Last-minute questions on the parody essay

1. "For the parody essay, if one of the key themes we touch on is Israel's ability to always get himself out of sticky situations, how many situations should we include?" (Could also apply to any parodied text in which there is a repeated plot device.) Answer: you should not feel that you need to imitate every single iteration of something that's repeated--say, if you were doing "Earth's Holocaust," you wouldn't need to have an analogue in your parody for every single episode of throwing something into the fire and then debating it. For one thing, there isn't room in this short assignment! Since you are trying to draw attention to something being reiterated, you do want to reproduce the effect of repetition, however, so do at least a couple of go-rounds. The question to ask yourself is: why is this element [plot situation, rhetorical device, phrase, etc.] being underlined and emphasized through repetition? What's important about it?

2. "If you take one of the stories we're read and change the genre, is that still considered a parody? For example, 'Man of the Crowd' as a romantic comedy." It could work, as long as you maintained some other recognizable elements from the original: for instance, the narrator's peculiar point of view, the German epigraph and theme, the kinds of wandering they do through the city, the 19c setting, etc. My concern is that if you choose too much to change from the original--if your version has a different narrative style, a different relationship between the narrator and the character, a contemporary US city, and a different conclusion to be drawn from the ending, what's left? Where are the key elements from the original that you still have left to highlight through your exportation into parody?

Here's a case where it might help to try to draft the analysis first: ask yourself, what am I saying about the original by changing the ending to suit a romantic comedy? (In the first place, how do you know when you're "in" a romantic comedy--is it the gender of the two main characters, or the uniting of the lovers in a happy ending?)