Matthew Olzmann: Aspects of Satire (July 2017)

Contemporary satire creates a distortion of society, an individual, or an institution. In the incongruity that exists between the distortion presented in the satire and in the world we actually lie in, a flaw in human behavior is revealed to the reader. Drawing from texts from Juvenal and Horace to George Saunders and Kevin Young, Olzmann’s lecture examines how this particular incongruity is shaped, and how it becomes a resonant social criticism.