Showing papers by "Linda Hutcheon published in 1978"

Ironie et Parodie : Stratégie et Structure

Abstract: L'ironie et la parodie en tant qu'actions qui suivent des "strategies" (K. Burke) destinees a permettre au lecteur d'interpreter et d'evaluer. La coincidence de l'interpretation du lecteur et de l'intentionnalite de l'auteur fondent l'identite structurelle du texte (comme parodie). Satire et parodie. La p. moderne peut etre consideree comme une forme litteraire autonome (v. les formalistes russes). Elle pourrait etre le signe qu'une forme ou qu'une convention est en train de devenir usee.

Parody Without Ridicule: Observations on Modern Literary Parody

Abstract: Modern experimental novelists or metafiction writers as they are now called have many ways of pointing out that their creations are essentially artifices made of words and not stories copying or recording any other form of 'reality.' Perhaps a narrator will explicitly inform the reader of the ontological status of the text he is reading; perhaps an internal mirror or mise en abyme will be the sign." Often, however, the 'literariness' of the work is signalled by the presence of parody: in the background of the author's work will stand another text, against which the new creation will be measured. It is not that one text fares better or worse than the other; it is the fact that they differ that the act of parody dramatizes. John Fowles, for instance, in The French Lieutenant's Woman, juxtaposes the conventions of the Victorian and the modern novel. The cultural and theological assumptions of both ages are compared through the medium of formal literary parody. A similar phenomenon of difference is found in such novels as Grendel, in which John Gardner reworked the backgrounded Beowulf, and The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch's modern rehandling of Hamlet. Thomas Mann, heir to the 'Romantic irony' of the last century, presents, in Doktor Faustus, a kind of parody which informs both the structure and the thematic content of his work as a whole. What is worth notice in all these examples is that while a text (or perhaps, more generally, a set of conventions) is clearly being drawn upon and parodied, it is in some senses a rather new and even strange form of parody. In these works there is irony but little mockery; there is critical distance but little ridicule of the texts backgrounded. In fact there is considerable respect demonstrated for them. This fact perhaps recalls T.S. Eliot's 'fragments shored against his ruins,' the literary and linguistic comparisons of past and present that imply, as well, moral evaluations in 'The Waste Land.' Yet if this is parody, it is somewhat different from the traditional concept of a ridiculing, belittling literary mode. It does, however, recall very precisely the etymological origins of the word. The Greek parodia or means a 'counter-song.' The 'counter' or 'against' suggests a concept of comparison or, better, of contrast inherent

Atwood and Laurence: Poet and Novelist

Abstract: Poets who write novels have a different hermeneutic relationship to both their readers and their narrative structures than do most novelists. Margaret Atwood's The Edible Woman and Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel are examples of this phenomenon.