Meta-parody in contemporary Russian media: viewpoint blending behind Dmitry Bykov’s 2009 poem “Infectious”

What is it about?

In this paper, I use the case of Dmitry Bykov's "Заразное" (Infectious) to explore meta- parody, a genre, which has received very little attention in literary studies and has not been explored from the cognitive poetic perspective so far. I investigate Bykov's performance of meta-parody as a new Russian hybrid genre event, related to the new Russian ideology of nationalism, as well as the respective Kremlin-sponsored media discourse. I adopt Steen's (2011) logic for cognition-based interdisciplinary analysis of genre. While making use of Hutcheon's investigation of parody (2000 and 2002) and Morson's description of meta-parody (1989), I explore meta-parody as a viewpoint blending network, focusing on revealing and examining types of linguistic viewpoint markers and (de-) compression operations (Dancygier 2012; Sweetser 2012) that prompt the network's construction. In so doing, I utilize blended joint attention (Turner 2014), conceptual blending (Fauconnier & Turner 2002), and viewpoint blending (Tobin & Israel 2012; Turner 2014), as the analytical tools, to elucidate the linguistic and conceptual, as well as multimodal, situational, socio-cultural, political, literary and historical aspects behind meta-parody's production and understanding. I argue that blending analysis helps to reveal the core construal and constraint operations underlying meta-parody, and to develop an interdisciplinary cognition-based methodological model for analysis of Bykov's parodic work, as constituting part of the contemporary Russian critical media discourse. Keywords: cognitive poetics, conceptual blending, blended joint attention, viewpoint blending, (de-) compression, genre, meta-parody, parody, irony, deixis, cultural frames, metaphor, counter-factuality, multimodality, intertextuality, poetic blends, expository questions, Russian national identity, critical discourse analysis.

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