It's awesome that you're reading Dante's Inferno—it's a great and super important work!
Satire is the use of irony, humor, and exaggeration to expose hypocrisy, stupidity, or evils. Social satire is when you do this in the context of your own society.
If you are familiar with the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, this is a great way to think about satire. In the Daily Show, Jon Stewart directly makes fun...
It's awesome that you're reading Dante's Inferno—it's a great and super important work!
Satire is the use of irony, humor, and exaggeration to expose hypocrisy, stupidity, or evils. Social satire is when you do this in the context of your own society.
If you are familiar with the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, this is a great way to think about satire. In the Daily Show, Jon Stewart directly makes fun of issues in our society. But in the Colbert Report (so sad it was cancelled!), Stephen Colbert would pretend to believe in the issues he was intending to mock, and would exaggerate them in a funny way to make his point.
Dante does the same thing in the Inferno. He exposes the hypocrisy and malice in Florentine society by showing how the people atone for their sins in hell—it's pretty extreme. He does this for groups in general, like in the third circle where the gluttons are punished. He also does it to specific people, like Filippo Argenti, in the fifth circle, where anger is punished.
Argenti was someone who had wronged Dante, and rather than just talk about that directly, Dante goes to an extreme and shows Argenti paying for that sin in hell.
Look for more examples like this—there are a lot of them!
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