Voltaire’s Satirical Catechisms: Secular Confessionalism

Satirical Perspectives: A Cross-Cultural Comparison

Understanding Satirical Articles Using Common-Sense

Automatic satire detection is a subtle text classification task, for machines and at times, even for humans. In this paper we argue that satire detection should be approached using common-sense inferences, rather than traditional text classification methods. We present a highly structured latent variable model capturing the required inferences. The model abstracts over the specific entities app...

A statistical analysis of satirical Amazon.com product reviews

A corpus of 750 product reviews extracted from Amazon.com was analyzed for specific lexical, grammatical, and semantic features to identify differences between satirical and non-satirical Amazon.com product reviews through a statistical analysis. The corpus contained 375 reviews identified as satirical and 375 as non-satirical (750 total). Fourteen different linguistic indices were used to meas...

Reclaiming the Secular: Developing Dialogic Skills for a Post-Secular Society

This research paper addresses secularization from both political and religious perspectives. One of its manifestations in the political sphere is that of globalization that can lead to alienation within society; and in the United Kingdom this is exemplified by Brexit. Within the religious sphere secularization is usually couched in oppositional terms. This paper reclaims the original use ...

Satura Contra Utopiam: Satirical Distortions of Utopian Ideas

Utopia and satire would seem, superficially at least, to be closely related genres. They both reject present forms of human society, and they sometimes make use of similar devices (e. g., the voyage, the stranger's eye). They would seem to differ only in emphasis. Whereas the satirist focuses on criticism, the utopian writer offers an ideal alternative. The implicit social censure embedded in u...