TY - JOUR
AU - Shallcross, Michael
AB - AbstractFor F. R. Leavis, parody ‘is always the worst enemy of creative genius’, and consequently ‘people who are really interested in creative originality regard the parodist’s game with distaste and contempt’. This paper challenges the pejorative intent of Leavis’s phrasing, developing the concept of the ‘parodist’s game’ in the context of Jonathan Coe’s satirical novel, What a Carve Up! (based upon the film of the same name), to explore the ways in which self-conscious cultural play may not only foster creative originality but also generate the deeper moral seriousness that Leavis implies to be incompatible with formally playful modes of discourse. Amidst the prodigious range of popular and ‘high’ cultural references that Coe’s novel plays upon, I highlight his adaptation of the board-game, Cluedo, as a symbolic means of subjecting his own project to ethical scrutiny. Via a wider analysis of the popularity of mass-produced household games in the mid-to-late-twentieth century, and the various cross-generic adaptations of Cluedo that have since emerged, I argue that Coe identifies a kernel of ambivalence within the capitalist homogenization of leisure activity which makes it a fecund source for parody. As I demonstrate, this reading not only serves to challenge Leavis’s reductive conception of the ethical parameters of parody but also the comparably partial account of a figure who is in some ways Leavis’s critical antithesis—Roland Barthes.
TI - ‘The Parodist’s Game’: Scrutiny of Cultural Play in Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up!
JF - Adaptation
DO - 10.1093/adaptation/apv023
DA - 2016-08-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-parodist-s-game-scrutiny-of-cultural-play-in-jonathan-coe-s-what-a-rDd4njcjPi
SP - 123
EP - 141
VL - 9
IS - 2
DP - DeepDyve
ER -