Анализ семантических и стилистических особенностей пародию по мотивам произведений

CONTENTS

 

 

 

 

 

INTRODUCTION

Despite the significant number of studies focused on parody, it is still not included in any of the classifications of the expressive means of the English language. That is why the general research of this topic is important, central, interesting, problematic and relevant in some way.

The term paper is devoted to the problem of identification of stylistic and semantic functions of parody as argumentative trope in poetic discourse. Parody was investigated by many researches, for example S. Dentith, M.L. Pratt and L. Hutcheon. The topic itself is very interesting for further research and has a considerable practical value.

The main idea of research is to define the meaning and stylistic role of the parody, the purpose of using it, the results, effects on readers and society, comprehension, and its importance as a stylistic device.

The rationale of the problem is that parody is still not included in any of the classifications of the expressive means of the English language. But notwithstanding the fact that parody is one of the oldest figures speech of art and it was neglected and considered to be unpoetic for a long time it still used in literature, journalism as an important stylistic device. Parody - a favorite subject of many modern writers, singers and comics. And problematique of this topic can be seen and analysed from different points of view.

The main aims of research are considered through investigation of the theoretical material and practical analysis of semantic and stylistic peculiarities of  parody based on works of Margaret A. Rose and using verses of Lewis Carroll and works of Jonathan Swift as for example.

The main objectives of the research:

1. to define linguo-stylistic status of parody as argumentative trope in the              system of expressive means and stylistic devices of the English language;

2. to define major characteristics of the poetic discourse;

3. to define functions of parody in poetic discourse;

4. to illustrate the use of parody in the poetic discourse.

The object of investigation is parody as an argumentative trope and main stylistic functions of the parody in the poetic discourse.

The subject of investigation is defining distinctive linguosemiotic and linguo-stylistic characteristics and functions of parody as argumentative trope.

The data sources of investigation are verses of Lewis Carroll and works of Jonathan Swift.

The methods of investigation are as follows: interpretational-textual, structural-semantic, linguo-cognitive and linguo-semiotic analysis.

The practical importance of investigation is the possibility to use

gained knowledge and experience in translation and ability to analyze and interpret parody in the various types of literary works without miscomprehension of the text.

The structure of the paper has following parts: introduction, 2 chapters, conclusion, the list of the reference sources, list of data sources and summary.

The introduction to this work is based on the choice of this topic, the rationale of the aim and specific problems.

The first chapter consists of three parts and describes linguo-stylistic status of parody in the system of expressive means and stylistic devices of the English language.

The second chapter, consists of two parts, and describes the major characteristics of poetic discourse and the main stylistic functions in it.

The conclusion generalizes all the results of the work and forms its primary conclusions.

 

 

 

CHAPTER 1

                         LINGUO-STYLISTIC STATUS OF PARODY

 

1.1. Parody in the system of stylistic devices and expressive means of the English language

       Language is a means of communication by symbolical sounds. The meaning of these symbols is imposed by the use of stylistic devices which further glorify and clarify them. Effective authors always have always used stylistic devices and accommodative language to liven up their works. Stylistic devices are the tools by which authors create meaning through language, and by which readers get understanding of literary works. Stylistic devices are fundamental in teaching language. Authors use a variety of means to create an emotional mood, an attitude, a setting, and characterization in their works. In other words, in a literary work, the techniques which the writer are important as well as what is going on in the story. To glorify their works authors often use different kinds of literary tropes.

A literary trope is the usage of figurative language in literature, or a figure of speech in which words are used in a sense different from their literal meaning. The term trope derives from the Greek τρόπος (tropos), "turn, direction, way". Rhetoricians have closely analyzed the great variety of "turns and twists" used in poetry and literature and have provided an extensive list of precise labels for these poetic devices. Some examples include:

• metonymy
• irony
• parody
• oxymoron
• hyperbole
• litotes
• antithesis
• synecdoche

Classification of lexical stylistic devices

There are 3 groups:

1. The interaction of different types of lexical meaning.

 a) dictionary and contextual (metaphor, metonymy, irony);

 b) primary and derivative (zeugma and pun);

 c) logical and emotive (epithet, oxymoron);

 d) logical and nominative (autonomasia);

2. Intensification of a feature (simile, hyperbole, periphrasis);

 3. Peculiar use of set expressions (cliches, proverbs, epigram, quotations)

In this work, one of these poetic devices will be examined throughout the verse of Lewis Carroll and works of Jonathan Swift , namely parody.

A parody also called send-up, spoof, pastiche or lampoon, in current use, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation. As the literary theorist Linda Hutcheon puts it, "parody … is imitation, not always at the expense of the parodied text." Another critic, Simon Dentith, defines parody as "any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice."

[31, 9] Parody may be found in art or culture, including literature, music. The writer and critic John Gross observes in his Oxford Book of Parodies, that parody seems to flourish on territory somewhere between pastiche ("a composition in another artist's manner, without satirical intent") and burlesque (which "fools around with the material of high literature and adapts it to low ends") According to Aristotle (Poetics, ii. 5), Hegemon of Thasos was the inventor of a kind of parody; by slightly altering the wording in well-known poems he transformed the sublime into the ridiculous. In ancient Greek literature, a parodia was a narrative poem imitating the style and prosody of epics "but treating light, satirical or mock-heroic subjects" [31, 10] Indeed, the apparent Greek roots of the word are para- (which can mean beside, counter, or against) and -ode (song, as in an ode). Thus, the original Greek word parodia has sometimes been taken to mean counter-song, an imitation that is set against the original. The Oxford English Dictionary, for example, defines parody as imitation "turned as to produce a ridiculous effect" [34, p 32]

  Roman writers explained parody as an imitation of one poet by another for humorous effect. In French Neoclassical literature, parody was also a type of poem where one work imitates the style of another for humorous effect. Ancient Greece made satyr plays which parodied tragic plays.  Parody is a frequent ingredient in satire and is often used to make social and political points. Examples include Swift's "A Modest Proposal", which satirized English neglect of Ireland by parodying emotionally disengaged political tracts; and, recently, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, which parody a news broadcast and a talk show to satirize political and social trends and events. Some events, such as a national tragedy, can be difficult to handle. Chet Clem, Editorial Manager of the news parody publication The Onion, told Wikinews in an interview the questions that are raised when addressing difficult topics:

    «I know the September 11 issue was an obviously very large challenge to approach. Do we even put out an issue? What is funny at this time in American history? Where are the jokes? Do people want jokes right now? Is the nation ready to laugh again? Who knows? There will always be some level of division in the back room. It’s also what keeps us on our toes».

[32].

  Parody is by no means necessarily satirical, and may sometimes be done with respect and appreciation of the subject involved, while not being a heedless sarcastic attack.

  Parody has also been used to facilitate dialogue between cultures or subcultures. Sociolinguist Mary Louise Pratt identifies parody as one of the "arts of the contact zone", through which marginalized or oppressed groups "selectively appropriate", or imitate and take over, aspects of more empowered cultures. [ 33, 91]

Shakespeare often uses a series of parodies to convey his meaning. In the social context of his era, an example can be seen in King Lear where the fool is introduced with his coxcomb to be a parody of the king.

 

1.2. Parody as argumentative trope

Argumentative discourse brings into relief the contours of its pragmatic aspect: dominant symbols, largely arbitrary, serve to make thought and conduct rational, being linked to human purpose and behavior. Symbols ‘come into existence by developing out of other signs, particularly of icons and from mixed signs partaking of the nature of icons and symbols’. They make semiosis exist in one multidimensional temporal world that exhibits the features of the state of affairs, as well as secures both referential and pragmatic consistency and coherence in speech. Thus texts of requires recourse to convention, can be classified as argumentative discourse – political, diplomatic, business, legal, commercial, military etc. They are ruled by the modalities of permission, prohibition, obligation and necessity. By the way, a vast bulk of religious, or sacred, texts and various formulas of sorcery, that have not been mentioned at all in any functional differentiation speech theory so far, as though they do not exist, rank first in this subdivision and finally acquire their typology. For their major communicative function is to bring home the dualistic vision of the world and to persuade the recipient of its being true. Argument here claims to acquire epistemic value.

  The argumentative trope, as every other, implies traditional modality of tropic substitution – semantic transfer, and in this respect it could classified as a figure of substitution. But the possibility of ambiguity here, being a permanent factor of change, lies in the simultaneous passing through the connotate channel of two different pragmatic meanings of strong evaluative and emotive colouring. We’d rather define this stereosemantic phenomenon as the splitting of the argumentative meaning into opposite functives being simultaneously realized: a radical transfer of properties of an object is based on both identity and difference associations. In other words, the semantic relationship here plays on both equivalence and contrast by the recourse to modalities of goodness and badness. Thus the argumentative trope can be defined as a figure of substitution that implies the recourse to a certain axiological code.

To illustrate this idea let me give an example of J. Thurber’s fable “The Little Girl and the Wolf”:

  “One afternoon a big wolf waited in a dark forest a little girl to come along carrying a basket of food to her grandmother. Finally a little girl did come along and she was carrying a basket food. ‘Are you carrying that basket to your grandmother?’ asked the wolf. The little girl said yes, she was. So the wolf asked her where her grandmother lived and the little girl told him and he disappeared in the wood.

  When the little girl opened the door of her grand-mother’s house she saw there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and nightgown on. She had approached no nearer than twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro- Goldwyn loin like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead.”

  Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be”.     [35, 42]

The text in view unexpectedly reveals unique semantic features of allusion, whose semantic typology seemed to be obscure so far. Obviously, associative culturological juxtaposition (a recourse to different axiological codes), that allusion ensures, happens to enforce an explicitly suggested aesthetically relevant argumentative message, that looks as a peculiar verdict to postmodern culture. Actually allusion is common in the mainstream postmodernist argumentative poetic text. It is of paramount importance in creating the collage semantic technique, one could observe, for instance, in the creative writing of Yu. Andrukhovich, in his “Exotic Birds and Plants” in particular:

ІЄРОНІМ БОШ XX

Наші святочні пориви – палкі та вознеслі,

Ніби й не нам волокти  цю планиду грузьку.

Далі, все далі від  нас рибалки і теслі,

Тільки предвічні сліди  на воді та піску.

 

Годі рибалити, браття,- глибини стемніли:

Риба з морів у  бляшанки тісні запливла.

Наші обійми схололи, обличчя змарніли

В холоді надто блискучих  будівель зі скла.

 

Між синтетичних ялинок шукаємо віху:

Як розпізнати майбутнє, о куле скляна?

Акумулятор для німба  – винахід віку,

На видноколі –  вогнетривка купина.

 

Щось ми згубили ( а може знайшли) на розпутті,

Тут, в епіцентрі іржавих дротів та епох.

З тихим благанням дивиться в  очі майбутні

Наш до ялинки підвішений крихітка-бог.

[36, 38].

 

In the text under consideration allusion creates polyphony that underlies aesthetically dominant pastiche – mild sad irony to mock at or to grieve about the postmodern civilization, so pervasively ruled by the black arts of the politician, the public-relations expert, the advertiser, the salesman and so forth. Misperceiving and misperceived, we are unable to regain the archaic ‘primitive’ insight into old good Christian-based humanitarian values we are becoming more and more irresponsibly alienated from, the collapse of the humanitarian ideals being the bane of our life.

Irony, parody, sarcasm, burlesque, travesty, satire make un group of argumentative tropes. It is amazing, but twofold and manifold application of any of these fundamental semantic patterns proves to lie at the heart of both nomination and signification, beginning with the linguistic sign to an infinite number of texts in verbal culture, archetypal syntactic morphologies being the only bridge to the actual world.

In terms of conclusion let us remind again that the logic of infinite regression of the semiotic universe in creating emergent systems of large-scale differences remains invariable. All thinking is performed in signs, as the Master semiotician put it, but there are no pure signs of any sort, and any classification of semiotic entities must take into account the fact that the feedback semantic technological principle is inherent in the architectonic of any semiotic entity, the discourse included.

Thus, following Peirce’s three-component semantic scheme, an attempt of further disclosure of the linguistic universe has been made. The semiotic typology of discourse, a new semantic classification of tropes being an intermediary presuppositional instantiation, is finally clarified. In the reconstruction of semiotic typology of the poetic text the linguosemiotoc description of previously vague nonsense verses and Russian ‘zaum’ poetry, linguostructuralist poetics failed to elucidate, is given with special attention  to the unique semantic features of allusion as a creating mechanism of the argumentative trope that did not revel itself  so far as a separate semiotic entity.

1.3 The main functions and characteristics of parody

Parody is quite often used as a means to encourage a change in a social, moral, or political process. It is used to criticize social defects without making the reader depressive. Sometimes it even makes people think about problems they would normally ignore completely. Parody is one of the oldest and most sophisticated forms of comedy and therefore it is immortal. As long as there are problems in the world, there will also be parody. Parody as a part of the literary studies was for a long time neglected. It was considered unpoetic.

Parody functions most effectively as a type of satire, mocking not only a specific piece of work, but the broader social trends that work embodies. In so doing, the parody expands its role to become an agent of social change. Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal," for instance, is on the surface a parody of dry, high-toned political treatises. But in a larger sense, it skewers the inhumanity behind such treatises and the ignorance of pain and suffering upon which their solutions often depend.

The main functions of parody:

• Parody reflects society
• Parody helps people to view others differently
• One of parody’s purpose is to reform or change society
• Parody brings out points generally applicable to everybody
• Where an individual is the parody  target, parody should not be

     libellious

• Parody helps people to work out the difference between folly

and vice

• Parody is particularly concerned with pointing out hypocrisy
• Parody has a lofty aim: to prompt the good to improve the world

The signals by which reader recognizes parody in the above Aristophanic play are to be found within the text or its performance. As a basic premise it will be maintained, that the prime distinguishing feature between the imitation (or the non-ironic, non-critical reproduction of the whole or a part of another literary work in a text) and the literary parody is the effect of comic discrepancy between the original work and its ‘imitation’. Types of discrepancy/ or the signals of parody in a text most frequently to be found by the reader can be broadly listed under the following categories:

1. Changes to the coherency of the text quoted

1. Semantic change

1. apparently meaningless, absurd change.
2. change meaningful  foe the reader’s world (often satiric)

2. Change in literal and metaphoric function of words.

3. Syntactic change ( which may affect the semantic level)
4. Changes in tense, persons or other sentence grammatical features.
5. Changes to the associations of the imitated text by the new context and other co-textual  ( and ‘ beyond the sentence’) changes
6. Changes sociolect, idiolect, or in other elements of the lexicon.

2. Direct statement

1. Comments on the parodied text or on the author of the parody.
2. Comments on the world of the reader.
3. Comments on the parody as the whole text.

3. Effect on the reader

1. Shock or humor from conflict with reader expectations about the text parodied.
2. Change effected in the world of the reader of the parodied text.

Discrepancy may thus be created within the text quoted and between the text and its new context. But the reader may also recognize the ironic use of quotation by finding a significant contrast between the familiar style of the author of the parody and his style in the parody in which he is writing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                                             

                                                CHAPTER 2