Hutcheon, Linda. “A New Introduction, an Old Concern.” Preface to 2000 Edition of A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985. xi-xx.

Parody changes with the culture; its forms, its relations to its “targets,” and its intentions are not going to be the same in North America today as they were in eighteenth-century England. And theories of parody have changed along with parody’s aesthetic manifestations. This is why the / definition of parody as ridicule that developed in tandem with the art of Pope, Swift, and Hogarth doesn’t necessarily feel right today. xi-xii

Because this kind of parodic art comes in a very wide variety of tones and moods—from respectful to playful to scathingly critical—and because its ironies can so obviously cut both ways, any theory that would try to account for its complexity must begin from a broad definition. From observing it at work, I chose to define parody as a form of repetition with ironic critical distance, marking difference rather than similarity. xii

Of course, parody is clearly a formal phenomenon—a bitextual synthesis or a dialogic relation between texts—but without the consciousness (and then interpretation) of that discursive doubling by the perceiver, how could parody actually be said to exist, much less “work”? xiii

Parody both distances us and involves us as perceivers; it always has an impact. xiii

The entire communicative act needs to be taken into account; like its rhetorical miniature, irony, parody is intensely context- and discourse-dependent. Even in a theoretical age like our own that has cast deep suspicion on the concept of intentionality, the experience of interpreting parody in practice forces us to acknowledge at least an inference of intention and to theorize that inference. xiv

Parody’s pragmatics, then, are likely as complex as either its dual formal structure of its ideological ambivalence. Like irony, parody is a form if indirect as well as double-voiced discourse, but it is not parasitic in any way. In transmuting or remodeling previous texts, it points to the differential but mutual dependence of parody and parodied texts. Its two voices neither merge nor cancel each other out; they work together, while remaining distinct in their defining difference. In this sense parody might be said to be, at heart, less an aggressive than a conciliatory rhetorical strategy, building upon more than attacking its other, while still retaining its critical distance. It is this critical distance, however, that has always permitted satire to be so effectively deployed through the textual forms of parody. From Tony Kushner to Weird Al Yankovic, satirists continue to use the pointed and effective doubling of parody’s voices as a vehicle to unmask the duplicities of modern society. xiv

Not only can parody destroy the Benjaminian “aura” of an original work through reproduction but it can actually undermine that work’s monetary value. This is usually the point at which the law is invoked. The proliferation of adaptations, that is, of translations of works into other genres and media, has no doubt contributed to this new recourse to litigation. When Richard Wagner adapted / the medieval tales of Wolfram von Eschenbach and Chrétien de Troyes for his 1882 opera Parsifal, that act was considered part of the normal creative process. And, a few generations later, when Thomas Mann adapted Wagner’s opera Die Walküre for his story “Wäsungenblut,” the more obviously parodic play with the intertext was both recognized and approved by readers and critics alike. Why then did a commercial photographer sue artist Jeff Koons, when the latter reproduced in sculpture his photograph of two friends holding a litter of new puppies? xiv-xv

I recall a friend once saying that the god of parody, if there were one, would have to be Janus, with his two heads facing in two directions at once. Increasingly though, I find myself invoking Hermes, the mediating messenger god, with his winged sandles and paradoxically plural functions, for Hermes is the god of both thieves and merchants, cheating and commerce. What better deity to preside over the thinking about parody’s transgressing and authorizing impulses, its challenges to as well as its reinscriptions of authority? xvii