Onderwysstudente se parodieë as hibridiese tekste: ’n navorsingsverslag

Abstract

Parody as hybridic text: research report

Parody can be seen as one of the techniques of selfreferentiality through which a consciousness of the context dependency of meaning is revealed in an aesthetic way. This article explores the theoretical background of parody as literary style against which the researcher challenged a group of teacher education students in a research programme to generate their own parodies. The task required that they choose a well-known fairy tale and use its structure to mock their own society. Students of another group were asked as the writers’ peers to read the stories in order to engage in a dialogue between encoder and decoder in the process of reception.

The educational aim of the programme was to equip students to reflect critically and react creatively to social, political and economic issues that surround them. Furthermore, the researcher wanted to discover how these texts would generate a flexibility, fluency and hybridity in relationship with the students’ cultural identity and how they would project their own liminality in a no-man’s land between youth and adulthood.

Analysis and interpretation of the parody texts revealed themes of late capitalism, materialism and consumerism, as well as typical student cultural manifestations of language usage and some of their existing attitudes toward the South African political society in post-apartheid. The students’ parodies have intertextual density with imitation and subversion of the original text contexts and values. The writers used a variety of stylistic techniques to generate double-voiced narratives as manifestation of literary creativity.