textual analysis and textual theory

TEXTUAL ANALYSIS AND TEXTUAL THEORY

Session Nine

Søren Hattesen BalleEnglish

Department of Culture and Identity

Agenda Introduction: the summary assignment

for today and next time Introduction: today’s session Presentation:

travel writing revisited Intertextuality and postmodernism

Class room discussion: Richard Holmes, ”In Stevenson’s Footsteps (1984) travel writing and the thematic function of

intertextuality

Summary of Session Eight Paul Fussel’s concept of displaced

romance: Quest Pastoral Picaresque

Travel writing and allegory Allegory: primary and secondary orders of

signification Travelling = living and dying (life is a

journey) Travelling = reading and writing (what is

suggested about the activities of reading and writing?)

Intertextuality[…]the multiple ways in which one literary

text is made up of other texts, by means of its overt or covert citations and allusions, its repetitions and transformations of the formal and substantive features of earlier texts, or simply its unavoidable participation in the common stock of linguistic and literary conventions and procedures that are ”always already” in place and constitute the discourses into which we are born. (Abrams, 317)

Graham Greene, ”I Spy” At last he got his courage back by telling

himself in his curiously adult way that if he were caught now there was nothing to be done about it, and he might as well have his smoke. He put a cigarette in his mouth and then remembered that he had no matches. For a while he dared not move. Three times the searchlight hit the shop as he muttered taunts and encouragements. ’May as well be hung for a sheep,’ ’Cowardly, cowardly custard,’ grown-up and childish exhortations oddly mixed. (535)

Idioms I might as well be hanged/hung for a

sheep as a lamb. Cowardly cowardly custard, can't cut

the mustard!

James Joyce, ”The Dead”Intertextuality: ”He was undecided about the lines from

Robert Browning for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers. Some quotation that they would recognise from Shakespeare or from the Melodies would be better” (NE2, 2174).

R.L. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey …

Intertextuality: John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, from

this world to that which is to come (1678-1684): pp. 14, 32

Romance: Quest Pastoral Picaresque

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress

An introduction to intertextuality and postmodernism

Introduction to intertextuality and postmodernism

Marcell Duchamp, Mona Lisa (1919)

An introduction to intertextuality and postmodernism

An introduction to intertextuality and postmodernism

”Homer Scream”

”Lisa Scream”

Edward Munch, ”Skriket” (1893)

An introduction to intertextuality and postmodernism

An introduction to intertextuality and postmodernism

An introduction to intertextuality and postmodernism

An introduction to intertextuality and postmodernism

Portrait conventions

Consequences of intertextuality: postmodernism

Any text is an intertext - a text which is made up of other texts

From work to text: The death of the Author and the birth of the

text genre (architextuality) context (intertextuality, paratextuality,

metatextuality, hypotextuality) The author is no longer the origin and end of

meaning Texts have no beginnings or endings

Richard Holmes, "In Stevenson's Footsteps“ (1984)

the non-fictional aspects, especially essay memoir and autobiography

the aspects of displaced romance: quest, picaresque, pastoral

the allegorical aspects, especially concerning reading and writing

The intertextual aspects