Can I read Wit's End: Women’s Humor as Rhetorical and Performative Strategy (Composition, Literacy, and Culture) on EtoBox?

Wit's End: Women’s Humor as Rhetorical and Performative Strategy (Composition, Literacy, and Culture) by Sean Zwagerman is a nonfiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Wit's End: Women’s Humor as Rhetorical and Performative Strategy (Composition, Literacy, and Culture) about?

In Wit's End, Sean Zwagerman offers an original perspective on women's use of humor as a performative strategy as seen in works of twentieth-century American literature. He argues that women whose direct, explicit performative speech has been traditionally denied, or not taken seriously, have often turned to humor as a means of communicating with men. The book examines both the potential and limits of women's humor as a rhetorical strategy in the writings of James Thurber, Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy Parker, Edward Albee, Louise Erdrich, and others. For Zwagerman, these texts “talk back” to important arguments in humor studies and speech-act theory. He deconstructs the use of humor in select passages by employing the theories of J. L. Austin, John Searle, Jacques Derrida, Shoshana Felman, J. Hillis Miller, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Zwagerman offers arguments both for and against these approaches while advancing new thinking on humor as the “end”—both the goal and limit—of performative strategy, and as a means of expressing a full range of serious purposes. Zwagerman contends that women's humor is not solely a subversive act, but instead it should be viewed in the total speech situ

Who reads Wit's End: Women’s Humor as Rhetorical and Performative Strategy (Composition, Literacy, and Culture)?

Author

Sean Zwagerman

Publisher

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published

2010

Language

EN

ISBN

9780822960744

Category

nonfiction

Subjects

History, Science, Philosophy