Carlylean Sentiment and the Platonic Triad in Anne of Green Gables

Humor in Anne of Green Gables serves the novel’s realism, establishing the perspective of a child. The humanistic humor and overblown, imaginative realism in Montgomery’s work is both a burlesque on Romantic attitudes and a vehicle for her social outlook, an outlook which is decidedly conservative. Like Thomas Carlyle in Past and Present, Montgomery creates in Avonlea an idealized past that serves (in part) as a moral standard from which she can gauge modernity. Anne’s optimism, her “ambitions,” humanizes Marilla’s Calvinism, Marilla’s tendency toward emotional austerity. But from the mid-point of the novel onwards, the humor is made increasingly at Anne’s expense as Montgomery satirizes Romantic pretensions and steers her heroine away from the extremes of childhood into an adult sense of individual balance and duty.     

No laughing matter? The ethics of racial humor in Tres sombreros de copa

ABSTRACT

Miguel Mihura's Tres sombreros de copa is often celebrated as an irresistibly funny critique of the values of the bourgeoisie in early twentieth-century Spain. Yet the enjoyment of some (myself included) is tempered by a discomfort at the handful of references to race and blackness in the play. Drawing on an approach to the ethics of humor that recognizes its performative aspect, this article considers several productions of Mihura's comedy from 1983 to 2011 and analyzes the various ways in which they do or do not engage with the potentially “racist” humor of the published text and with the issue of how to perform the character of Buby on stage.     

“Obra de arte yo too”: Eduardo Mendicutti on soccer,glamour, and the “Beckham effect”

ABSTRACT

La Susi en el vestuario blanco (2003) is a fictional chronicle of life in the Real Madrid locker room, a privileged insight into the sanctum sanctorum of the world's richest soccer team. The hiring of Susi as glamour coach ostensibly aims to boost the competitive advantage of the galácticos in foreign as well as local markets (reflecting the reality of the club at the time). In Mendicutti's homoeroticizing gaze, it also serves to uncover the homophobic substrate reportedly still common in male team sports and teases at the anxieties of the players. This article explores the peculiar function of Susi as she sets the comic tone of the work and engages with the varied virilities before her. It examines the notions of “glamour” and “identification” both as tongue-in-cheek team objectives and as phenomena with wider relevance for the way spectators relate to sport and players relate to the world around them.