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

This dissertation project begins with a coincidence and a question. The coincidence is the fact that the three greatest writers of the Spanish fin de siglo wrote historical narratives on the same event (the second Carlist war of 18721876). Moreover, these novels were written in the short time span between 1897, when Unamuno published his first novel, Paz en la guerra, and 1909, when Valle-Inclán finished his trilogy of La guerra carlista and Pío Baroja’s Zalacaín el aventurero appeared in bookstores. Surprisingly, each delved into a past confrontation which, at first sight, might seem completely alien to the tensions and dynamics of the authors’ own time. The question, obviously enough, is why. My thesis contends that Unamuno, Valle-Inclán, and Baroja’s novels on the second Carlist war articulate a critique of their contemporary society through an interpretation of this historical event. This conflict meant for them the problematization of the tensions between tradition and modernity that also plagued them at the turn of the century. In addition, their view on this historical time was mediated by an intense feeling of failure. Unamuno, Valle-Inclán, and Baroja revisited Carlism because this movement had a metonymical relationship with the failure of the Liberal revolution of 1868 and, consequently, with the failure of Spanish modernity itself. Furthermore, their take on the historical novel was mediated by the parodic use of the epic, thus reinforcing the notion of failure at a structural level. Through the subversion of the epic, these writers related to a past which was constantly mythified by the official historical and political discourse.

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

The modernist generation of 1898: failures of modernity in the historical imagination of unamuno, valle-inclan, and baroja

Japanese manga artist est em (esu to emu) is notable for blurring genre boundaries and subverting established conventions in various publications since her debut in 2006. Two of her works, Hatarake, kentaurosu! (‘Work, Centaur!’) and equus, focus exclusively on male centaurs in homosocial settings. Classifi ed as shōjo (girls’) manga and BL (‘boys’ love’) manga respectively, these two works allow female readers to enjoy the pleasures of homoerotic subtexts and intertextual parody. Th is paper examines how conventions of sexuality and gender, particularly hegemonic masculinity and heterosexuality, are constructed/deconstructed in est em’s centaur manga using the framework of intertextuality, with particular emphasis on parody, pleasure and play. By placing centaurs in realistic, everyday settings, these works present a critique of Japan’s contemporary salaryman culture, while also highlighting issues of alienation and otherness that both female readers and gay men face in their daily lives.

/pdf/a-centaur-in-salaryman-s-clothing-parody-and-play-in-est-em-4ao0g7pag5.pdf

A Centaur in Salaryman's Clothing: Parody and Play in est em's Centaur Manga

As is well known in the field of Shakespearean adaptation studies, Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost was not generally well received by journalistic reviewers on its release in 2000, nor, until relatively recently, by academic critics. 1 While academic writers have considered the film from a number of angles, common threads in approaches to the film have been negative assessments of the film’s use of the conventions of the Hollywood musical film of the 1930s, in particular musico-dramatic integration, and of the performance competence of the cast. 2 Although the film is not without its faults, I suggest that much of the negative criticism of Love’s Labour’s Lost relates both to an assumption that the film is a more or less straightforward attempt to recreate the Hollywood film musical, and to a mode of reception that approaches the film as a consistently readable text—or that at least assumes that the film presents itself as such, even as it ultimately fails. In the first part of this article I argue instead that the film is more productively approached in terms of pasticcio and pastiche rather than recreation or revival; the manifold discontinuities of its pasticcio texture and its approach to musico-dramatic integration set it up as an interrogative text which draws viewers into conversation with it, rather than as a consistently readable text containing fixed and identifiable meanings. 3 In the second part of the article, I suggest that one of the potential “conversations” the film invites is an interrogation of the concept of escapism, an aspect I explore through a hermeneutic approach to performance competence within the film. Approached in this way, the film’s negotiation of its discontinuities and the performance skills of its actors might be seen not as evidence of aesthetic failure but as an overlooked strength, responding to Shakespeare’s text on a number of levels and adding dramatic meaning and cohesiveness to the adaptation.

Interrogating escapism: rethinking Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost

Reading utopian narratives in a dystopian time

https://cdr.lib.unc.edu/downloads/9593tv60r

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

Citations

The modernist generation of 1898: failures of modernity in the historical imagination of unamuno, valle-inclan, and baroja

A Centaur in Salaryman's Clothing: Parody and Play in est em's Centaur Manga

Interrogating escapism: rethinking Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost

Reading utopian narratives in a dystopian time

Parody as criticism: the literary life of Eulalia Meinau

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