|
Jessie Kuei-yi Chu
Argument: Postmodernist parody is a value-problematizing,
de-naturalizing form of acknowledging the
history (and through irony, the politics) of representation.
(94)
I. Parodic postmodern representation
A. Definition of postmodern parody: Parody-often called
ironic quotation, pastiche, appropriation, or intertextuality-is
usually considered central to postmodernism, both by its detractors and
its defenders. (93)
B. According to her argument, Hutcheon disapproves Jameson's
idea of pastiche which is equivalent to empty parody. The counter
example is Salman Rushdie's works. (94)
C. The function of parody
1. Postmodern parody is not ahistorical or de-historicizing
but signals how present representations come from past ones and what
ideological consequences derive from both continuity and difference. (93)
Postmodern parody does not disregard the context of the past
representations but uses irony to acknowledge the fact that we are inevitably
separated from the past. (94)
2. Parody also contests our humanist assumptions about artistic
originality and uniqueness and our capitalist notions of ownership
and property. (93) Through the process of reproduction, parody works to
foreground the politics of representation. (94)
3. In terms of historiographic metafiction, postmodern parody
is a kind of contesting revision or rereading of the past that both confirms
and subverts the power of the representations of history. (95)
4. Parody of the past of art is not nostalgic; it is always critical
and ironic. (93) Postmodern parody is both deconstructively critical and
constructively creative, paradoxically making us aware of both the limits
and the powers of representation-in any medium. (98)
D. The function of irony: Irony makes these intertextual references
into something more than simply academic play or some infinite regress
into textuality: what is called to our attention is the entire representational
process-in a wide range of forms and modes of production-and the impossibility
of finding any totalizing model to resolve the resulting postmodern contradiction.
(95)
II. Double-coded politics
A. As form of ironic representation, parody is doubly
coded in political terms: it both legitimizes and subverts that which it
parodies. (101)
B. Parody can be used as a self-reflexive technique that points
to art as art, but also to art as inescapably bound to its aesthetic and
even social past. Its ironic reprise also offers an internalized sign of
a certain self-consciousness about out culture's means of ideological legitimation.
(101)
C. Postmodern parodic strategies are often used by feminist artists
to point to the history and historical power of those cultural representations,
while ironically contextualizing both in such a way as to deconstruct them.
(102)
D. The politics of representation and the representation of politics
frequently go hand in hand in parodic postmodern historiographic metafiction.
Parody becomes a way of ironically revisiting the past-of both art and
history, in a novel like Salman Rushdie's Midnight Children. (103-4)
III. Postmodern film
A. Compared with Modernism, postmodernist is less radical.
Postmodernism is more willfully compromised more ideologically ambivalent
or contradictory. (107)
B. The characteristics of postmodern film
1. Self-consciously intransitive representation simultaneously
destablizes and inscribes the dominant ideology through its interpellation
of the spectator as subject in and of ideology. Hutcheon argues that the
question of ideology's relation to subjectivity is central to postmodernism.
(108)
2. Showing the formation process not just of subjectivity but
also narrativity and visual representation has become a staple of metacinema
today. (110)
3. The exploitation is done in the name of contesting the values
and beliefs upon which that wholeness is constructed-with the emphasis
on the act of construction-through representation. (110)
C. Woody Allen's film as the representation of postmodern cinema
1. The critique from withiin the institution and history
of film production is part of what is postmodern about Allen's work: its
insider-outsider doubled position. (109)
2. Woody Allen's Stardust Memories parodies Fellini's modernist
8 1/2. (107)
3. The parody and metacinematic play in The Purple Rose of Cairo
(109)
IV. Conclusion
Hutcheon doesn't approve of Jameson's assertion of postmodern
parody and nostalgia are merely narcissistic symptom which laments a loss
of a sense of history in today's art. (113) But she considers parody and
nostalgia are double-voiced irony (114) or double encoding (117) to question
and to challenge the dominant ideology and then to construct the present
(history) through representation.
Hucheon, Linda. "The Politics of Parody." The Politics of
Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1989.
93-117.
|