The Art of Dueling with Words: Toward a New Understanding of Verbal Duels across the World

Abstract

A common view of verbal duels posits that they are a cathartic expression of aggression. This is partially due to the fact that—although a body of cross-disciplinary studies on verbal duels demonstrates their complexity as forms of expression—works intended to summarize and disseminate them have tended to rely on a minor number of sources, many of them studies on the African-American “dozens, ” and to adopt a restrictive definition of verbal duels as exchanges of insults.1 For example, in his definition of “poetic contests ” for The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Earl Miner writes: “Indeed the poetic contest itself is not a genre at all but rather the verbal expression of a general mode of human interaction—the aggressive and agonistic—whose roots extend deep into biology and psychology ” (1993:925). Marco Jacquemet, in a review of verbal conflicts for the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, defines verbal duels as “the competitive exchange of usually obscene insults and invectives between at least two parties ” (2005:4923). The view of verbal duels as a cathartic expression of violence where the negative impulses of society or its members get released, and conflict gets resolved, developed in an ethnological milieu dominated by functionalistic and structural-functionalistic theories around

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