Karikatyyrin äärillä

• Tatu Virtanen Jyväskylän yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74924

Abstrakti

On Caricature

In this article I study a widely known and yet wildly used term, caricature. The term is commonly used both in everyday speech and in academic studies of arts and literature, but it tends to be used in an uncritical way. It is usually used as a reiteration and as a way of avoiding a substitutive word for almost any kind of ”flat”, ”typical” or otherwise functional character. Moreover, it is frequently used as an alternative for more established terms, such as satire and grotesque. In the studies of pictorial arts it is also quite common to use the term when referring to almost any kind of pictorial satire. This kind of uncritical thinking is bound to be unscientific in the first place, but it also prevents the term caricature from referring to anything specific by its own right. The careless usage of the term also obscures the well worked typologies of more established terms and even genres. In this paper I provide a thorough analysis of the actual meaning of the term caricature. I study the ways in which the term caricature is used over the centuries, bearing in mind the denotations it has been given in and after the time of its establishment in the late 16th century. After finding the term’s essential features and elements, I compare it with other and more fixed terms, such as the ones mentioned above, and seek to find the boundaries after which the term’s actual sense starts to collapse or get mixed up with something else and, in short, to lose its meaning. As my tools I use (mostly) quite well known studies from the academic disciplines in which the term has been used, that is, art history and literary studies. Yet, as the theories lack adequate clarity, or in some cases are overly clear, I find it important to highlight my views and to test them in practice by studying some well known classics from both literature and pictorial arts in the light of my hypotheses and theories.