The Ironic Musical Edge: Using Songs to Present and Question Myths

Authors

  • Jason Blake University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.13.1.99-110

Keywords:

Arrogant Worms, culture course, irony, irony in music, culture and society courses

Abstract

Professors never have enough time to cover everything they would like to teach. If the temptation in literature survey courses is to whittle the reading list down to a few canonical texts, the temptation in culture courses is to reduce “American Culture” or “Canadian Culture” to facts and figures, important dates in history, and so on. This paper argues that ironic songs can efficiently introduce important information about a country’s myths and sense of self, while simultaneously questioning those myths. After a discussion of syllabus agonies of choice, the paper discusses irony, then irony in music, before finishing with an examination of The Arrogant Worm’s comic song “Canada’s Really Big.”

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

  • Jason Blake, University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts

    Jason Blake teaches in the English Department at the University of Ljubljana. He is the author of Canadian Hockey Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2010), Culture Smart! Slovenia (Kuperard, 2011), and three writing guides aimed at non-native speakers of English:

    Writing Short Literature Essays: A Textbook with Exercises for Slovenian Students, 101 English Tips: A Quick Guide to Avoiding “Slovenglish” and (with Andrej Stopar) 102 English Tips: Another Quick Guide to Avoiding “Slovenglish”.

Downloads

Published

20. 06. 2016

Issue

Section

English Language and Literature Teaching

How to Cite

Blake, J. (2016). The Ironic Musical Edge: Using Songs to Present and Question Myths. ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries, 13(1), 99-110. https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.13.1.99-110