Parody Pedagogy: Plath as Style

Here’s my lead-in to a piece on Plath parodies for Plath Profiles #7. It’s a collaboration with students from my 2013 course on ‘Plath and Her Cultural Afterlife at 50’ (timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of her death). In it, you’ll find wonderful parodies of these Plath poems:

“The Burnt-Out Spa”; “The Arrival of the Bee Box”; “Daddy”; “The Jailer”; “Cut” and “Lady Lazarus.”

Enjoy! You can access the full piece here (click PDF).

I tell my modern and contemporary poetry students that writing a parody is the most intimate form of literary analysis. You inhabit the poem in a different way—like living in an apartment long enough to find your roommate’s habits and quirks as familiar as the furniture. You may not know your roommate’s deep, dark secrets. But you know what she has for breakfast and what kind of deodorant she uses. Writing a parody is like fitting into someone else’s clothes and taking on her style, her flair. It’s better than karaoke because you bring the artist’s signature moves to the song, but get to improvise the words. Successful parodies blend intimacy and performance—the same effects we find so engaging in Sylvia Plath’s best known poems.

What does it mean to parody a writer that many readers find intimate already—and some find overly so? I find that parody pedagogy can spring Plath from her confessional crypt, spiriting her away from the biographical binds of her critical and media reception. Writing Plath parodies gives students an artful understanding of the intensities she brings to her page; they are devices and distillations, not death-drives and Daddy dilemmas. My students relished these aspects of Plath’s signature style: an energetic and flamboyant persona; an eye for detail and texture; embellished diction; rich sound devices; warped romance and domesticity; twisted humor. Parody pedagogy offers Plath’s poetry and prose as material to perform—not objects to interpret or symptoms to diagnose.

My students and I hope our Plath playlist inspires more teachers and students to engage this stylish writer through parody.  -MB