Scarica Intertextuality: A Poststructuralist Approach to Literary Dialogue e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity!
INTERTEXTUALITY
Intertextuality: Poststructuralist Approach According to intertextuality, all literary texts are intertexts, in the sense that they infer some passages from, and allude or link to, other texts. Therefore, there is a sort of dialogue between different texts. This literary phenomenon was experimented many times during literary history, starting from the Latin period – such as in the satire – when many quotations were made, and some plots rewritten, though there was no literary term to define this new phenomenon/ concept. The concept of intertextuality dates back to the ancient times when the first human history and the discourses about texts began to exist. In classical literature we can find some scholars that define this literary phenomenon or apply it to their work, experiment with it. Plato was the first to speak about intertextual relations in his writings , he quoted other writers; he was really engaged in the dialogue with other philosophers, especially with Socrates. Aristoteles , too, was aware that grammatical creation resulted from other verbs; he alluded to other works. Cicero and Quintilian state that a writer learns to write through imitation of other writers. There is always a dialogue between different generations, different ideas. Imitation was “original”, because through imitation the style was regenerated and became something completely new, able to meet the expectations of the readers. As a phenomenon it has sometimes been defined as a set of relations which a text has with other texts belonging to various fields and cultural domains. Yet the commencement of intertextuality as a critical theory and an approach to texts was provided by the formulations of such theorists as Ferdinand de Saussure , Mikhail Bakhtin and Roland Barthes before the term ‘intertextuality’ was coined by Julia Kristeva in 1966. Kristeva and Bakhtin believed that a writer is trained by imitating other writers, sometimes even copying or imitating masterpieces. Imitation, quotation are all intertextual practices. Kristeva was the first scholar to use the term intertextuality, in her essay “Word, Dialogue and Novel” (1966). From her work, we can extract some points:
- the text is a sign of dialogue , a negotiation between other texts , a place for different texts to meet and interact;
- the text is not a motionless unity , but is something active and actively changing, because the reader can feel the influence of other texts, making it become new and interconnected to new texts that may have come after, or that the writer wasn’t aware of. The reading public is heterogenous. Readers react to a text in a very different way from a different century. A reader can be very educated, trained in classical languages, modern languages, and can also belong to the lower class. He can use the knowledge he has to interact with the text.
Literary canon can be rewritten through intertextuality and made more inclusive. Rewriting is a crucial word when we speak about recent literature (20th/21th century). When reading a contemporary novel, there is often an allusion or a rewriting of some plot which has been forged in the past years, and contemporary literature is really pervaded by this practice, by these dialogues between texts. In his Ulysses, Joyce was rewriting the Odyssey, but he set it in contemporary Dublin, in the first decades of the 20th century. So there really is a play of echoes between these two works: one is a novel, and the other one is an epic poem, and both of them, in a certain sense, are cultural texts. In the modernist era, intertextuality was used not only in literature, but also in painting (Dalì, Picasso). Intertextuality is a theory which provides the reader with numberless ways of deciphering the texts including literary works because it considers a work of literature, not a closed network but an open product containing the traces of other texts. In its simplest sense, intertextuality is a way of interpreting texts which focuses on the idea of texts’ borrowing words and concepts from each other. Every writer , both before writing his text and during the writing process, is a reader of the texts written before his text. Therefore, an author’s work will always have echoes and traces of the other texts to which it refers either directly or indirectly and either explicitly or implicitly. It will also have layers of meanings rather than a solid and stable meaning which is supposed to be constructed through the writer’s authorial vision. The role of the reader becomes central as well as that of the contemporary writer, who can orientate our reading of past masterpieces. Intertextuality, thus, as a post-structuralist theory, not only challenged the traditional approaches to text seeing it as an object to be deciphered and decoded, but also disrupted the notions of a fixed meaning residing in the text and of the probability of an objective interpretation. Examples of intertextuality: Allusion : This is a brief and indirect reference to a person, place, thing or idea of historical, cultural, literary or political significance. For example, the title of Aldous Huxley's novel "Brave New World" is an allusion to Shakespeare's "The Tempest". Quotation : This is when one work directly quotes or closely paraphrases another. For example, T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" quotes directly from a range of texts including Dante's "Inferno" and the Upanishads. Parody : This is a humorous or satirical imitation of a serious piece of literature or writing. For example, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" is a parody of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice". SAUSSURE The whole of modern literary theory is often viewed as having stemmed from the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralism and semiotics (Allen, 2000: 8; Plett, 1991: 8) and therefore it would not be wrong to say intertextuality took its origins from the concepts formulated by Saussure.
perception cannot be monological either: I will have a perception of the external reality which is fragmented in many points of view. The self is also connected to the self of other people, so one has to continually negotiate their vision of the world, and must also connect to other cultures. Our perception of culture is dialogical, because we have to activate exchanges between cultures, we’re always moving from one culture to another. All utterances are dialogic → their meaning and logic dependent upon what has previously been said and on how they will be received by others. DIALOGISM , for Bakhtin, is a constitutive element of all languages. Dialogism is not literally the dialogues between characters within a novel. Every character in the dialogic novel has a specific personality. According to Bakhtin it is the polyphonic novel which has a dialogue with the other genres either by means of rewriting or transforming or parodying them. In contrast with the monologic works (Bakhtin sees poetry such as epic and lyric and the traditional realistic novels as monologic since they are constructed only to transmit the author’s ideology ), polyphonic novel’s discourse is dialogic since it recognizes the multiplicity of voices and perspectives other than the poet’s and thus it does not represent merely the author’s reality but a number of realities. A novel mirrors life and reality and it is a mix of different opinions. It’s a dynamic genre. The Narrator’s Role As for the narrator’s role in contemporary and modernist novels, while in Defoe there is an omniscient narrator – filtering information for us, introducing some characters, giving his general opinion about the events, stories and characters –, starting from the Victorian novel, and much more in the modernist novel,there’s less space for the narrator and for the omniscient narrator. Many characters will intrude in the narrations, their presence detectable through some words or interjections which are typical of their social classes or of their idiolect. The characters are competing with the narrator, telling their own point of view, their story. These techniques are used even in Jane Austen, and it is not surprising that Virginia Woolf wrote some essays on Austen’s style, because she tried to reproduce it. The characters tell their personal perspectives because the world is becoming more inclusive. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics , he talks about polyphony , heteroglossia and double-voiced discourse. Polyphony → According to Bakhtin, polyphony is an unique characteristic of prose literature, in which are present several contesting voices. They all exist separately, without authorial judgement or constraint → all the voices are being heard without one controlling them. Bakhtin does not seek to announce the death of the Author. The author, we might say, still stands behind his or her novel, but s/he doesn’t enter into it as a guiding authoritative voice.
- Novels of Dostoevskij and the Shakespearean plays are examples of polyphony, the voices are not controlled by the author. Dostoevsky, for B. represents the creator of the polyphonic novel.
He does not confine the characters and plot to the boundaries of the author, or make the characters the mouthpieces of the author – this is monologism. Dostoevskij’s function as author is to let the plural consciousness of the characters participate independently in their own terms, speak in their own voices, and create a multi voiced reality. The polyphonic novel is a site of heteroglossia since the language of the novel represents multiple speech genres formed by the different social classes and groups. Heteroglossia → Given that hetero stems from the Greek word meaning “other” and that glot stems from the Greek for “tongue” or “voice”. A diversity of voices, styles of discourses, of points of view within a literary work, especially a novel. Happens when : characters of narrators in a novel use styles of speech different from their normal discourse, or narrators switch between different registers within a text or the speeches of the characters change depending on factors like age, occupation, nationality, social class, etc. Bakhtin gives the example of an illiterate farmer
- He speaks in Church language to God
- Speaks to their family in their own dialect
- Sing songs in another dialect
- Puts on a high-class dialect when he gives a petition to the local government This means individuality is not a monolithic thing; a character is composed of many languages emerging from diverse social contexts. In his opinion, the novel has been forged by revolutionary forces. The origins of the novel must be posited in the parody of the higher traditional forms. Before the arrival of the novel , there was another popular genre, the Romance , imported from France to England: Romance, Novel In Italy, we have only one word to define very long stories written in the 16th and 17th century, as well as stories – like I Promessi Sposi – which were written in the 19th century: we have tradition, without any break, from the ancient ages till the contemporary ages, and we call these works romanzi. But in England there was the romance first, which was mainly imported, during the Renaissance, from France, sometimes translated into English. It was perfect to express and convey the aristocratic values; most of them were written in verse, and for this reason were readable for the noble classes, but very difficult to read for people from the middle and lower classes. It was a very elitist reading: the hero was an aristocratic, generally young man, and the story was set in exotic countries – sometimes not even described or named – and in historical times, so we have very weird references to the real time in which the hero lived. The hero then meets some enemies throughout his travels, and in the end, he achieves his reward – generally a lover, or a treasure. Romance was not the best genre to embody the middle class values , and in the 18th century time was right for revolutionary new tales: noble and aristocratic classes were losing their power, and they were not as rich as the rising middle class (mercers, traders) anymore. Industrialization was taking place in England, so there were so many people who had capitals and money to invest; this new class wanted to replace the aristocratic class, and to oversee politics, because they were, really, the leading class in England at the time. In order to have
present times, and to set them in London – which was a brilliant urban reality in the 18 century
- or in places which were very familiar to the British public. These new characters were involved in adventures which were very common, so people could identify with them; it was a window which was opened on a part of society which was never portrayed before. Thanks to the novel, there were so many references to historical events – the genre was really involved in contemporary life. There were also some references – which we cannot now understand – to events which were, at the time, familiar to the leadership which led in London or in Britain. These novels were about the education of young people, and we always have examples of the rising middle class which demonstrate step by step that it is better that the aristocracy. They are more virtuous, devoted to work, honest and decent people. Work was the most important value. The novel does not ask people to do something, just presents them with good examples, and we can see troubles taking place between classes, between opposite forces. And this is why I’d define the novel as a dynamic genre. The last thing to be noted in Bakhtin’s dialogism is perhaps his ideas about style. For him, style is referred to as “double voiced” discourse because the novelist presupposes the stylistic devices which were produced beforehand and thus he/she enters into a dialogic relationship by mingling his/her voice with that of another author. KRISTEVA It was Julia Kristeva, who coined the term ‘intertextuality’. Kristeva used the term in her seminal essays on Bakhtin and intertextuality, in both “ Word, Dialogue and Novel ” in 1966 and “ The Bounded Text ” in 1967. In the “Bounded text” Kristeva is concerned with establishing the manner in which a text is constructed out of already existent discourse. Authors do not create their texts from their own original minds, but rather compile them from preexistent texts. “ The writer’s interlocutor is the writer himself, but as a reader of another text .” “ The one who writes is the same as the one who reads .” “ Since his interlocutor is a text, he himself is no more than a text rereading itself .” Kristeva, 1980 This is so crucial to our discussion: a writer is first of all a reader, and, reading a text, they will memorise it, some words, the techniques used. And then, when they’re writing, they cannot forget these techniques, and will try to forge their own text by using these words inherited by other writers. Kristeva claims the writer is not a person, but a text, which is made of so many fragments and interacts with other texts: think of literature as a verbal exchange between different texts – it’s a new point of view in intertextuality. Kristeva: the French intellectual scene into which Kristeva arrived in the mid-1960s was one in which an array of established positions within philosophy, political theory and psychoanalytic theory were being transformed by a structuralism dependent on Saussurean linguistics. An attention to the role of literature and literary language was crucial to the rise of poststructuralist theory , nowhere more so than in the journal ‘Tel Quel’. Kristeva’s attack on the notion of stable signification centred on the transformation of Saussure’s idea of semiology, or what was increasingly called semiotics.
Kristeva sets out to establish a new mode of semiotics, which she calls semianalysis. She attempts to capture in this approach a vision of texts as always in a state of production , rather than being products to be quickly consumed. Kristeva stresses that it is not merely the object of study that is in process, the process of being produced, but also the subject, the author, reader or analyst. Kristeva implies, ideas are not presented as finished, consumable products, but are presented in such a way as to encourage readers themselves to step into the production of meaning. Literature cannot be the privileged site of this radical mode of semiotic production. We will see here how the Bakhtinian notion of the dialogic has been rephrased within Kristeva’s semiotic attention to text, textuality and their relation to ideological structures. Whilst Bakhtin’s work centres on actual human subjects employing language in specific social situations, Kristeva’s way of expressing these points seems to evade human subjects in favour of the more abstract terms, text and textuality. Dialogism to intertextuality: In ‘The Bounded Text’ Kristeva is concerned with establishing the manner in which a text is constructed out of already existent discourse. As Kristeva writes, a text is a permutation of texts, an intertextuality in the space of a given text, in which several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and neutralise one another. The text is not an individual, isolated object but, rather, a compilation of cultural textuality. Individual text and the cultural text are made from the same textual material and cannot be separated from each other. Whilst Bakhtin’s work centres on actual human subjects employing language in specific social situations, Kristeva’s way of expressing these points seems to evade human subjects in favour of the more abstract terms, text and textuality. For Kristeva the intertextual dimension of a text cannot be studied as mere ‘sources’ or ‘influences’ stemming from what traditionally has been styled ‘background’ or ‘context’. The text is a practice and a productivity , its intertextual status represents its structuration of words and utterances that existed before. Texts do not present clear and stable meanings; they embody society’s dialogic conflict over the meaning of words. Kristeva’s semiotic approach seeks to study the text as a textual arrangement of elements which possess a double meaning: a meaning in the text itself and a meaning in what she calls ‘the historical and social text’. A text’s meaning is understood as its temporary rearrangement of elements with socially pre-existent meanings. Meaning is always at one and the same time ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the text. Kristeva’s analysis moves on to the Bakhtinian theory of the novel , as that form of text which most expressly embodies these intertextual processes of appropriation and restructuration; a move enlarged upon in the essay, ‘word, dialogue, novel’. Kristeva is interested less in the genre of the novel than in what she calls poetic language. Kristeva incorporates Bakhtin’s dialogism, his insistence on the social and double-voiced nature of language, into her new semiotics. She defines the dynamic literary word in terms of a horizontal dimension and a vertical dimension. In the horizontal dimension the word in the text belongs to both writing subject and addressee; in the vertical dimension the word in the text is oriented toward an anterior or synchronic literary corpus.
It occurs whenever a character in the novel speaks about or expands on another text trying to explain it, to interpret it. There are so many novels where a character is a poet, or an intellectual, or a novelist, so that they intrude in the narration to give us their metatextual notes: it’s someone who, for us, is the first interpreter, whose opinions we cannot always trust. Backtin, in order to explain metatextuality, refers to the character of Don Quijote: he is, first of all, a reader of romances, he rebounds between fiction and reality, not able to distinguish between the two, and that’s why every time he tries to adjust the reality to how it is in his books, and is so frustrated when that doesn’t work. In the 18th century there was a wonderful novel, Tristan Shandy, whose protagonist is a very busy figure, but also an intellectual, who meditates on the book he is going to write. In the 18th century, writers wanted to save their books, so they tried to move towards the reader’s expectations: the large majority of the readers were from the middle class, and were also mostly women, so they tried to reach out to this public, trying to quote passages from books they could be familiar with (such as the Bible).
- Architextuality : Architextuality is “the most abstract and implicit of the transcendent categories and indicates “ a relation that text has to other text .” Novels may indicate their relation to other texts in their subtitles. (A biography; a diary; a romance etc.). Some novels have a sort of double title. So, they have the first title and then a subtitle. These subtitles orient the readers: they expect to read a life of writing, the story of a fantastic hero in an exotic country… **Genette states that a very important factor of this type is “the reader’s expectations, and thus their reception of the work”.
- Paratextuality** Genette finds another type of transtextuality, paratextuality. The paratext is what lies on the threshold of the text, so before entering in the imaginary world which is presented in the text; it’s divided in two parts: the peritext – prefaces and notes – which serve to direct the reader, who can then master this new imaginary world and try to understand it; the epitext , what the writer thought in writing this novel – first hand information, epistolaries, contemporary author’s interviews (see - for Margaret Atwood). The epigraphs belong to the peritext. Sometimes we have epigraphs at the beginning of a book, on a blank page. It’s clear that a writer chooses an epigraph which can attract the reader, it must be an epigraph easily memorisable and quotable. He tries to impress his reader and it’s also a key to the understanding of the text, exactly like the prefaces. In these epigraphs, sometimes the writer indicates or underlines his archetypes. There are so many novels that have titles which are quotations from other books. So, there is a continual pillage of these sentences taken from other texts. Sometimes epigraphs have been echoed throughout the text, as a sort of reminder to the reader that the text quoted is related to the novel – you should read my novel in the light of the other text. Prefaces can be autographic or allographic – when they have been written not by the writer, but by a critic or a friend of the writer and such. They serve to give readers instructions about reading and interpreting. Sometimes it is the writer, who’s trying to control his contents and to
give directions for the reading – though the reader is completely free, and he can find new interpretations, his real personal interpretation. “The paratext performs various pragmatic functions which guide the readers to understand when the text was published, who published it, for what purpose, and how it should or should not be read.” He also “makes a distinction between paratexts, which are autographic ; by the author, and allographic ; by someone other than the author, such as an editor or a publisher. The main function of the autographic or allographic preface is to encourage the reader to read the text, and to instruct the reader in how to read the text properly. It consists of a peritext : the title , chapter title , preface , epigraph and notes that are "beside" the text and are a part of its meaning. It also includes an epitext consisting of elements: newspaper or Journal reviews, publicity events, interviews given by the author, the letters of the author, the cover design, the flap and the blurb or the production aesthetics of the book. The paratext is the sum of the peritext and the epitext Paratext= peritext + epitext
5. Hypertextuality According to Genette, hypertextuality involves “ any relationship uniting a text B (hypertext) to an earlier text a (hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary ”. Thus, hypertextuality represents the relation between a text and a text or genre on which it is based but which it transforms, modifies, elaborates or extends (including parody, spoof, sequel, translation)”. He claims that “all texts are hypertextual, but that sometimes the existence of a hypotext is too uncertain to be the basis for hypertextual reading. In such a case, Genette reminds the reader that a hypertext can be read either for its own individual value or in relation to its hypotext” (ibid). Examples: Hypertext Hypotext The Hours (1998) Michael Cunningham Mrs. Dalloway (1925) Virginia Woolf The Rings of Saturn (1995) W.G. Sebald Urn Burial (1685) Thomas Brown Last Orders (1996) Graham Swift As I lay Dying (1931) William Faulkner A very interesting example of hypertext is Macbettu, a performance by director Alessandro Serra: it is a translation in Sardinian of Macbeth by Shakespeare – so Macbeth is the hypotext, and then we have the hypertext, which is Macbettu. Serra did really adapt Macbeth to the Sardinian audience, and to a new society: he was trying to describe the Sardinian society. He takes some of passages from Macbeth, he tries to respect his hypotext, yet there are omissions, it’s much more concise than Macbeth, there are references to Sardinian society, costumes are typical of Sardinia, and also some of the properties hint to Sardinian society or villages. Through presenting both of these texts on the stage we have the coexistence of the hypotext and the hypertext. It must have been a very effective play, because it was represented in Sardinia, but also in Australia, in the States and around Europe, and it was successful. This part of the activity of rewriting even in another language is really truthful, because people are puzzled, and they think about the main themes in Macbeth and how they apply to their own situation and their own culture.
EPIGRAPHEES
Determining the epigrapher determines the epigraphee, the addressee of the epigraph. When the epigrapher is the author of the book, it goes without saying that for him the epigraphee is the potential reader. If an epigraph is clearly attributed to the narrator, its addressee would equally be the narratee, so the reader. In the case of an extradiegetic narration, the potential reader would be extradiegetic and offered up for identification with the real reader. In the case of intradiegetic narration, we must exclude oral narrations, which scarcely contribute themselves to epigraphs. FUNCTIONS OF THE EPIGRAPH Genette discovered 4 functions of the epigraph, but none of those are explicit, the use of an epigraph is always a silent gesture whose interpretation is left up to the reader.
1. Commenting is the most direct function, which is located in the 20th century. It consists of commenting and elucidating and justifying the title, not the text. This function was largely used in the 60s. This use of the epigraph as a justificatory appendage of the title is almost a must when the title itself consists of a borrowing, an allusion or a parodic distortion. 2. This function is the most canonical , it consists of commenting on the text, whose meaning indirectly specifies or emphasises. More often the commentary is puzzling, has a significance that will not be clear or confirmed until the whole book is read.
- This function is more oblique, sometimes in an epigraph the main thing is not what it says but who the author is. For example during the romantic period many epigraphs were from Scott, Byron or Shakespeare.
- The most oblique effect of the epigraph is due to its presence, whatever the epigraph itself may be: this is the epigraph effect. The presence or absence of an epigraph in itself marks the period, the genre, or the tenor of a piece of writing. The epigraph itself is a sign of culture, a password of intellectuality. TRANSGENERIC Another famous word coined by Genette is transgeneric. I decided to offer you, as an example, the novel itself, because it is a hybrid genre. It drew from letters, news ballads, journals, drama, diaries, autobiographies, the most popular genres in the 18th century. Even today this genre is so vital because it can contaminate itself by using features which are typical of other arts, from cartoons, newspapers, the internet. It wants to win the favour of the public, and it tries to achieve this goal by copying, imitating the techniques which are more popular. Of course, sometimes it’s not so easy to understand this mix of techniques. But how can a writer transform a text? Here are some ways or techniques a writer can use in order to rewrite a famous text: ➔ omit, cut off some parts; ➔ amplify, so expand some events and their narration; ➔ introduce new characters; ➔ rename characters; ➔ change settings;
➔ change the characters’ motivation; ➔ change the plot. Take as an example “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” by Stoppard. Stoppard is a contemporary dramatist in England. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two minor characters in Hamlet by Shakespeare, and Stoppard decided to focus on these two minor characters, trying to understand their motivations, their histories. In Hamlet the focus is on the prince, on Ophelia, and so on. But he decides to concentrate his attention on two minor characters which can be closer to his contemporary audience. We have no prince, nowadays, but we have so many Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. There are other interesting examples, which are not so remote but also not so close to us. Brother and sister Charles and Mary Lamb wrote “Tales from Shakespeare” in 1807. They rewrote Shakespeare plays by transforming (transcoding is the exact term) them into tales, prose writing. They decided to rewrite Shakespeare as they thought that this was much needed to educate young ladies. They wrote in their preface to “Tales from Shakespeare” that boys could have access to their parents’ library, take the books and read them, and also, they could learn about Shakespeare at school. Most of the ladies were trained at home, and they were almost forbidden from reading Shakespeare because some of the plays were too cruel and rude. Therefore they decided to rewrite these plays for young ladies, so that they could have first access to Shakespeare. Of course, they had to transform the works, because plays were meant to be performed, so they are composed of dialogues and there is no space for a narrator. Charles transforms tragedies into tales and Maryland transforms comedies. They introduced a narrator because they wanted to filter these stories, so sometimes this narrator chooses some adjectives to define characters, so that immediately the young ladies can see that this character is very malicious, he’s really part of a devilish nature. For instance, for Lady Macbeth, they can read immediately that she is a cruel woman. They also omitted some passages, as some of the plays written by Shakespeare were scandalous in matter. They tried to cut off these passages, as well as edit in a coda (Latin term which means the moral of the plot): these young ladies had to be instructed, and they decided to have an explicit moral warning at the end of their tales. The right words to summarise what happens in the Tales from Shakespeare is that, first of all, it is a rewriting, so it has been built to appeal to young ladies and to instruct them. The target is completely changed, and this rewriting transcodes Shakespeare.
