Reading Tom Stoppard’s Travesties as Serio-comic Genre

طیموری, مهدی

doi:10.48308/clls.2025.241323.1370

Reading Tom Stoppard’s Travesties as Serio-comic Genre

نوع مقاله : مقاله علمی پژوهشی

نویسنده

مهدی طیموری

گروه زبان دانشگاه خیام

10.48308/clls.2025.241323.1370

چکیده

The objective of this paper is to argue that Stoppard’s Travesties exemplifies a serio-comic work, a kind of genre whose emergence and development were theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin in his attempt to account for the rise of the novel. Known for his conception of language as dialogic, Bakhtin traced the rise of novel back to Socratic dialogue and Menippean satire, two genres heavily influenced by the carnivalistic folklore that inculcates a carnival sense of world. He believed that dialogism and polyphony, as the defining characteristics of the novel, were the products of carnivalization as the shaping influence of the carnival. My discussion will proceed along similar lines demonstrating that Travesties contains features and elements that qualify it as a serio-comic genre. To do so, I will first provide an introduction to carnival and carnivalization and then elaborate on the defining features of serio-comic genres with a view to reading Travesties in light of them.

کلیدواژه‌ها

dialogism

polyphony

carnivalization

Menippean satire

Socratic dialogue

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. “Discourse in the Novel.” In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist: 269-422. Texas: University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1999. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by Caryl Emerson. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

Brassell, Tim. 1985. Tom Stoppard: An Assessment. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Brater, Enoch. 1981. “Parody, Travesty, and Politics in the Plays of Tom Stoppard.” In Essays on Contemporary British Drama, edited by Hedwig Bock and Albert Wertheim: 117-130. Munich: Hueber.

Doll, Mary A. 1993. “Stoppard’s Theatre of Unknowing.” In British and Irish Drama Since I960, edited by James Acheson: 117-129. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Er, Zekiye. 2005. “Tom Stoppard, New Historicism, and Estrangement in Travesties.” New Theatre Quarterly 21 (3): 230 – 240. http://doi:10.1017/S0266464X05000138

Jerkins, Anthony. 1989. The Theatre of Tom Stoppard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge.

MacKenzie, Ian. 1989. “Tom Stoppard: The Monological Imagination.” Modern Drama 32 (4): 574-586. http://doi:10.1353/mdr.1989.0041

Rod, David, K. 1983. “Carr’s Views on Art and Politics in Tom Stoppard’s Travesties.” Modern Drama 26 (4): 536-542. http://doi:10.1353/mdr.1983.0037

Scruton, Roger. 1983. “The Real Stoppard.” Encounter LX (2): 44-47.

Stegh Camati, Anna. 1990. “Tom Stoppard’s Position within the Tradition of Contemporary Comic Drama”. Letras 39: 185-200. https://doi.org/10.5380/rel.v39i0.19165.

Stoppard, Tom. 1975. Travesties. New York: Grove Press.

Whitaker, Thomas, B. 1983. Tom Stoppard. London: Macmillan.