Posts Tagged ‘Intertextuality’
I have contributed another post to Blogging Woolf, this time about the role of intertextual and geographical citation in the works of Virginia Woolf and Arnold Bennett. If you look to the right hand side of the weblog, I am now listed as a writer. I will contribute posts on a semi-regular basis about Woolf and a number of subjects related to her writing.
I want to highlight a few guest blog posts I have contributed in recent weeks:
First, I contributed to about the role of social media at the conference. There is a lot of great information and ideas in that post. I tried to come at it from a different angle that hopefully supplement the other ideas.
Secondly, I wrote a post about the role of intertextuality in Mrs. Dalloway for the Blogging Woolf weblog. This coincides with the Mrs. Dalloway Online Discussion Day that happened a day later as part of Woolf In Winter. Hopefully, in the future, I will be writing a few more posts for Blogging Woolf.
Recently read: Critical Practice by Catherine Belsey.
I have to thank Dr. Bluemel for recommending this book (well, to Toni, but I was standing next to them!). It proved to very helpful in further tempering my understanding of intertextuality, Barthes, and the “decentering” of authors. It is a brief but extremely useful text for any number of scholarly fields.
The focus of my final graduate course, on ancient world literature, became the cyclical and intertextual nature of creation myths. One of the stories I ended up narrowing in on was the story of Kain and Able in the Hebrew Bible. That said, my favorite short piece in In Praise Of Darkness is Legend:
Cain and Abel came upon each other after Abel’s death. They were walking through the desert, and they recognized each other from afar, since both men were very tall. The two brothers sat on the ground, made a fire, and ate. They sat silently, as weary people do when dusk begins to fall. In the sky, a star glittered, though it had not yet been given a name. In the light of the fire, Cain saw that Abel’s forehead bore the mark of the stone, and he dropped the bread he was about to carry to his mouth, and asked his brother to forgive him.
“Was it you that killed me, or did I kill you ?” Abel answered. “I don’t remember any more; here we are, together, like before.”
“Now I know that you have truly forgiven me,” Cain said, “because forgetting is forgiving. I, too, will try to forget.”
“Yes, said Abel slowly. “So long as remorse lasts, guilt lasts” (12)
The changes in intertextual narrative direction in ancient literature, whether Sumerian’s Descent Of Inanna, or Greek’s Persephone myth in The Homeric Hymns, or otherwise, are a form of erasure each time the narrative is changed as oral myths were passed from civilization to civilization and adapted for them. This is particularly true for women in creation myths, which was the subject of my seminar paper. Women are liberated and powerful in some versions of the creation myth, in others they are docile and lack agency.
More on this when I get around to posting my seminar paper.
Recently read: On A Pale Horse by Piers Anthony
I listened to the audio version of this novel during the summer. I tried to reread some of Anthony’s novels from this series back in 2005 but found myself moving through them very slowly. They are still good, very intertextual, and extremely thoughtful, but I had this nagging difficulty with them. Listening to the audio book, however, was a very pleasant experience. This is the kind of novel that needs, perhaps, a good reading that can be listened to on the go. I listened in the car and while running, amusingly the author’s note at the end is about Anthony’s experiences running at the time, and found myself eager for the next chance to listen.
Recently read: The Dialogic Imagination by M. M. Bakhtin.
The essays in this book have been essential for both my spring seminar paper and my MA thesis. Epic & Novel has proved particularly useful. This may be cliche at this point, but it is impressive that Bakhtin was writing such advanced essays about intertextuality so many years before theorists like Kristeva came along in the late sixties.
For Dr. Kristin Bluemel’s course on the Novel, my seminar paper consisted of comparison of Arnold Bennett’s Anna Of The Five Towns and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Given their famous feud, I found they had a lot more in common than I thought they would. I wanted to look at how these novels show different ways in which “real” history, specifically that of women, is recorded. I examined the intertextual approach Woolf uses against the geographic, author based, approach Bennett uses. A big question became how is intertextuality a different form of citation than geography. After carefully examining both novels, and authors, I found that they came to similar, but not totally the same, conclusions. ()
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