Invective Form in Popular Media Culture: Genre – Mode – Affordance

Abstract

The following article outlines a way to conceptualize invective form in popular culture that is particularly interested in accommodating the range, fluidity, and slipperiness that define pop-cultural invectivity. It is an approach that draws on one very well-established concept of formal criticism – that of mode – and one concept that has recently been brought to the fold of formalist inquiry – that of affordance. I will argue that conceiving of invective form in popular culture as a mode and as an affordance allows to address the diversity and range of external forms by which pop-cultural invectivity operates. In addition, it brings into focus the fluidity that marks the repertoire of invective popular culture, its paradoxical tendency to gravitate toward routinization in more set conventions, only to conspicuously push against these conventions’ boundaries. Finally, to conceive of the invective valence of the mode’s repertoire not as a fixed property but as an affordance helps talk about the volatility and dynamism of invective performances in popular culture, the way in which their invective effects are contingent on the social positionality from and for which they realized, and the way in which their invective valence is open for resignification.

Of Hypocrites, Whores, and Holy Animal Bones. Polemical Comparisons and the Invective Mode in Early Reformation Disputes

“…Since these communicative practices were neither bound to specific genres nor styles like polemic, the concept of invective mode is applied to analyze the dynamics and consequences of interwoven invective communication in this region during the first years of the Reformation. Of recent origin, the concept of 'invective mode' has been outlined by Katja Kanzler as a way to analyze and describe those kinds of communication that potentially disparage those offended while transcending literary genres and styles (Kanzler 2021).…”