ABSTRACT
In an influential essay, ‘The Politics of Self-Parody’, published in The Partisan Review in 1968, Richard Poirier linked discussions of parody with developments in writing that have come to be known as postmodernism. Poirier set himself the task of describing a kind of newly developed writing, ‘a literature of self-parody that makes fun of itself as it goes along’ (Poirier, 1968:339). Taking Joyce and Nabokov as his exemplary writers, Poirier distinguished between a traditional practice of parody which retained some sense of the controlling force of ‘life or history’, and those writers who were conscious of the provisional nature of all discursive constructions. While Poirier’s essay certainly did not initiate the connection between parody and postmodernism (a connection made more insistently in the discussion of architecture) it is symptomatic of a widespread position which equates postmodernist cultural forms with formal self-consciousness, epistemological relativism (the belief that there can be no secure ground to belief), and parody. Poirier’s article was a modest if important attempt to characterise one trend in contemporary writing. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, there developed a proliferating set of arguments under the heading of
‘postmodernism’, which concern not only art and architecture but also the nature of late capitalism and contemporary society. Extraordinary as it may seem, the nature of parody has been a significant strand in these debates.
