SPATIALIZING THE TEXT : INTERTEXTUALITY IN CONTEMPORARY THEORY AND PRACTICE
FELICIA CHAN ENG BIN
FELICIA CHAN ENG BIN
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Abstract
This thesis aims to address the effects of the theoretical conception of
intertextuality on contemporary cultural practices - specifically postmodernist
experimental fiction, paperback popular fiction and film - in terms of how their
various intertextual operations raise questions about the value of fiction-making
within a culture that popularly understands post structuralism to be an adversary
of literary assessment and value.
Chapter One discusses intertextuality as understood by post structuralism, of
which the greatest impact on literary studies has been to "spatialize" the text, or
to re-define the concept of "text" in spatial terms, and considers the impact it
has had on literary studies.
Chapter Two considers John Barth's Chimera in terms of its struggle for identity in the effort to reconcile poststructuralist textual ideals with postmodernist textual (im)possibilities. The postmodem novel, in spite of its declarations of textual freedom, appears to be unable to achieve the poststructuralist spatialization of the text, even as it appears to actualise its theoretical concerns. Part of this tension arises from Barth's inability to abandon entirely the traditional notion of author, a recommendation that post structuralism makes quite forcefully.
Chapter Three studies Emma Tennant's Pemberley and An Unequal Marriage as
well as Joan Aiken's Jane Fai, fax in terms of their negotiation with Jane Austen
as originating author of English "classics". The more literal form of intertextuality employed by Tennant and Aiken negotiates less with Austen's novels than with Austen's cultural position in the English canon.
Chapter Four addresses the intertextuality involved in film adaptations of literary novels, suggesting, with Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility, that the language of film may provide the solution to the anxieties of authorship discussed in the preceding chapters; and that it may provide the bridge between, and subsequently the way beyond, the apparently irreconcilable opposites of poststructuralist and postmodemist intertextualities.
Finally, the thesis concludes with a brief inquiry into the role that critical discourse itself plays, through its own cultural appropriation of the notion of intertextuality, in the problematisation of current literary assessment.
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1999
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