0: Intertextuality
This quotation, taken from The Death of the Author, by the French semiotician , captures the notion that texts exist – if they exist at all – as a complex network of the inter-relations of previously made material, reinterpreted, not just by the author, but also by the reader. |
The origins of the idea of intertextuality can be traced back to the work of the Swiss linguist , whose lectures were posthumously published as Course in General Linguistics. The literary theorist, , introduced the term ‘intertextuality’ in the late 1960s, her early works being translated into English in 1980 as Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. In her 1966 essay, Word, Dialogue and Novel, Kristeva built on ‘s notions of dialogism, polyphony and heteroglossia, describing his ‘conception of the ‘literary word’ as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings: that of the writer, the addressee (or the character) and the contemporary or earlier cultural context.’
The term ‘intertextuality’ is now used much more widely and can be applied to ‘texts’ of any kind (i.e., ‘texts’ can include music). Gérard Genette coined the more over-arching term ‘Transtextuality’ in his 1997 book Palimpsestes. The term has five sub-types, which David Chandler summarises as:
To these definitions, we might also usefully add ‘Intratextuality’ – denoting internal relations within a text – and ‘Extratextuality’ – the relation of the text to something that lies outside of the text. |
Chandler proceeds to define degrees of intertextuality, which might include:
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Musical IntertextualityAlternative terms have been proposed to more closely reflect the notion of musical intertextuality: the American academic, Ingrid Monson, in her book Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Uni. of Chicago Press, 1996) introduced the concept of , partly in response to the literary bias of the term ‘intertextuality’, but also to highlight the rich tradition of borrowing, quotation and referencing inherent in jazz music practice; whilst David Hertz, in his book Angels of Reality: Emersonian Unfoldings in Wright, Stevens and Ives (Southern Illinois Uni. Press, 1993) proposed the term as a way of understanding the relationship between music, other arts and ideas. As both linguistic and musical systems occupy intertextual spaces, music that employs text, and which is further articulated through a variety of methods of vocalisation (which might also be regarded as a system of signs), presents us with a richly complex network of associations and relations. |
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Barthes studied at the University of Paris, where he took a degree in classical letters in 1939 and in grammar and philology in 1943. After working (1952–59) at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, he was appointed to the École Pratique des Hautes Études. In 1976 he became the first person to hold the chair of literary semiology at the Collège de France.
His first book, Le Degré zéro de l’écriture (1953; Writing Degree Zero), was a literary manifesto that examined the arbitrariness of the constructs of language. In subsequent books—including Mythologies (1957), Essais critiques (1964; Critical Essays), and La Tour Eiffel (1964; The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies)—he applied the same critical apparatus to the “mythologies” (i.e., the hidden assumptions) behind popular cultural phenomena from advertising and fashion to the Eiffel Tower and wrestling. His Sur Racine (1963; On Racine) set off a literary furor in France, pitting Barthes against traditional academics who thought this “new criticism,” which viewed texts as a system of signs, was desecrating the classics. Even more radical was S/Z (1970), a line-by-line semiological analysis of a short story by Honoré de Balzac in which Barthes stressed the active role of the reader in constructing a narrative based on “cues” in the text.
Barthes’s literary style, which was always stimulating though sometimes eccentric and needlessly obscure, was widely imitated and parodied. Some thought his theories contained brilliant insights, while others regarded them simply as perverse contrivances. But by the late 1970s Barthes’s intellectual stature was virtually unchallenged, and his theories had become extremely influential not only in France but throughout Europe and in the United States. Other leading radical French thinkers who influenced or were influenced by him included the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, socio-historian Michel Foucault, and philosopher Jacques Derrida.
Two of Barthes’s later books established his late-blooming reputation as a stylist and writer. He published an “antiautobiography,” Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975; Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes), and his Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977; A Lover’s Discourse), an account of a painful love affair, was so popular it quickly sold more than 60,000 copies in France. Barthes died at the age of 64 from injuries suffered after being struck by an automobile. Several posthumous collections of his writings have been published, including A Barthes Reader (1982), edited by his friend and admirer Susan Sontag, and Incidents (1987). The latter volume revealed Barthes’s homosexuality, which he had not publicly acknowledged. Barthes’s Oeuvres complètes (“Complete Works”) were published in three volumes in 1993–95.
Saussure contended that language must be considered as a social phenomenon, a structured system that can be viewed synchronically (as it exists at any particular time) and diachronically (as it changes in the course of time). He thus formalized the basic approaches to language study and asserted that the principles and methodology of each approach are distinct and mutually exclusive. He also introduced two terms that have become common currency in linguistics—“parole,” or the speech of the individual person, and “langue,” the system underlying speech activity. His distinctions proved to be mainsprings to productive linguistic research and can be regarded as starting points on the avenue of linguistics known as structuralism.
Kristeva’s theories synthesized elements from such dissimilar thinkers as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the French philosopher Michel Foucault, and the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. Two distinct trends characterize her writings: an early structuralist-semiotic phase and a later psychoanalytic-feminist phase. During the latter period Kristeva created a new study she called “semanalysis,” a combination of the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and the semiology, or semiotics (the study of signs), of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. Her most important contribution to the philosophy of language was her distinction between the semiotic and the symbolic aspects of language. The semiotic, which is manifested in rhythm and tone, is associated with the maternal body. The symbolic, on the other hand, corresponds to grammar and syntax and is associated with referential meaning. With this distinction, Kristeva attempted to bring the “speaking body” back into linguistics and philosophy. She proposed that bodily drives are discharged in language and that the structure of language is already operating in the body.
After graduating from the University of St. Petersburg (now St. Petersburg State University) in 1918, Bakhtin taught high school in western Russia before moving to Vitebsk (now Vitsyebsk, Belarus), a cultural centre of the region, where he and other intellectuals organized lectures, debates, and concerts. There Bakhtin began to write and develop his critical theories. Because of Stalinist censorship, he often published works under the names of friends, including P.N. Medvedev and V.N. Voloshinov. These early works include Freydizm (1927; Freudianism); Formalny metod v literaturovedeni (1928; The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship), an attack on the Formalists’ view of history; and Marksizm i filosofiya yazyka (1929; Marxism and the Philosophy of Language). Despite his precautions, Bakhtin was arrested in 1929 and exiled to the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. From 1945 to 1961 he taught at the Mordovian Teachers Training College.
Bakhtin is especially known for his work on the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Problemy tvorchestva Dostoyevskogo (1929; 2nd ed., 1963, retitled Problemy poetiki Dostoyevskogo; Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics), which he published under his own name just before he was arrested. It is considered one of the finest critical works on Dostoyevsky. In the book Bakhtin expressed his belief in a mutual relation between meaning and context involving the author, the work, and the reader, each constantly affecting and influencing the others, and the whole influenced by existing political and social forces. Bakhtin further developed this theory of polyphony, or “dialogics,” in Voprosy literatury i estetiki (1975; The Dialogic Imagination), in which he postulated that, rather than being static, language evolves dynamically and is affected by and affects the culture that produces and uses it. Bakhtin also wrote Tvorchestvo Fransua Rable i narodnaya kultura srednevekovya i Renessansa (1965; Rabelais and His World).
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