Self-parody

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Anti-art like Marcel Duchamp's Fountain is a parody by artists of art itself.
Anti-art like Marcel Duchamp's Fountain is a parody by artists of art itself.

A self-parody is a parody of oneself or one's own work. As an artist accomplishes it by imitating his or her own characteristics, a self-parody is potentially difficult to distinguish from especially characteristic productions (exempli gratia: a situation in which a litterateur's mannerisms are typically ponderous, sesquipedalian, and Latinizing).

Sometimes critics use the word figuratively to mean the artist's style and preoccupations appear as strongly (and perhaps as ineptly) in some work as they would in a parody. Such works may result from habit, self-indulgence, or an effort to please an audience by providing something familiar. Ernest Hemingway has frequently been a target for such comments. An example from Paul Johnson's book Intellectuals:

Some [of Hemingway's later writing] was published nonetheless, and was seen to be inferior, even a parody of his earlier work. There were one or two exceptions, notably The Old Man and the Sea, though there was an element of self-parody in that too.

Political polemicists use the term similarly, as in this headline of a 2004 blog posting. "We Would Satirize Their Debate And Post-Debate Coverage, But They Are So Absurd At This Point They Are Their Own Self-Parody".[1]

[edit] Examples of self-parody

The following are deliberate self-parodies or are at least often considered to be so:

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  1. ^ Gibson, Mary Ellis (1995). Epic Reinvented: Ezra Pound and the Victorians. Cornell University Press, 71–72. ISBN 0-8014-3133-6.