Reading Tom Stoppard’s Travesties as Serio-comic Genre

Document Type : Original Research Article

Author

Department of English, Faculty of Humanities, Khayyam University

Abstract

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.

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References

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