Teaching Cultural and Historical LiteracyThrough SatireJohn Leech, Punch 1853Christian EhretELAN 7408Fall 2005Ehret2Table of ContentsRationale ………………………………………………………… 3Materials ………………………………………………………….13Goals and Rubrics …………………………………………..…...14Introductory Activity………………………………………….....19Lesson Plans ……………………………………………………..21Appendices ……………………………………………………….36Ehret3Satire as a means of cultural critique is not a recent literary development. Satirehas been a popular form of social commentary since the fifth century B.C. whenAristophanes used his play The Clouds to peg the then prominent philosopher Socrates asa Sophist. But Aristophanes was also a pacifist; he drafted Lysistrata to protestcomically—yet insiduously—the ongoing Peloponnesian War. Satire was unfamilairneither to Elizabethan England, nor to its most famous playwright William Shakespeare.In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Malvolio famously lampoons the fatuous andhypocrytical Puritans. Though both playwrights’ social commentaries were pointed andrelevant to a large social group, they did not reach a large percentage of the population atonce. But in our media-saturated society, satires reach not only a greater number ofpeople, but also a much greater number of young people. Accroding to a poll performedby the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press during the 2004 Presidentialelections, 21 percent of people aged 16 to 29 cited "The Daily Show" and "SaturdayNight Live" as a place where they regularly learned about world news. In contrast, only23 percent cited any of the major nightly newscasts from ABC, CBS or NBC's as aEhret4significant news source. These numbers should concern parents and educators alike.What would happen if students read these satires literally—mistaking ficticious socialcommentary for fact? In 1862 a young newspaper columnist named Samuel Clemenspublished “The Petrified Man” in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. The newspaperreport described—fictitiously—a petrified man who had been found almost perfectlypreserved in a local mud swamp. The newspaper reporter remembers the social milieuthat lead to his satirical report:In the fall of 1862, in Nevada and California, the people got to runningwild about extraordinary petrifactions and other natural marvels. One couldscarcely pick up a paper without finding in it one or two glorified discoveries ofthis kind. The mania was becoming a little ridiculous. I was a brand-new localeditor in Virginia City, and I felt called upon to destroy this growing evil1.But Mark Twain’s newspaper piece did not have the effect he desired. Twain’s piece wastoo effectively wrought and his readers not only took the story in good faith, but they alsomoved assembled in droves to view the body. Although satire was not a new mode ofwriting—even in the nineteenth century—Twain’s unsuspecting readers were not privy tothe common conceits of the genre. Had they been aware of such common elements asexaggeration, incongruity, reversal, and parody a local uproar may not have ensued, andTwain may not have been forced from his post at the newspaper. Can we as parents andeducators allow our students to chase after petrified men? Just as many of this nation’syouth receive as much of their news from satirical sources as genuine network news 1 Mark Twain, "The Petrified Man," Sketches New and Old Vol. 5 (Hartford, Connecticut and Chicago,Illinois: The American Publishing Company, 1882) pp. 239-242.Ehret5broadcasts, and we cannot allow them to pass into adulthood without the tools necessaryto understand and decode satire.Still, some may argue that satire teaches children to resist authority, to mockauthority figures, and to use media as subterfuge. But this unit will not develop counter-cultures. Rather this unit will deconstruct how the media imparts particular culturalvalues2. Competency in twenty-first century society requires media literacy, and thusstudents must understand not only how to use modern means of communication but theymust also possess the critical ability to analyze and interpret various types of mediagenres. G.A. Hull describes such competency as “a familiarity with the full range ofcommunication tools, modes, and media, plus an awareness of and a sensitivity to thepower and importance of representation of self and others, along with the space andrapport to communicate critically, aesthetically, lovingly, and agentively—these areparamount for literacy now”3. Short of subterfuge, satire provides students with theability to be social activists—with the social skills necessary to participate meaningfullyin our democratic society. To argue against the teaching of satire and popular culture isto argue that students should remain passive, static citizens, unable to read the signs andsignals of twenty-first century media and culture.Apart from its extraordinary cultural, social, and literary significance outlinedabove, satire provides access to a myriad of historical moments. Making students betterreaders of satire will thus make them better readers of history. Working from thisassumption, the following instructional unit will take a cross-curricular, multimodal 2 Kubey, R. (1998). Obstacles to the development of media education in the United States. Journal ofCommunication, 48 (1), 58-70.3 Hull, G.A. (2003). Youth culture and digital media: new literacies for new times. Research in theTeaching of English, 38 (2), 229-333.Ehret6approach to the teaching of social, cultural, political, and literary satire. In this waystudents will be able to identify multiple types of satirically constructed media andthereby become better readers of contemporary culture. Students will also learn to applytheir reading of contemporary satirical media to readings of various satirical media fromthe twentieth, nineteenth, and eighteenth centuries. This approach to teaching satirefollows from standard one set by the IRA/NCTE4:Students read a wide range of print and nonprint texts to build an understanding oftexts, of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world; toacquire new information; to respond to the needs and demands of society and theworkplace; and for personal