Menippean satire

The genre of Menippean satire is a form of satire, usually in prose, that is characterized by attacking mental attitudes rather than specific individuals or entities. It has been broadly described as a mixture of allegory, picaresque narrative, and satirical commentary. Other features found in Menippean satire are different forms of parody and mythological burlesque, a critique of the myths inherited from traditional culture, a rhapsodic nature, a fragmented narrative, the combination of many different targets, and the rapid moving between styles and points of view. The term is used by classical grammarians and by philologists mostly to refer to satires in prose (cf. the verse Satires of Juvenal and his imitators). Social types attacked and ridiculed by Menippean satires include "pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts, rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds," although they are addressed in terms of "their occupational approach to life as distinct from their social behavior ... as mouthpieces of the idea they represent". Characterization in Menippean satire is more stylized than naturalistic, and presents people as an embodiment of the ideas they represent. The term Menippean satire distinguishes it from the earlier satire pioneered by Aristophanes, which was based on personal attacks. The form is named after the third century BC Greek cynic parodist and polemicist Menippus. His works, now lost, influenced the works of Lucian and Marcus Terentius Varro, the latter being the first to identify the genre by referring to his own satires as saturae menippeae; such satires are sometimes also termed Varronian satire. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, the genre itself was in existence prior even to Menippus, with authors such as Antisthenes, Heraclides Ponticus and Bion of Borysthenes. Varro's own 150 books of Menippean satires survive only through quotations. The genre continued with Seneca the Younger, whose Apocolocyntosis, or "Pumpkinification", is the only near-complete classical Menippean satire to survive.

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Related concepts (2)

Parody

A parody is a creative work designed to imitate, comment on, and/or mock its subject by means of satiric or ironic imitation. Often its subject is an original work or some aspect of it (theme/content, author, style, etc), but a parody can also be about a real-life person (e.g. a politician), event, or movement (e.g. the French Revolution or 1960s counterculture). Literary scholar Professor Simon Dentith defines parody as "any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice".

Gargantua and Pantagruel

The Five Books of the Lives and Deeds of Gargantua and Pantagruel (Les Cinq livres des faits et dits de Gargantua et Pantagruel), often shortened to Gargantua and Pantagruel or the Cinq Livres (Five Books), is a pentalogy of novels written in the 16th century by François Rabelais. It tells the adventures of two giants, Gargantua (gɑːrˈgæntjuə , ɡaʁɡɑ̃tɥa) and his son Pantagruel (pænˈtægruɛl,_-əl,_ˌpæntəˈgruːəl , pɑ̃taɡʁyɛl).