Parody is most commonly applied as an effective tool in both postmodern and postcolonial fictions. Teimouri compares Fredric Jameson and Hutcheon's critiques of parody. According to Teimouri, Jameson holds a rather negative view towards parody, preferring the term pastiche instead of parody. The parodic practices, in Jameson's opinion, lack depth and history, which is also a fitting description for late capitalism.
On the other hand, Hutcheon credits parody’s political efficacy. Parody exercises its political agenda through ironizing, which allows parody a historical continuation and also peculiarity (Teimouri 4). Hutcheon’s view of parody is “broad” and “liberal,”
according to Brian Edwards, as Hutcheon liberates parody from the mere intent to
ridicule and emphasizes parody’s paradoxical nature to both imitate and subvert (66-68). My thesis will adopt Hutcheon’s point of view on parody—parody’s
reworking of another text embodies both deconstructing and reconstructing. While the contemporary view of parody oftentimes limits the scope to parody’s comic effect, Hutcheon’s theory of parody incorporates both parody’s aesthetic (irony) and political (resistance within authorial control) functions. In brief, what characterizes parody is its paradox and ambivalence, and its ability to revise and construct at the same time.
According to G. D. Kiremidjian, the fundamental principles of parody are expressed in three ways: firstly, it upsets the balance between its form and content;
secondly, it questions the relationship between its form and content; lastly, it imitates art to expose "something about its basic character" (233). It is the last point from which parody works the most effectively, and that is when parody exercises its most vitriolic critiques.
The metafictional feature of parody marks it a distinctively different form of criticism. Traditionally, parody disqualifies as art. Aristotle’s definition of art says the very function of art is to imitate life or mirror the nature (Kiremidjian 233). Unlike the kind of art Aristotle appreciates, parody mirrors itself and imitates another work of art.
In other words, parody turns the original work into an “introverted and introspective”
state. This double intention or paradox: to criticize and to represent are the key features of parody. Simon Dentith in his book Parody also highlights this aspect of parody: "parody involves the imitation and transformation of another’s words"
(Dentith 3). In addition, William Van O’connor also regards parody as criticism: “One of the functions of parody is to make us see, or better, let us experience, the nature of a style and subject, and their excesses” (241). From this point, parodied texts have an ambivalent relationship with their target texts; parodies reenact, and thus participate in the guilt of the texts they criticize.
Ann Jefferson, in her review of Margaret A. Rose’s Parody//Meta-Fiction says that the “object of criticism” becomes an integral part of the parody (232). Moreover, the criticism itself is ambivalent, for that parody does not always bear negative critiques against the target text. Similarly, Hutcheon thinks that the postmodernist critique is strange because it is in complicity with power and domination (4). Parody is the form of paradox that the postmodern discourse applies: "by both using and ironically abusing general conventions and specific forms of representation, postmodern art works to de-naturalize them" (Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism 8).
Parody, as opposed to the traditional definition as merely a rhetorical device, also functions on a political level. In the analysis of Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Geneva Cobb Moore avers that Morison adopts this “ancient genre”— the use of parody to reconstruct and deconstruct the history of America. In her account of A Mercy as a demonic parody, Moore addresses several functions of parody: it reduces the
authoritative power of the mainstream discourse, debunks the hypocrisy of the target text and thus deconstructs it, and it also problematizes the assumed authoritative boundaries (2).
The dialogic relations lie in the crux of parody; dialogic relations do not entail egalitarian relations, but the hierarchical, mobile and contradictory intersubjectivity.
According to Bakhtin, the aesthetic and political values of the novel are expressed through the dialogic relations, foregrounded by heteroglossia. In turn, heteroglossia becomes effective when it is situated in a dialogized context. In this case, parody dialogizes the heteroglot language, and contemporizes the past that was once fixated.
Moreover, parody is capable of bringing the high of history to the low of the present (Bakhtin 21). Parody and dialogue’s “life spark” is ineluctably kindled by the social situation of the contemporary (Singer 176). That being the case, parody, dialogism
and heteroglossia perform with political intentions—they work with and against their enemies and they find unofficial moments of liberation within the legalized zone.
Dialogism has a linguistic shape that suggests the emphasis on the stylistic, but dialogism takes on a social feature of language, that is, language as an “ideologically saturated” perspective that allows the “maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of ideological life” (Bakhtin 271). For this reason, dialogism is capable of representing the dialogized discourse which real dialogue cannot attend to. Although appealing to the concept of hybridization, dialogism does not embody simple equality;
dialogism performs a multiplicitous world with its internally hierarchical stratum.
Dialogic languages are also parodic designs for they express heteroglossia with an authoritative tone.
The dialogic novel and the dialogue differ in dialogism’s representational acts and its intramural unevenness in contrast with dialogue’s premise of equal exchanges of the ideological. Although the dialogic discourse brings the voice of the people to the forefront, it highlights not the evenness of the people and those in power, but the
“quazi-Nietzschean ‘liveliness,’ its earthiness and vulgarity […]” (Hirschkop 108).
The key element of dialogism is double-voicedness, or “internally dialogized discourse” (Bakhtin 325). In a dialogized text, the characters speak with an already processed authorial voice. Double-voicedness can be applied to a modern
phenomenon— cross-cultural communications. The second speaker in cross-cultural communications always refracts the original ideas from the first speaker, while both kinds of utterances remain in a competitive and hierarchical relationship (Crapanzano 437). Parody, in the case of double-voicedness, best exemplifies the working of dialogism. The author remodels the original voice with his or her own intention, and thus creates a voice of two accents. Parody, moreover, embodies heteroglot voices that mutually make each other’s existence seen. This feature shows that to be
conscious of one’s existence, the other is indispensable. Language possesses this feature as well, for it is perceived as language when the other language is present.
Dialogism also consists of the following traits: interdependency, difference, and paradox. These two voices in the dialogic language convey interdependency and also the idea that difference is insurmountable. Moreover, the mechanism of dialogism is inherently paradoxical, because dialogism embraces what it critiques—it is both subversive and authoritative. Dialogism is an authoritative voice critiquing another authoritative intention. Finally, because of its contradicting nature, one cannot neglect the performativity of dialogism. Dialogism’s double-voiced and hierarchical
disposition makes it a performative discourse that is oftentimes enacted through parody.