Content area
Full text
Parody: The Art that Plays with Art. Robert Chambers. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Pp. xvi + 266. $79.95 (cloth).
Parody, Robert Chambers reminds us in this approachable, eccentric, self-deprecating, and mildly megalomaniac book, is one of the few literary terms that come down to us from ancient Greece, where it means something like "beside-or-against song" (3). Certainly Chambers has taken the licence of its antiquity to extend the scope of parody way beyond what most people have taken it to mean up to this point. It is not to be confined to the minor and disreputable genre beloved of nineteenth-century littérateurs and the New Statesman/New Yorker. This is because it is not to be confined to a genre at all, since it is in fact a pervasive technique characteristic of all literary periods, possibly even of all language use, which works to combine or play off one convention or set of conventions against another. Its scope is therefore very wide indeed, encompassing children's mimicry, all of the traditionally designated parodic genres (so: mock-epic, comic epic, burlesque, travesty, spoof, lampoon and hoax - though it's not itself a genre), word-play and puns, much of the history of the novel, skaz, film adaptations, imitations, Dada, self-reflexive art, and what we know as modernism and postmodernism. Parody is characteristically multistable, that is, it permits or encourages several perspectives simultaneously, thus challenging the linearity of Western thought in favour of the Yin and Yang of Daoism; it is the principal means by which genres get exploded and new genres develop; and its pervasiveness has only been overlooked by criticism since the Romantics because of extraordinary critical myopia (not to say stupidity). Chambers undertakes to remedy this myopia, more perhaps...