Mockmusicals: Parody, Satire, and Musical Comedy at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
說明
239 p
附註
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 76-07(E), Section: A
Adviser: Jon D. Rossini
Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Davis, 2014
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Mockmusicals: Parody, Satire, and Musical Comedy at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century investigates the representational politics of gender, race, sexuality, and class in this musical subgenre that emerged in the 1990s. Using a cultural materialist approach, the work joins Lauren Berlant and Judith Halberstam's "counter-politics of the archive of the silly" by taking musical comedy seriously in order to uncover how subversive and irreverent humor may illuminate broader understandings of U.S. culture at the particular moment in history in which they were created. The first chapter examines the genealogy of mockmusicals using literary theories on satire and parody to dissect the formalistic conventions of these works and situate them within the broader frame of musical historiography and U.S. culture. The second chapter explores the concepts of referentiality and reflexivity that are central to understanding the formulation of mockmusicals through close readings of Musicals of Musicals: The Musical and [title of show], respectively. Chapter 3, "Mocking Temporality," looks at the recurring phenomenon of musicals that spoof the 1920s with specific attention to how this theme reflects and investigates the treatment of class politics at different points in history. Using theories of gender, chapter 4 analyzes the use of heterosexual (white) male anti-heroes in Cannibal: The Musical and Spamalot, which posits a group of white, presumptively heterosexual, male characters in expeditionary narratives raising issues about colonialism and representations of the other through the construction of hegemonic masculinity. The next chapter examines recent scholarship on the myth of post-racial America through the use of mockmusicals that use non-human characters to allegorize themes of multiculturalism. Bat Boy: The Musical and Avenue Q present familiar tropes of the noble savage through the guise of monster identity testing the limits of acceptance and integration in contemporary U.S. culture
