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

This chapter offers an overview of the concepts of ideology, parody, and postmodernism, engaging with the theories of important critics in these areas. The chapter delves into two major issues regarding the relationship between parody and ideology. First, it examines whether postmodern parody is a mere deconstruction of previous ideologies, or whether, in its process of deconstruction, a new ideology created. It also examines how postmodern parody resolves the conflict between its insistence on epistemological relativism and the enthronement of its own new ideological discourse. Second, the chapter considers whether postmodern parody is guilty of a deconstruction totally divorced from the world outside the text, or whether postmodern parody in fact possesses an ethico-political dimension that engages morally with reality outside itself.

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

Parody and Ideology

Diaries imply true confessions, and readers wish to believe Daisy Flett’s life story in Carol Shields’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Stone Diaries (1994), but her layered narration, alternating first- and third-person narrative, proves problematic. “Death,” the final chapter, is particularly puzzling, as third-person accounts of Daisy’s demise are punctuated by her comments, such as, “I’m still in here” (320). But how does a first-person narrator relate her own death? The secret to Daisy’s death narrative, as David Williams observes, is the correspondence between Shields’s postmodernist gem, The Stone Diaries, and Laurence’s modernist masterpiece, The Stone Angel (1964), published three decades earlier, as Shields’s title clearly references Laurence’s. Two decades after Williams’s insightful essay, we can extend the parallels (and delineate the differences) between the two—and explore their implications. Such intertextual resonance illustrates Shields challenging the borders between fiction an...

Written in Stone: subverting the authoritative (auto)biographical voice—Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel

Dysfunctional friendship has become an ethical and political dilemma in postmodernity. In the dysfunctional nature of friendship, strangeness is a crucial factor. This strangeness is the recognition of alterity and the lack of relationship of otherness to the self. In this regard, two survivors of the Holocaust offer cogent commentaries. Emmanuel Levinas describes ethics as the face-to-face response toward an other (1986) while politics survives within Hannah Arendt's insight that "every single person needs to be reconciled to a world into which [s]he was born a stranger and in which, to the extent of his distinct uniqueness, [s]he always remains a stranger" (Essays 308). Arendt's experience after 1933 was that "an abyss had opened" to reveal "the disloyalty of friends" (14). Hence, the role of friendship had to be revaluated in the face of the catastrophe of the Holocaust. Levinas was and continues to be a major voice in this reevaluation of friendship since the Holocaust. With the inspiration from his ethic al writings, we can portray friendship as a response to the call of the other in a deliberate attempt to bridge the void between the self and the other. Despite these voices, some contemporary theorists maintain that friendship is still problematic in postmodernity. Jacques Derrida, who himself is strongly influenced by Levinas ("Adieu"), submits a volume often essays (Politics) telling us about the cogency of Montaigne's sixteenth-century outcry: "Oh my friends, there is no friend." Meanwhile, though Maurice Blanchot rhapsodizes about his ethical "friendship" with Levinas (Writing; Friendship), his political flirtations with Fascism during the 1930s (Bident) are problematic. Because dysfunctional friendship is becoming more and more of a pattern in postmodernity, we need more examples of exceptional friendship that can be unique and that can make the friend functional. The intersection of Arendt's and Thomas Mann's works provides opportunities to situate friendship in this manner. On the one hand, Arendt was a perceptive political theorist whose essays have been generally concerned with the loss of human freedom in political governance. She prefers the political writings of Plato to Aristotle and sees the crucial dilemma as placing at center stage "the typically Socratic question What is friendship?" (Life 101). Of course, the problem is how to answer the question. She often positioned her discussions of friendship as ethical comfort within the conflicts of a politically charged milieu. For this reason, Arendt's writings have become a lively subject of discussion in France. From her adaptation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's role of compassion as a moral and political principle, Arendt is portrayed by one of her astute French translators, Sylvie Courtine-Denamy, as "asking questions about the place of ethics and generosity in politics" (241). [1] Since Aristotle, who claimed in his Nicomacheon Ethics that "the science for the good of man is politics" (300), the relative positioning of ethics and politics has been debated. But this positioning of friendship as the crucial ethical problem for politics is also the unsaid problem in the writings of Thomas Mann, Arendt's fellow native German who like her came to the United States in the aftermath of the Nazi debacle. Both Arendt and Mann used their writings as arenas in which to dramatize the struggle for the role of ethics after their departure from their homeland in the face of great political evil. Both had written prior to their emigration from Germany. But the departure from their homeland made them portray friendship differently in their writings. While Arendt was primarily a political theorist who used the principles of ethics and philosophy to engage her contemporaries in debates about human governance, Mann portrayed the great struggle between aesthetics and ethics and seemed to ignore the centrality of the political struggles o f his characters to obtain control over their lives. …

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/style.34.3.444

An Ethical Model in a Postmodern Faust: The Daemonic Parody of the Politics of Friendship in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus

What to Make of the New Icons

In September 2005, the New-York based editing assistant Robert Ryang had recently participated in an editing competition run by the Association of Independent Creative Editors. The annual Trailer Park Competition, first held in 2001, had the objective to re-edit a well-known movie into a trailer, advertising the same film, but with a change in genre. Ryang chose to transform Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic The Shining (1980) into the family-friendly comedy “Shining” and won the first prize, a new Avid Editing Suite and a little trophy, shaped like a travel trailer.

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

Citations

Parody and Ideology

Written in Stone: subverting the authoritative (auto)biographical voice—Carol Shields’s The Stone Diaries and Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel

An Ethical Model in a Postmodern Faust: The Daemonic Parody of the Politics of Friendship in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus

What to Make of the New Icons

You’ll Never See This on the Silver Screen: The Film Trailer as a Template for the Appropriation and Transformation of Hollywood Movies

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