Overview
- Re-conceives how scholars and thinkers should approach traditional notions of Humanism
- Explores a wide range of source material from both the Early Modern period and contemporary culture, including Shakespeare, memes, YouTube videos, Spenser, and more
- Offers useful discussion and thought for scholars within rhetoric and composition, new media, and cultural studies, particularly those interested in posthumanism, queer studies and/or object-oriented ontology
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700 (EMCSS)
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About this book
This book frames the undeniably copious 21st-century performances of stupidity that occur within social media as echoes of rhetorical experiments conducted by humanist writers of the Renaissance. Any historical overview of humanism will associate it with copia—abundance of expression—and the rhetorical practices essential to managing it. This book argues that stupidity was and is a synonym for copia, making the humanism of which copia is a central element an inherently stupid philosophy. A transhistorical exploration of stupidity demonstrates that not only is excess still the surest way to eloquence, but it is also just the kind of spammy, speculative undertaking to generate a more generous and inventive comprehension of human and nonhuman relationships. In chapters exploring the rhetorics of memes, attack ads, public shaming blogs, clickbait and gifs, Stupid Humanism outlines the possibilities for a humanism less invested in the normative logics that enshrine knowledge, eloquence and linear development as the chief indicators of an active, articulated selfhood and more supportive of a program for queer knowledge, trivial pursuits, anti-social ethics and the curious relationships that form around and in response to abundance of expression.
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Keywords
- literary analysis of memes
- stupidity and humanism
- spam in the 21st and 16th centuries
- copia and the Disaster Girl meme
- Erasmus's Praise of Folly and contemporary politics
- early modern philosophy and modern political attack ads
- Menippean satire in the twenty-first century
- Menippean satire and modern public shaming
- Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy
- Public shaming on Twitter and Tumblr
- enforcement of social norms on Tumblr and Twitter
- Clickbait and early modern literature
- Edmund Spencer's The Faerie Queene
- Sir Scudamore
- The .gif format and storytelling
- the .gif and Spencer's epic
Table of contents (6 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Christine Hoffmann is Assistant professor in the English Department at West Virginia University. She writes and teaches about early modern English literature; the rhetoric and ethics of social media; and the posthuman intercessions within copia and collecting. If you are a collector of weird stuff, contact her at cehoffmann@mail.wvu.edu.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Stupid Humanism
Book Subtitle: Folly as Competence in Early Modern and Twenty-First-Century Culture
Authors: Christine Hoffmann
Series Title: Early Modern Cultural Studies 1500–1700
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63751-8
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-63750-1Published: 20 November 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-87626-9Published: 24 May 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-63751-8Published: 08 November 2017
Series ISSN: 2634-5897
Series E-ISSN: 2634-5900
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIV, 192
Number of Illustrations: 31 b/w illustrations
Topics: Early Modern/Renaissance Literature, Literature and Technology/Media, Digital Humanities