Examines the historical development of parody in order to examine its place, purpose and practice in the postmodern world of contemporary artforms.

Linda Hutcheon, University Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, was the University of Konstanz’s choice to give the prestigious Wolfgang Iser lecture in September 2013, which simultaneously opened that year’s annual convention of the German Anglistenverband (organized by Silvia Mergenthal and Reingard M. Nischik). Within this framework, Linda Hutcheon spoke to me about the development of various strands of thought in her impressive body of work—encompassing nine monographs, several collaborative books, and literally hundreds of articles and book chapters. We discussed the importance of crossing borders between disciplines, media, and nations, as well as of positioning oneself as a reader and critic. Other topics included her own intellectual background in comparative literature, in Canadian Studies, and in her more recent interdisciplinary projects on opera; recent developments in and since postmodernism; and the interconnections within her work on various...

A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms

“Intellectually Promiscuous”: An Interview with Linda Hutcheon (Konstanz, September 19, 2013)

In postmodernist fiction and new journalism, parody is used to combat the manipulation of classical literary and journalistic genres, based on objectivism as a commonplace, which usually impose an unequivocal vision of facts preventing any kind of dissidence. This shrewd control of language, revealed in clich use, also characterizes political discourse. Parody has been studied in Quim Monzo's fiction and non-fiction, but not in his radio and television shows. The aim of this article is to examine parody in the radio show Articles que no farem/Articles we won't write (2005-2006), where Monzo imitates the trite style of archetypal columnists issuing banal opinions on society, culture and politics. Rather than express original ideas, they merely strengthen mainstream ideas using commonplaces. Monzo's parody mainly operates through the manipulation of individuals and their column titles; he also uses humoristic devices such as paronomasia and comparison. As a complement to previous research into Monzo's journalism, it will help us understand his conception of columns and of the mainstream ideas he humorously censures, particularly political correctness.

Zombie language: The parody of newspaper columns in Quim Monzó's radio commentaries

ions of avant-garde practice on one hand, and the arrogant claims to objective truth made by documentary on the other If genocide seems to demand the nonmimetic, either by avoiding the graphic representation of atrocities or by underlining its impact on a collective of people above all else, Balazs’ theory here corresponds with synecdoche in its insistence that such events be filtered through the consciousness of a diegetic individual Such defences of Spielberg very much echo those qualified defences of Chaplin, Mickey Mouse, and other Hollywood entertainment figures discussed in previous chapters by such writers as Benjamin and Kracauer, where a sentimental mode of address ironically underscores the sad facts of modern oppression and hegemony In Spielberg’s films, the articulation and foregrounding of hopeful, idealized outcomes, such as the reform and remorse of the central male protagonist, provide poignant and instructive counterpoint to instances of historical trauma against which they occur, where moral subjectivity continues to be fraught with contradiction and violence, yet remains an ideal nevertheless The film concords with Steve Neale’s arguments 48 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Subject Positions, Speaking Positions: From Holocaust, Our Hitler, and Heimat to Shoah and Schindler's List’, in Vivian Sobchack (ed), The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Public Event, London: Routledge, 1996, p 178 259 concerning melodrama’s invocation of the ‘too late’, where displays of humanity and sentiment (often maternal sacrifice in the ‘Woman’s Film’) partially resolve a local or familial problem but fail to remedy the larger conditions that produced them and necessitate such acts In such respects, the film’s central relationship between Schindler and the concentration camp commandante Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), underscored as a kind of alter-ego to Schindler, mitigates charges concerning the film’s unalloyed optimism Demonstrating not only that for every Schindler that took the risk of disobeying Nazism, there were many others that did not, Goeth’s crimes in particular testify to the pedagogical problems of Schindler’s exemplary actions One of the film’s most interesting scenes shows Schindler’s attempts at inspiring compassion in Goeth’s treatment of the Jews in his camp By suggesting to Goeth that the latter’s feelings of power could be enhanced rather than diminished by ‘pardoning’ the life of camp victims rather than by murdering them, Schindler tests a key premise of ‘moral sentiment’ theory that foregrounds the potential of compassion for moral change By doing so, the test not only foregrounds the film’s moral pedagogy as an overriding philosophical concern, but also crucially serves as a rebuttal to those who condemn the film on the grounds of distorted optimism, for it is a test that resolutely fails Once Goeth attempts to pardon a Jewish boy who has failed to clean grime off his bath (‘Go ahead, go on, leave I pardon you’), he kills the boy anyway as he leaves the commandante’s house, finding the rewards of empathy inferior to those of murder Owing in no small way to the terms upon which it is formulated, whereby power is still invested in the one who ‘pardons’, which is in turn commended by Schindler as a 49 See Steve Neale, ‘Melodrama and Tears,’ Screen, Vol 27, No 66 (1986), pp 6-22 260 pleasure of virtuous power rather than any kind of categorical imperative, Goeth returns to murder within minutes Remorse and compassion are shown as such to be far from ‘innate’ to the human soul, which is just as likely to be invested in sadism during times of war and racial persecution The film’s foregrounding of Schindler as a man who ultimately refused to follow orders becomes radically more condemnatory of those that didn’t (and a culture that succumbed to totalitarianism) than the most graphic or factually accurate representation of Nazism If the final farewell scene seems a cloyingly sentimental falsification of a pragmatic and self-interested Nazi up to that point, its point is as much to underline the tragedy of Schindler’s exceptionality as to present him as a hope for mankind Just as Chaplin’s tramp ultimately represented the same kind of idealized figure that worked against the grain of history, history and its failures nevertheless remain signified as much as effaced by them In both instances, such excessively desired presences serve to signify mankind’s ‘too late’s

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The Concept of Sentimentality in Critical Approaches to Film and its Cultural Antecedents

Tras la publicacion de Como hacer cosas con palabras , de John L. Austin, se le han atribuido al lenguaje potencias que van mucho mas alla de la representacion y que podrian condensarse bajo el concepto de performatividad, una caracteristica del lenguaje referida a su capacidad de hacer cosas o producir realidades. Las implicaciones de esta comprension han superado el campo en que este termino surgio ―la filosofia del lenguaje― y en las decadas siguientes fueron y han seguido siendo exploradas por las mas variadas aproximaciones teoricas, desde la retorica y los estudios literarios hasta los estudios culturales, poscoloniales, de la raza y del genero. Esta ampliacion del espectro de la performatividad no solo ha conducido a una redefinicion del concepto acorde a los problemas especificos de cada campo, sino que tambien ha desencadenado debates epistemologicos. La consideracion de los multiples sentidos en que se dice que algo es “performativo” ha enfatizado los limites y las tensiones entre formas de teorizar que podrian ser clasificadas, gruesamente, en dos grupos: por un lado, aquellas que se ocupan de las dimensiones pragmaticas del lenguaje y, por otro lado, aquellas que se enfocan en el estudio de las normas sociales corporalizadas, que han vinculado el concepto de performatividad al de performance. En este articulo me propongo explorar las tensiones que han constituido este concepto para abogar por una comprension que en lugar de crear barreras entre campos del saber, abra la posibilidad de una teoria mas compleja y transdisciplinaria de la performatividad. Palabras clave: actos de habla, performatividad, iterabilidad, gesto, discurso Since the publication of John L. Austin’s How To Do Things With Words , forces have been attributed to language that go far beyond representation, and that could be summarized under the concept of performativity: a feature of language to describe its capacity to do things or produce realities. The implications of this understanding have surpassed the field in which the concept emerged—philosophy of language—and in recent decades there have been studies from various theoretical approaches, from rhetoric and literary studies to cultural, postcolonial, racial, and gender studies. This widening of the performativity scope has not only led to the concept’s redefinition according to the specific problems of each field, but it has also triggered epistemological debates. The consideration of the multiple ways in which something is said to be “performative” has stressed the borders and tensions between theorizing methods that can be classified into two main groups: on one hand, those that deal with the pragmatic dimensions of language, and, on the other hand, those that focus on the study of social and cultural embodied norms, that have closely linked the concept of performativity to that of performance. The purpose of this article is to explore the constitutive tensions of this concept, to put forward an understanding that, instead of creating walls between fields, it has the opens up the possibility of a more complex, transdisciplinary theory of performativity. Keywords: speech acts, performativity, iterability, gesture, discourse

A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms

Citations

“Intellectually Promiscuous”: An Interview with Linda Hutcheon (Konstanz, September 19, 2013)

Zombie language: The parody of newspaper columns in Quim Monzó's radio commentaries

The Concept of Sentimentality in Critical Approaches to Film and its Cultural Antecedents

Entre el discurso y el performance: sobre el concepto de performatividad y sus transformaciones

Perpetual displacement as a creative and critical strategy of inquiry into sites of meaning

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