Literary Allusion and Satire

Allusion: a reference in a literary work to a person, place, or thing in history or another work of literature. Allusions are often indirect or brief references to well-known characters or events. Allusions are often used to summarize broad, complex ideas or emotions in one quick, powerful image.

--All American: Glossary of Literary Terms http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/allam/general/glossary.htm

Satire: The use of wit, especially irony, sarcasm, and ridicule, to attack the vices and follies of humankind. --Encarta Dictionary

Reading the definitions above, it is obvious that Mother Goose has been a prime source of literary allusions and satire over the years. Today these nursery rhymes are both alluded to and allude to other people or events in literature or society. The combination of image and brief text is particularly effective for social commentary or for referring to that which is familiar from other texts.

“While images standing by themselves can convey incongruity or contradiction, or hypocrisy and other moral deformities (think of Hogarth and Daumier and Nast and the other great caricaturists, or George Heartfield), images combined with some words or lines of text provide contexts for each other and increase the range of options for representing hypocrisy, incongruity and so on. Digital images can of course be distorted in ways that caricature their subjects-and this is a technique used by some Web satire sites-but the mainstay of many very popular sites is to place images that by themselves would be taken to be rather bland or even affirmative next to text that casts a different light on them. These juxtapositions develop another of the old humorous devices-the inappropriate or flippant caption. As a regular feature of on-line satiric newspapers and newsletters, these images appear under the conventional relation of "illustrating the story" and it is only as we read the story that way they illustrate the story becomes clear.”

http://courses.washington.edu/hypertxt/cgi-bin/12.228.185.206/html/contexts/satire3.html

The New Yorker magazine is famous for its cartoons that poke fun at the social inadequacies and foibles of contemporary society, often using references to well-known literary works to drive home the point. How and what does this cartoon make you think about housing problems, especially on our cities?

The Chas. Addams Mother Goose book sets up provocative juxtapositions between the texts of the traditional rhymes and his visual interpretations. Here both readers and film buffs see the obvious allusion and appreciate the humor of his subtle satire.