Introduction. Parody and Bakhtin

2010

The vast diversity of the proposed definitions of parody, both before and after the twentieth century, can be an emblem of the lack of a thorough agreement amongst the literary critics about the definition of this literary technique (genre?!). While there is not a comprehensive all-accepted definition of parody, modern and postmodern literatures both exhibit a wide application of it. After looking at the definition of parody under Bakhtin's dialogic concepts, Genette's structuralist viewpoints, and Barthes's poststructuralist notions this study endeavours to put forward a more comprehensive and more applicable definition of parody mainly based on Bakhtin's dialogic criticism. Parody then can be defined as a deliberate imitation or transformation of a socio-cultural product (including literary and nonliterary texts, and utterance in its very broad Bakhtinian understanding of it) that recreates its original subject having at least a playful stance towards it.

The Scriblerian and the Kit-Cats, 2021

After a thorough tour of this ambitious study of parody, one is reminded of Dryden's admonition: "This is the Mystery of that Noble Trade, which yet no Master can teach to his Apprentice: He may give the Rules, but the Scholar is never the nearer in his practice." Or, more succinctly, E. B. White's comment: "Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better, but the frog dies in the process." The book's title ought to be fair warning that the author has chosen a rather large frog to dissect. In a later chapter, Uściński alludes to Fielding's "bill of fare"; his own offers a generous buffet of Gay, Pope, Fielding, and Sterne, as seen through the critical eyes of Bakhtin, Watt, Derrida, McKeon, and a host of others. This obviously revised doctoral dissertation can be either forgiven or applauded for the scope of its effort to explore the role of parody in eighteenth-century literature, focusing on the Scriblerians. While the author seems primarily interested in examining parody as it relates to the novel (hence his chapters on Fielding and Sterne), his more interesting readings are of Gay and Pope. Before embarking on specific readings of Beggar' s Opera, The Dunciad, Joseph Andrews, and Tristram Shandy, Uściński lays out his critical approach, an attempt to unite Bakhtin's writings on parody and novelistic discourse with Derrida's emphasis on textual performance. He states in his introduction that "Parody is omnipresent in the Scriblerian literary discourse because it is a key textual mechanism of 'wit' as they practiced it. They parodied specific works and discourses as well [as] broader stylistic and generic conventions, questioning in their creative parodic practice such fundamental concepts as 'the poem,' 'the book,' 'the learned discourse,' and 'the novel.'" It certainly makes sense that Uściński would turn to Bakhtin on parody (primarily Rabelais and His World, but also Problems of Dostoevsky' s Poetics) to describe and explain the parodic impulse he sees in the works in question, and the first two chapters are perhaps the most useful in

Russian Literature, 1990

Advances in Language and Literary Studies, 2017

While conventional critics seek the comic aspect of parody, modernist critics credit parody with questioning mainstream literary trends and subverting literary production. For instance, Mikhail Bakhtin believes in parody’s power to create “a decrowning double” by turning the official worldview up-side-down. For experimental poets like John Donne, parody transcends mere comical imitation into a serious practice. Donne, having lived in the heyday of the Renaissance with its overemphasis on decorum and courtly love, sought refuge in parody to resist and disturb existing norms of versification and offer an alternative worldview. This paper examines John Donne’s parody poem “The Bait” in the light of Bakhtin’s concept of parody as a decrowning double. The analysis shows that not only had Donne resorted to parody to criticize the society, but he also employed it to undermine established rules of poetry. The study concludes that Donne used parody to create an important platform to liberate poetry from dominant modes of versification, invite readers, often by means of defamiliarisation, to reconsider their stance and literary taste, and promote experimental styles; thus, Donne transcends the norms of prevalent courtly love poetry once and for all. Keywords: John Donne, Parody, Poetry, Mikhail Bakhtin, Canon, Neoclassicism, Intertextuality

Comedy Studies

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2017

This essay explore the nature of Intertextuality and its use in the parody genre. Exploring subjects such as Semiotics, Genre Subversion, Ghost Texts and Postmodernism. While drawing on a large pool of artefacts, this essay focuses primarily on the works of Mel Brooks, specifically the films Young Frankenstein [Brooks. 1987], Blazing Saddles [Brooks. 1974] and Spaceballs [Brooks. 1974].

The Dostoevsky Journal, 2016

In the context of Bakhtin’s preoccupation with corporality, one of his best known concepts is that of the grotesque body. The ‘open’ and grotesque body coincides with the generation and invention of the new word-body, the word in action, separated from the old word-body. Moreover, the transgression in the grotesque has to be considered as a categorical infringement, as a violation of the bounderies between body and word, subject and object, external and internal. Bakhtin’s paper on Content, Material and Form… contains the first articulation of the concept of ambiguity (double body, double word and ambivalent meaning) in Bakhtin’s theory of discourse. His thoughts on the corporeality [тeлecнocть] of the act of reception, and on the author’s and reader’s direct presence prepares and supports the – non-hermeneutic, non-semiotic – contemporary theories of the literary text.

Opticon1826, 2007

Bakhtin's theory of carnival as it is developed in the two seminal studies Rabelais and his World 1 and Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics 2 has impacted on a variety of disciplines. Although essentially literary in conception, it claims a historical underpinning. Bakhtin's fundamental premise is that carnival, understood as the 'sum total of all diverse festivities, rituals and forms of a carnival type', 3 was a historical and cultural phenomenon of incalculable importance for the development of European comic narrative from classical antiquity onwards. He speaks of the 'determining influence of carnival' on literature (p. 122), and uses the term 'carnival' to describe particular features that the literary 'genres of the serio-comical' and actual festival forms have in common; as he sees it, the various kinds of comic writing which translate and continue the carnival tradition are 'saturated with a specific carnival sense of the world' (p. 107). For Bakhtin, carnival is a manifestation of 'folk laughter' and 'folk humour'; it embodies a popular, folk based culture which is defined by its irreverent antipathy to the official and hierarchical structures of everyday, noncarnival life. Bakhtin claims that in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance a 'boundless world of humorous forms and manifestations opposed the official and serious tone of medieval ecclesiastical and feudal culture'; 4 he characterizes carnival as 'the people's second life, organized on the basis of laughter' (p. 8), insisting that the laughter which gave form to carnival rituals freed them 'completely from all religious and ecclesiastical dogmatism' (p. 7). Carnival laughter is for Bakhtin above all an assertion of freedom; its function is to bring about a 'temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order' (p. 10). Bakhtin argues that the 'laws, prohibitions and restrictions that determine the structure and order of ordinary, that is noncarnival, life are suspended during carnival'; and he contends 1 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. by Hélène Iswolsky