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

This article looks at how The Simpsons' representations of aging, considered ageist and stereotypical by some, can be viewed as a positive look at the elderly that attempts to subvert the same stereotypes that it seemingly employs. The Baby Boom cohort is now seen as an attractive economic group, and as they continue their journey through the life cycle, they are drawing increased attention. A current scholarship exists that investigates the ways that the ''aged'' are seen, catered to, advertised at, seemingly marginalized, and represented in the larger context of the mass media. Relying primarily on the theoretical musings of Frederic Jameson and Linda Hutcheon, the article constructs a bridge that places The Simpsons squarely within a postmodern aesthetic and, using this rubric, shows how the inherent political nature of parodic irony can help to create an inversion of meaning.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0714980800000441

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

"Old people are useless": Representations of Aging on The Simpsons

Nation, culture and family : identity in a Scottish/Australian popular song tradition

The twenty-first century musical is dominated by high-profile adaptations and the recycling of popular texts in a wider trend Graham Allen terms ‘cultural regurgitation’. From Wicked (2003) and Billy Elliot the Musical (2005) to Jersey Boys (2005) and The Book of Mormon (2011), the commercial musical stage is a prominent site of high-profile intertextuality in that it draws from ‘innumerable centres of culture’ to fuel an evening’s entertainment. Given the proliferation of such intertextuality, however, this trend has received little critical attention beyond the detailing of these musicals as ‘safe-bet’ entertainments which attract an audience through the recycling of familiar elements.
The primary aim of this thesis is therefore to fill an important gap within existing scholarship by investigating how intertextual references function and operate within contemporary musical theatre. In differentiating the various styles of intertextual reference evidenced within the form, this thesis argues that most twenty-first century musicals either adapt a specific text, capitalise on nostalgia, fashion a bricolage of references or metatheatricalise perceptions of musical theatre as an art form. In doing so, it put forwards the claim that musical theatre invites intertextuality as a diverse layering of textual elements in and of itself. Not only is musical theatre an inherently intertextual form, but it ultimately requires intertextuality to reflect the recycled nature of popular culture more broadly.

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Recycled culture: the significance of intertextuality in twenty-first century musical theatre

This dissertation explores the question of indigenous development and its literary representation through an investigation of depictions of growth in novels from the United States and Peru where boys mature, perhaps, into men. I find that texts with adolescent characters intimately connected to indigenous communities challenge western concepts of maturity and development as presented in the traditional Bildungsroman. Specifically, I read Jose Maria Arguedas’s Los rios profundos (1958) and Sherman Alexie’s Flight (2007) as parodies of the genre that call into question the allegory of a western civilizing mission with its lineal trajectory of growth in which the indigenous is relegated to an uncivilized time before modernity. I describe the protagonists of these novels as inconceivable saviors; inconceivable in that the West cannot imagine them, as indigenous, to be the saviors of the nation (i.e., its protectors and reproducers). They are border-thinkers who live in-between epistemological spaces and the stories of their lives serve as kinds of border-Bildungsromane, narratives of growth that arise in the blurred time/space of a border culture, or Bil(dung)sroman, stories of the abject or expelled. Arguedas’s and Alexie’s narratives confront the issue of race, a problem that allegories of the consolidation and development of the nation (e.g., Bildungsroman and foundational fictions) evade through magical means by turning the form into a fetish and presenting fetishized fetal origins that offer reassurances of legitimacy for the western narrative of modernity and the nation-state. That is, the traditional form acts like a talisman that magically disappears the fragmentation of coloniality by providing a history to hold on to, creating an origin that does not really exist. Instead of conforming to the model of the genre or rejecting it, Arguedas’s and Alexie’s texts yield to the power of the original form, appearing to tell the familiar story while carrying a subversive message. Their power derives from the uncertainty inherent in this mimesis. In this way, these novels encourage readers to question the maturation process as conceived and represented in the west and in western literature and to consider alternative paths and formations of self.

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Inconceivable saviors: indigeneity and childhood in U.S. and Andean literature

This project explores a case study in children's science culture: Horrible Science, a UK based series aimed at 7-11 year olds. Children, I believe, are one of science communication's most interesting audiences. They are both potential members and potential outsiders of the scientific community, and Horrible Science produces a liminar identity to meet these two markets. I apply a metaphor of pantomime to help describe Horrible Science, partly because of the series' approach to using fiction and its style of audience participation. It is also panto-science because it is presented as a carnivalesque show, exciting and fun, laughing at authority. Horrible Science invites us to snigger at science's heroes and explore the hidden underside of both nature and of scientific work. However, I believe that this, at least in part, is largely a matter of excusing a type of earnest reverence, delight and excitement for science that had become unfashionable by the end of the 20th century. I investigate Horrible Science as an interesting phenomenon in its own right, but also because I hope to develop ideas about the popularisation of science. Since the early 1990s, theories on popular science have tended to describe popular science as sitting (obstructively) between scientists and the rest of the world. Its public audience are defined as receivers; the scientists, the providers. However, recent work from historians of 19th century science have critiqued this view, instead positioning popular science within a `marketplace', full of empowered consumers choosing not only what cultural products to partake of, but who to trust and how far. I accept this emphasis on the marketplace, but with a less utopian view of consumer power which retains some of the scepticism of the 1990s analytical approaches. I suggest that Horrible Science aims to appeal to its readers by implying they can use a 'horrible' version of scientific knowledge to take up a position between the great and the good of the scientific community and an assumed, unenlightened othered public. Drawing on Bourdieu's ideas on symbolic `capitals' of culture, I conclude with a reading of popular science as a product through which interaction between and across cultural fields allows a range of actors to, at once, share social power, declare their own cultural status, and fall prey to the hierarchies of science in society.

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

Citations

"Old people are useless": Representations of Aging on The Simpsons

Nation, culture and family : identity in a Scottish/Australian popular song tradition

Recycled culture: the significance of intertextuality in twenty-first century musical theatre

Inconceivable saviors: indigeneity and childhood in U.S. and Andean literature

Science as pantomime : explorations in contemporary children's non-fiction books

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