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Tyler Shores (Rhetoric/English major)
“Fictional Nonfiction: Examining Postmodernist Parody and Subjectivity in Mass Culture"
Sponsor: Professor Kent Puckett, English
Project Description
Tyler’s project will examine postmodern parody as a model of discourse, and will seek to account for parody’s ubiquity in a specifically mass cultural context. Although parody is of course nothing new, there is something particularly of philosophical interest about postmodernist parody. By introducing the notion of subjectivity into the discussion, the focus will emphasize the more individual implications of postmodernist parody’s effects, whereas much previous literature on the subject has tended to focus upon its ideological and political implications. The instances of parody which will be investigated will range from episodes of the long-running animated television series The Simpsons, while drawing upon the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Federico Fellini, among others. The Simpsons is also the subject of a book Tyler has begun work on, to which this project will contribute.
Scholar's Photo
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Tyler takes a break from parody, Nietzsche, and The Simpsons, as Homer looks on.
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Scholar's Journal
I’m sure there’s a theory-of-relativity explanation that goes far beyond my English and Rhetoric background, but it sure seems that summer research just flies by. Sure, three months sounds like a long time, but when you’re trying to fit six months worth of research into half that amount of time, things go by a lot quicker than one would think.
For me, the research was familiar territory. There was reading to be done, and lots of it. The bulk of my field research – unless we’re counting trips to and from Doe Library – was done at the Museum of Television and Radio in Los Angeles. I found more than a few useful examples of cross-genre parody (for instance, in comparing the interaction when one medium, say television, parodies another?) There’s a viewing library at the museum, and I noticed with no small amount of irony that I was one of the people there not watching old episodes of The Simpsons.
After that, it was time to plunge right back into my texts. I went into the summer knowing that I had quite a lot on my To Do list to start with. Postmodernism. Parody. Subjectivity. Mass culture. Any of these by themselves would have been plenty to provide a thesis’s worth of material for. And it seemed that the more I read about that most mysterious of topics, postmodernism, the more I realized how little I actually understood about it. As it turns out, the reason why so much has been written on the subject is directly related to how little has or can been decided upon postmodernism. I’ll admit, I have a problem which hopefully others can relate to. I feel like I have to do all the reading, read all the theory and every book I can lay my hands on, before I feel like I can write knowledgeably about a subject. I guess it’s what you might call the know-it-all syndrome.
A lot of time was devoted combing through the library collections, oftentimes checking out dozens of books at a time until my own apartment began to look a second library of its own. More often than not I’d succumb to the impulse to grab any and all books off the shelves that sounded potentially useful. The problem with this method of course, is that Doe has A LOT of books that look potentially useful. One of the largest challenges I faced was coping with the fact that theoretical research can literally go on and on and on, and the most important thing I learned was thanks to the sage advice of my mentor: having a few solidly grounded primary texts keeps things manageable, focused, and sane.
And to be quite honest, I’d spend more time than I cared to admit Googling all sorts of bizarre word combinations in the vain hope that I’d stumble upon that perfect, unifying theory. No such luck, by the way. You would however be quite surprised what sorts of stuff turns up when you combine “The Simpsons” along with major theoretical works. Quite the time-waster.
During more than a few moments, I’ll admit to feeling a sense of being overwhelmed by just how much work there was to be done. One of the things that I felt helped a lot was drawing up a make-believe syllabus for myself over the summer, with mini deadlines that proved to be effective in keeping me motivated (pretty nerdy, huh?)
In between poring over Foucault, Nietzsche and others, I made ample time for Simpsons research, too. Luckily for me, all those semesters teaching a DeCal on The Simpsons ended up being a huge time-saver. With about 350 episodes or so, that’s well over a 100 hours if one were to sit down and attempt to watch them all. Even for me, that might be a bit much. Sometimes, I’d have an episode playing in the background, maybe in the vain hope that it would seep into my subconscious and produce some breakthrough. Some people listen to Mozart to help them think better, I end up listening to The Simpsons.
At the moment, my efforts are focused on the philosophical significance of repetition as it relates to Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” and seeing where that takes me. To end on a cheap literary pun, you might say that the work of a Haas Scholar is never quite, “nevermore.”
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