250 likes | 360 Views
Textual Analysis and Textual Theory. Session Nine Søren Hattesen Balle English Department of Culture and Identity. Agenda. Introduction : the summary assignment for today and next time Introduction : today’s session Presentation : travel writing revisited
E N D
TextualAnalysis and TextualTheory Session Nine Søren Hattesen Balle English Department of Culture and Identity
Agenda • Introduction: the summary assignment for today and next time • Introduction: today’s session • Presentation: • travelwritingrevisited • Intertextuality and postmodernism • Classroomdiscussion: • Richard Holmes, ”In Stevenson’sFootsteps (1984) • travelwriting and the thematicfunction 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 wellbehanged/hung for a sheep as a lamb. • Cowardlycowardlycustard, 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
Consequences of intertextuality: postmodernism • Anytext is an intertext - a textwhich is made up of othertexts • 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 nobeginningsorendings
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