'An Approach to Intertextuality in Classical and Late Medieval Literature' (original) (raw)
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The term " intertextuality " , coined in the late sixties by Julia Kristeva, refers to a literary theory or a reading method for analyzing how individual texts are connected to other texts, a phenomenon which is as old as literature itself.1 Texts are mosaics of quotations and never entirely new: they are made up of, or connected to, earlier texts and traditions, and they continue them. The earlier texts, the intertexts (or, more accurately, pretexts), resound like other voices in the new text as a result of which the cultural life of the older texts is extended. This way of textual sharing invites a comparison between the textual traditions outside of the actual object of research, and the use of these texts inside it. It asks us to think about how and why an author is choosing a particular text, name or situation in his work and to what effect these older elements are reimagined. Over the years, intertextuality has become a much-used term which has come to be defined in many ways. Medievalists in particular have developed various critical approaches. Long before the term was coined, they recognized a ubiquitous response to oral or written authorities in medieval literature, since authors " participate in an aesthetic of conventionality which prizes rewriting above " originality " ex nihilo. " (Bruckner 1987, 222) However, there is no reason to believe that medieval authors just looked at previous texts as models and " classics " to be imitated. They are confronted with a set of choices, which range from taking a mimetic approach to exploring variations on well-known structural schemes, themes and motifs, to making a clean break with conventional patterns. Therefore, we are not dealing with a simple donor-recipient model. Intertextuality is part of the unique identity of medieval works, demanding an analysis of its particular function and use within the boundaries of the single text and its specific historical literary context.
History and Poetics of Intertextuality
2008
In his book History and Poetics of Intertextuality Marko Juvan argues that intertextuality is constitutive of all textuality and that it may be foregrounded in literary works, genres, or styles such as parody. Juvan surveys the field in order to ground the poetics of intertextuality in the history of its idea and presents its development as general intertextuality (from Kristeva to New Historicism) and citationality (from Genette’s late structuralism to the present text theory). He also discusses the concept’s precursors since Antiquity (imitatio, influence, etc.). In modern times the concept emerged in the 1960s from a radical theory of writing. Based in Derrida’s deconstruction, the notion and practice of intertextuality implied a relational and transformative character of identity, meaning, subject, text, and socio-historical reality. In consequence, the notion gained currency in postmodernist aesthetics while in literary studies it has been transformed from its transgressive content into a detailed descriptive methodology. However, by bringing citationality into focus, practices of intertextuality suggest that literature is an autopoetic system, living on cultural memory, and interacting with other social discourses. The poetics of intertextuality Juvan proposes in his book is based mainly on semiotics and it elucidates factors determining the socio-historically elusive border between general intertextuality and citationality (encyclopaedic literary competence, paratext, etc.). In his analysis Juvan explores modes of intertextual representation. He stresses that in intertextuality pre-texts evoked or re-written in post-texts figure as interpretants of the latter and vice versa. Juvan’s analysis suggests that intertextual derivations and references have become common in literary culture as citational figures and genres.
Intertextuality in the Literature
International Journal of Social Sciences & Educational Studies
Literature is not the product of a specific nation; rather it is a combination of the experiences of all nations. So to speak, there is inheritance amongst the literary texts all over the world literature. Thinking of the global changes and technological development, it is quite easy to see the issue of interaction between the nations which is called "intertextuality". This concept appears in a literary work within different interactions. Especially the religions, trade, wars, social and or economic movement, internet and technology have significant roles in this because this interaction is provided through these factors in the society. Now that, the society is mirrored up in the literature, these affects necessarily will be seen in the literature and the scholars deal with finding formic, contently and stylistic resemblances among the cultures and literary areas in a literary work. In this study, two aspects of these interactions in the literature will be handled as theme-based and form-based. The stylistic resemblances will be treated under the form-based part.
A Close and Distant Reading of Shakespearean Intertextuality
2020
This study is an attempt at tracing and understanding Shakespearean intertextuality with the help of both qualitative and quantitative methods. The author looks for (near-)verbatim quotations of Shakespeare’s works in contemporary British novels. The references cited help to answer how Shakespeare is referenced by those who came after him and how text mining and computational methods can facilitate the search for these references. The present study looks for salient patterns in Shakespearean intertextuality in a manual, qualitative examination of the complete prose works of 11 authors in a corpus of 14 million words. A second, quantitative reading of digitalised versions of the texts allows for a significant extension of the corpora and a comparison of the methods involved. The quantitative part of this study mirrors the qualitative part with methods provided by the ever-emerging Digital Humanities. The findings of both approaches are juxtaposed, and problems and possible solutions ...
An Agenda for the Study of Intertextuality
The study of intertextuality has been a central pursuit of scholars of Greek and especially Latin literature. It promises to reveal the meaning of texts for original audiences, trace authorial influence, and illuminate an aspect of literary artistry. Yet inconsistent standards and the scattering of insights across publications have hindered progress. This article proposes restoring momentum toward the goals of intertextual study through an agenda of representing intertexts in a standard digital form susceptible to complex and systematic analysis.