Pitannâ Lìteraturoznavstva (Nov 2017)
Parody as a Phenomenon of Literary Criticism
Abstract
The article elucidates the properties of a parody as not only an art work, but also as a literary-critical study. There is shown that the parody, according to the creative invention of its author, has the purpose to expose and then to deride the certain disadvantages of on original poetic text; however, in closer reading, it seems to maintain a critical paradigm. First of all, this paradigm reveals all of the noticed flaws as the remedy to make “the creative prophylactics” for a future poet; second, it helps a reader to comprehend as well the positive features of a parodied text (particularly, in reading an original), and also to imagine the image of an author (of either the original or the parody) opened to further interpretations. The subjects of studies in this article are Ukrainian literary parodies published throughout the 20th – the beginning of the 21st centuries (authors – Ostap Vyshnia, V. Yaremenko, Yu. Ivakin, A. Bortnyak, I. Havryliuk); there are also analyzed several poetic works that are not parodies a priori, but tend to deride some realia of the authors’ everyday life. There was shown that the efficiency of literary criticism could be defined by not only what the critic said, but also how one did it. Therefore, elucidation of a parody seems to be impossible without studying its generic, stylistic, imagery and compositional characteristics of a potential parody object (original verse work), including the specifications of development of a poet’s individual style within parodying any kind of literary works.
