Parody & Co

In speaking of parody, I venture into an area that has been theoretically mapped by Doug Muecke, Wayne C. Booth, Margaret A. Rose, Linda Hutcheon and countless others, since Bakhtin. While their exercises in taxonomy are of particular interest to literary theorists, they may seem too arcane to be worth the effort to close attention by poets for whom parody and satire have porous boundaries. Parody takes many forms, and has many relatives. A minefield of formal distinctions exists between parody and burlesque, and between both of these and travesty. It is not my intention to dwell on the debated territory belonging to persiflage (raillery or light banter), 'pekoral' (unwitting parodies, by inept writers, of other styles) and plagiarism, and I will simply signal my awareness that pastiche and hoax constitute further adventure playgrounds for the critically imprecise. (Margaret Rose's treatise, 'Parody//Meta-Fiction' is a fruitful source of fine distinctions: in what follows, I draw sometimes on her insights.) Let me start with an unexceptional claim. Parody is imitation; 'parodia' is imitative song; a 'parodos' is a singer who imitates.In Greek comic plays, the chorus (and other characters) moved to the front of the stage to send up, for the audience's delectation, the actions and words of the actors behind them. The audience itself could be the subject of parody.