Parody and Its Containments: The Case of Wordsworth

Abstract

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY HAS frequently been regarded as Golden Age of in English poetry. This judgment may still seem to find material confirmation in the Victorians' domination of the anthologies,' but it is interestingly contradicted by Mikhail Bakhtin's view that flourishes in medieval literature and declines thereafter, that place in modern literature is insignificant.2 We might dismiss this disagreement as showing only that Bakhtinian and Western conceptions of are incompatible. But the nature of the incompatibility suggests a containment on our part. This essay privileges a Bakhtinian conception of to suggest that, as usually conceived in Western criticism-as genre, as communicative vehicle, and especially as a playful form of criticism-parody is a tamed creature.3 In Bakhtin's conception, is not a genre but a degree of dialogism; and by virtue both of its dialogism and of its generic indistinctness from nonparodic forms, it functions not as criticism but, to the contrary, as a challenge to critical discernment and authoritative interpretive practice.4 To put this differently, the critical object of Bakhtinian is less another text than it is the possibility of interpretation. I investigate here some of the ways in which modern criticism has therefore, in the period of its own institutionalization, sought to contain parody-from legal parody trials to contemporary theory. But I also conclude that more Bakhtinian remains than Bakhtin lets on, and that it survives in the places one least suspects, like the poetry of William Wordsworth.