems an oily exudation secreted in social contact, while sympathetic tears are a rendering of the fat accumulated in digestion. His contempt for sympathy as self-indulgent weakness is part of the heroic ethos forced upon him by the consciousness that death tainted his lungs. Dietary scruples are his ascetic strategy for avoiding consumption. Influenced by Wilkinson's The Human Body and Its Connection with Man (1851), Thoreau's covert scatological puns embody in style his philosophy of play, blending estheticism and stoicism in the concept of life as a heroic game. Many nineteenth-century punsters including Carlyle and Nietzsche exemplify similar compensatory attitudes; so do other modern hero-worshipers.

A sufficiently generous response to the aesthetics of medieval drama may discern indirect and profound moral meaning in some of the scabrous language that has traditionally been regarded as crudity beneath serious literary interpretation.' The question of "naif" anachronism and anatopism can serve as an illustrative analogue. The generation of William Archer thought illogic about time and place an evasion of dramaturgical responsibility,2 but when Noah invokes the Trinity and the Shepherds in the Secunda Pastorum complain about English weather in Israel, the suggestion is implicit, we now see, that the nature of God is not bound by human measurement and that the Redemption knows no time or place. If we step away from our genteel sensibilities and from the assumption that in literary history later is always better,3 we may find that even base scatology has something sophisticated to say. It may, then, be a worthwhile venture to explore the almost forgotten meanings of turds and dunghills in medieval literature and art. Those meanings had not been forgotten in the Tudor period, as an analysis of Gammer Gurton's Needle can show; and Ben Jonson's sophisticated literary strategy in The Alchemist is evidence that the literary device retained its indirect expressiveness in Jacobean England, though the primary moral meaning of skatos had changed by Jonson's time.4