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Review of 'A Companion to Jane Austen' edited by Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite.

© 2008 LexisNexis and authors. Published version of the paper reproduced here in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from LexisNexis, In Part 1 of ‘Defining Parody and Satire’ we sought to show that, for the purposes of the new exception to infringement of the Copyright Act in ss 41A and 103AA (the ‘new exception’), it is unsafe to construe parody and satire according either to US law on the matter or to available dictionary definitions. In this part we propose working definitions for parody and satire which, we suggest, are more congruent with both the intention of the Act to protect the free speech of Australian humorists and with the ordinary meanings of the words. There are four categories of artistic practice that the new Australian exceptions would seem designed to protect. The largest two groups combine the two terms: (1) satirical parodies in which copyright material is reused and distorted for the satirical effect of ridiculing that material. These are the staple of many literary, theatrical, video and digital media. We propose a metaphor of the satirical fist of critical intent animating the parodic glove of formal reuse to help comprehend this group particularly. (2) A group of satirical parodies where the target is not the artistic form parodied, but where the parody, for example of a popular song, provides a vehicle for satirical comment of some other person, group, or event. (3) Pure parody — formal play without discernible satirical intent either towards the vehicle text or any other potential target. This is, perhaps, most common these days in the visual arts, where a layering of pre-existing images creates juxtapositions which defy rhetorical purpose; there is also an established tradition of affectionate literary and dramatic parody. (4) Straight or pure satire, which may be independent of parody, but which may also quote its object so that the audience can know what the target is, without distorting the form of that object (text or image) in parodic ways. This category would include the use of excerpts of television broadcasts which became the subject of Australian copyright litigation in the well known ‘Panel’ case decided before the introduction of the new exception. We submit that unlicensed use of copyright material in all of these categories should enjoy the protection of the new Australian exception, subject to the issues of ‘fairness’ and possibly also moral rights in particular instances — a consideration of which is beyond the scope of this article. The definitions of parody and satire we will propose are: Parody: the borrowing from, imitation, or appropriation of a text, or other cultural product or practice, for the purpose of commenting, usually humorously, upon either it or something else; Satire: the critical impulse manifesting itself in some degree of denigration, almost invariably through attempted humour; the artistic results (usually humorous) of expression of such a critical impulse., Nth Ryde NSW

© 2008 Copyright is vested in the authors. Apart from any fair dealing permitted according to the provisions of the Copyright Act, reproduction by any process of any part of the work may not be undertaken without written permission from the copyright holders of Comic Commentators., Political cartoonists feel various forces for ‘censorship’ on and in their work. Often these are informal pressures that are based on moral or commercial interests, or the amorphous notion of ‘good taste’.1 This chapter seeks to focus on the formal legal pressures on cartoonists. We suspect that cartoonists fear (and are led to fear by cautious editorial staff) more legal sanction than is likely to be the case, and that ‘legalling’ of cartoons before publication is often a cover for other sensitivities. But we first need to look at the state of the law., Perth

In this paper, Robert Phiddian explores four pragmatic issues involved in writing a biography of Australian cartoonist and illustrator, Bruce Petty. When your subject has published at least weekly and often daily since 1963 (apart from annual leave and a brief hiatus of 2 months in 1976), your problem is one of profusion. When your subject has also made a dozen animated features, hundreds of prints, several sculptures, and half a dozen books, your problem with profusion is not exactly dissipating. When your subject has led a personal life that in many ways exemplifies the social changes in Australia in a period spanning the Depression to the present, and is happy enough to talk about them, sanity demands that you view profusion is a realm of happy opportunity.

Copyright © The author(s). First published by Australian Review of Public Affairs 2004., In a previous issue of The Drawing Board: An Australian Review of Public Affairs, Michael Hogan discussed the role of political cartooning in Australia. Hogan argued that we ought to be concerned about how cartoons erode public confidence in politicians, parties, and democratic institutions. He sought to provoke debate on the role and value of cartooning in political debate in Australia, and we have taken up his invitation. We are more inclined than Hogan to support the licence of cartoonists to mock public figures and institutions freely. We base our view on: (1) an analysis of political cartooning as an established and understood element of free speech in Australia; (2) a provisional taxonomy of the types of political cartoon, judged by the effects they are liable to have on readers; and (3) some empirically based scepticism about the capacity of cartoons to directly influence public opinion. We conclude that cartoons make a valuable contribution to public debate that is distinct from journalism and written commentary, and that cartoonists should not be formally or informally encouraged to restrain their satirical instincts in the interests of balance or for fear of engendering public cynicism.

Copyright (C) The authors., © 2008 Copyright is vested in the authors. Apart from any fair dealing permitted according to the provisions of the Copyright Act, reproduction by any process of any part of the work may not be undertaken without written permission from the copyright holders of Comic Commentators., A survey of the life and work of Australian political cartoonist and animator, Bruce Petty, from birth to mid-career (early 1976): In this piece, I focus on Petty’s early years, until the major seachange in his and Australia’s career marked by the events of 1975. While I deal with images in approximately chronological order and gather some information about his life, this is not primarily a biographical sketch.1 It is Petty’s engagement with public life and debate that I seek to outline, to describe his developing perspective on the issues of the 1960s and early 1970s.

Phiddian's review of Frank Boyle's book "Swift as Nemesis" Modernity and Its Satirist" (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

Copyright © The author(s) - Australian, This paper focuses primarily on the cartoonists operating in major daily newspapers rather than on the periodical and electronic media. The thing that most obviously needs to be explained in a survey of political satire in the 1996 election is what it was that kept satirical passion at bay. The three basic reasons that satire remained relatively tame during the campaign were (1) the sense that the election was a form of entertainment put on by experts for the benefit of the voters, (2) the pressures on the media (including satirists) to be even-handed, and (3) the failure of the arch-satirist of Australian political life, Paul Keating, to start a good brawl.

In this essay, Robert Phiddian argues that Derridean deconstruction is not just a (serious) theory couched in a parodic mode (that it is a parodic theory of language), but also that it treats language and questions of truth and reference as if they were already in a play of parody (that it is a theory of parodic language). Though some recent work is beginning to look at ways of taking it less "seriously," this is decidedly not the way it has generally been received in the academic community.

Umberto Eco denies that "Foucault's Pendulum" is an allusion to the theories of Michel Foucault: 'I was aware from the very beginning that somebody could have smelled an allusion to Michel Foucault... [but] as an empirical author I was not so happy about such a possible connection. It sounds like a joke and not a clever one, indeed. But the pendulum invented by Leon was the hero of my story and I could not change the title: thus I hoped that my Model Reader would not try to make a superficial connection with Michel.' In this essay, Phiddian refutes this denial. What if Eco's concession that 'maybe I am responsible for a superficial joke; maybe the joke is not superficial. I do not know' is actually true, and the joke isn't superficial, but rather a covert indication that the novel is secretly constructed around the ideas of Michel Foucault and his followers? If we pick up the thread and seek to read the word 'Foucault' in the title not as a 'superficial' joke, but rather as the key to a covert allegory of poststructuralist semiosis, Eco's parodic text starts to spin in fascinating ways. In fact, the precise connection with Foucault is an inevitable and (for Eco) convenient indirection, in that it does not lead us very far in its own right. Phiddian proposes that we read the 'Foucault' in the title as a metonymy for poststructuralist theory at large.

In Swift's "A Modest Proposal", the Proposer discusses recipes for stewed baby. If Swift's plan for the readers was first to trick us into temporary assent to the proposal, and then to follow this with an instructive catharsis when we recognise our error and revise our view of the political situation, it would seem that Defoe was a more skillful parodic ironist than he. The "Modest Proposal" is simply too aggressively alienating to be successful as a hoax, and Phiddian suggests that we should not try to read it that way. The text does not make a serious attempt to lull us into a false sense of security. Rather, it attacks us; everywhere it makes us vulnerable. We are exposed to the vicissitudes of moral choice, stretched between the polar claims to authority made, on the one hand, by the delinquent and lunatic Proposer, and, on the other, by an angry but fugitive Swift. What Phiddian aims to do in this essay is to look carefully at how we readers are positioned in the text and in relation to these polar authorities.

Writing as a literary critic and literary historian rather than as a professional or academic accountant, Phiddian proposes to highlight two ways by which accountants might resist the rhetorical power of positive accounting theory to give the impression that it operates with scientific neutrality. First, by attending to satirical modes of writing that use parody to unsettle the assumptions of accounting discourse; secondly, by adopting and illustrating a sceptical mode of interpretation based on a model of blindness and insight very commonly employed in current literary theory.

Hutcheon's fundamental principle, and the point which sets her work apart from the mass of formalist and intentionalist analysis of irony that has gone before, is that irony is an event which is inferred by the reader/watcher/listener, rather than a formal trope of language or a deliberate message from the artist. Wisely, she does not claim that form or intention are irrelevant to irony, but she carves out her territory in "the theory and politics of irony" in the zone of reader-response and the pragmatics of reception.