An Intertextual Reading of Louise Glück’s Meadowlands (1997) and Vita Nova (1999)

Abstract

Adopting notions of “hypertextuality,” propagated by French structuralist critic Gerard Genette’s, and the text’s “referential” and the “semiotic” levels, advocated by French poststructuralist critic (and semiotician as well) Michael Riffaterre, this paper conducts an intertextual examination of Meadowlands (1997) and Vita Nova (1999), two volumes by Louise Gluck (b.1943), now an established major voice in contemporary American poetry. It shows how the intertextual (semiotic) dimension of those texts—which includes the making up of several poems in those volumes from texts (or fragments of texts) such as Homer’s Odyssey, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Virgil’s Aeneid—is integrated with their textual (referential) dimension in order to articulate the poet’s vision of the disintegration of a contemporary marriage and the possibility of a new start. Mythological figures such as Odysseus and Penelope in the first volume, Aeneas and Dido, Eurydice and Orpheus in the second volume are evoked in order to show how far their experience may be relevant to Gluck’s contemporary world. The paper also argues that the two volumes are thematically related: the first presents a couple struggling with their marriage, and the second is a continuation of that account while suggesting the possibility of a new beginning. Formally, both volumes freely adopt elements from their “hypotexts” and integrate them with the textual structures of the poems under scrutiny to eventually create both the meaning and significance of Gluck’s unique “hypertexts,” and this is what intertextuality as conceived by Genette’s and Riffaterre elucidates.