Intertextual Dialogue Research Articles

Pt

The aim of this study is to show the presence of classical epic, Homer's Iliad, in the chronicle of Machado de Assis, analyzing the intertextual dialogue between Machado de Assis and the epic poem by Homer, considering the concept of intertextuality developed by Julia Kristeva from philosophical conceptions of Bakhtin. In the chronicle of March 18, 1894 for the newspaper Gazeta de Notícias on sunday column "A Semana", Machado de Assis crosses Homer's epic to his chronicle, rewrites the epic text for the daily issues of his weekly column. To Tiphaine Samoyault, writing is rewriting, "stand on the existing foundations and contribute to a continued creation" (2008, p. 77) one of the principles of intertextuality. It was observed that from the reading and assimilation of the classic poem, Machado de Assis can approach so far genres, bringing the verses to his prose, leaving it closer to poetry. In this sense, we can see the richness of Machado de Assis chronicles, often left on the sidelines in favor of his short stories and romances. In addition, the dialogue, to rewrite the epic in his chronicle, Machado seems to contribute to this "continuous creation", reviving the memory of literature and emphasizing the permanence of classical work.

An Insatiable Market for Minor Characters: Genre in the Contemporary Literary Marketplace

Much of the recent revitalization of the field of genre theory takes as axiomatic the premise that scholars can extrapolate, from a genre’s conventional form, its underlying social logic. But how does literary form come to index or encode the social? This essay argues that we can produce a fuller account of how and why genres emerge and flourish, and of their reciprocally determining relation with their sociohistorical moments, by analyzing how the social logic of literary forms gets deployed in their more immediate contexts: the institutional locations, channels of production and reception, and the commercial and symbolic economies through which such forms circulate. The flourishing contemporary genre “minor-character elaboration” makes for a particularly revealing case of an emergent literary form that gets taken up and spurred by producers for its ability to fulfill social needs that are promulgated, if not manufactured, by the publishing industry, because it is a popular form that trades on the prestige of the traditional literary canon while accommodating voices from the margins. The essay demonstrates how the market logic of the book industry and the symbolic economy of the literary field shape the conventional forms that come to dominate that field. Today’s risk-averse publishers have embraced and actively promoted minor-character elaboration because its formal logic—explicit intertextual dialogue tethered to the adoption of diverse points of view—helps them identify and appeal to niche markets: an educated and wellcapitalized “bibliophile” niche of readers who recognize the prestige of the great books even if they haven’t read them, and identity groups that are reconceived as target publics. The genre proliferates, that is, because of the particular ways it is instrumental in helping producers accrue economic and symbolic capital.

Cara ao ermo. Estratexias para o cuestionamento da realidade desde a poesía galega recente

Through the analysis of the collection of poems Fase de trema by Lorena Souto (Espiral Maior, 2012) and Cero by Oriana Méndez (Galaxia, 2011), a reading of these poems will be suggested as proposals that trough the use of the “Madness metaphor” seek a specific intertextual dialogue in order to boost a deconstructive speech –in Derrida’s terms– about reality questioning in order to bring new positions from the literary.

Songs of Experience: Confessions, Penitence, and the Value of Error in Tasso and Spenser

As the Reformation and Counter-Reformation swept Europe in the sixteenth century, penance (or its rejection) became a cornerstone of individual and confessional identities. Extending a post-Tridentine view of sacramental penance as consolation, Torquato Tasso'sGerusalemme liberatasuggests that penance offers a means to recover and even to benefit from the experience of error—and to incorporate romance error into epic action and ethics. Through extensive intertextual dialogue, Edmund Spenser'sFaerie Queeneengages this view to explore the fears produced in some lay people by the English Reformers' rejection of penance. Book 2 interrogates the possibilities for epic heroism in a fictional environment lacking any visible means to recover from error and therefore profoundly skeptical of experience and the errors to which it might lead. Spenser's virtuoso act of cultural translation reforms Tasso's penance-based ethics, exposes the shortcomings of one approach to reformation, and affirms the educational value of human error.

Non-chronological reading of the collection of poems adventures of Kraljevic Marko

This paper is on the actualisation of the epic character of Marko Kraljevic in the collection of tales Adventures of Marko Kraljevic by Branko Stevnovic. The aim of this paper is enlightening inter-textual connection of these poems with epic poetry and legends about Marko, and to foresee possible currents of its perception, depending on the reader's experience of the assumed reader. We are starting from the assumption that the collection is aimed for the youngest age groups, not having tendencies towards interpreting inter-textual dialogues and not being acquainted enough with our epic tradition. Possible function of inter-textual overlapping is being revealed and which is a stating point for the text in specific, non-chronological reading about Marko Kraljevic.

Where is an author?

If you're reading these words on a digital device, we are not alone: our encounter as author and reader is taking/making place in and through an uneven, evolutionary planetary digital infrastructure of cognitive production, measurement and monetization. Five and a half millennia after symbolic discourses of literacy and authorship co-evolved with the first urban revolution, the material, embodied phenomenological encounters of planetary urbanization have arrived at the precise moment of explosive contingency in the scalar nexus between cities and literacy. ‘What is an author?’, Foucault asked in a brilliant lecture in Paris in February 1969. Today, if we put Foucault's question into an intertextual dialogue with contemporary critical urban theory as well as earlier elements of Comte, Marx and Kant, we gain fresh insight into the ways reading and writing are being reconstituted through partially automated constellations of quantification and commodification of human consciousness. Foucault's genealogy of the ‘author function’ has become an increasingly contested and lucrative circuit of accumulation as Marx's concept of the ‘general intellect’ has materialized through the transnational urban networks of what is now widely described as ‘cognitive capitalism'. The growth and evolutionary adaptation of socially networked cultures of reading, viewing, sharing and writing are now performing a new neo-Kantian time-space construction of sense perception in a planetary version of Harvey's ‘urbanization of consciousness', putting individual authors into constitutive conversation with global knowledges once imagined by Comte as the ‘Great Being’ of collective intergenerational inheritance of post-theistic human knowledge.

Género, nación y literatura: Emilia Pardo Bazán en la literatura gallega y española by Carmen Pereira-Muro (review)

Reviewed by: Género, nación y literatura: Emilia Pardo Bazán en la literatura gallega y española by Carmen Pereira-Muro Kathleen Honora Connolly Pereira-Muro, Carmen. Género, nación y literatura: Emilia Pardo Bazán en la literatura gallega y española. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 2013. Pp. 227. ISBN 978-1-55753-625-9. Pereira-Muro’s study, Género, nación y literatura, analyzes Emilia Pardo-Bazán as a public intellectual and writer, who functioned as a catalyzing force for the formation of the emerging Spanish and Galician national cultures during Restoration Spain. Pardo-Bazán, for much of her career, adopted the patriarchal discourses of her time that associated women with nature and men with culture. However, Pereira-Muro argues that she was able to subvert these gender binaries by advocating for an inclusion of women in a public and participatory role in the nation. With her last novel, Dulce dueño, Pardo-Bazán was able to carve out a space for female writing, and a female voice in national culture. Her complex ideological views make her difficult to classify for some feminist scholars, as well as critics engaged in the Spanish and Galician literary canons. Pereira-Muro indicates that the anomalies or dissidences produced by Pardo-Bazán’s work are an opportunity to re-think the “naturalness” and historical validity of literary canons, and come to terms with the underlying issues of gender and power that inform them. The first chapters of the book are devoted to contextualizing the literary and cultural milieu of Restoration Spain and the Galician Rexurdimento. Pereira-Muro draws a parallel between the reluctant inclusion of Pardo-Bazán in the Spanish canon, and her exclusion from the Galician [End Page 520] one, highlighting the underlying issue of gender. The realist novel was, for intellectuals during the Restoration, the way to produce a nation that was not yet cohesive. Studying the critiques leveled against Pardo-Bazán by her contemporaries reveals the efforts to naturalize Spanish literature (and by extension, the nation) as virile, masculine, and therefore modern. Pardo-Bazán’s critics, such as Clarín, decried her works as “cursi” and wished to disqualify her from the national canon due to the fact that she was a woman, and therefore only capable of superficial imitation. Yet, Pardo-Bazán’s realist works were included in the national canon, in order to maintain the prestige and stability of the realist novel as the legitimate national narrative. Ironically, what qualified Pardo-Bazán’s works for the Spanish literary canon was what disqualified them from the Galician one. Pardo-Bazán’s transgression of gender roles, and her “masculine” literary pursuits (the realist novel), were what Manuel de Murguía, the “father” of Galician literature, attacked. For Murguía, Pardo-Bazán, as a novelist and a person, lacked appropriate “womanly” feelings; her prose was too “masculine.” Pardo-Bazán is contrasted with Murguía’s wife, Rosalía de Castro, whom he enshrined as the paradigm of Galician national literary production. Pereira-Muro underscores the gender discourses that framed the Galician national canon, which had to be emotive, lyrical, and “maternal,” so that it could be appropriated by the “fathers” of Galician nationalism, such as Murguía. Pereira-Muro dedicates the final chapter to Pardo-Bazán’s last novel, Dulce dueño (1911). The author argues that, in Dulce dueño, Pardo-Bazán was able to transcend an “impasse” in her intellectual and literary production: insisting on women’s public participation in the nation, but continuing to maintain a patriarchal view of literary and national culture. Pereira-Muro demonstrates that modernism, primarily due to its destabilization of gender categories, is the movement that helped Pardo create a narrative space that was “feminine” and at the same time modern. Dulce dueño’s female protagonist and narrator, through an intertextual dialogue with the Spanish literary canon, hagiography, and mysticism, harmonizes feminine literature with high culture in a manner that had not been available before. Pereira-Muro has conducted an extensive analysis of Pardo-Bazán’s letters, essays, speeches, and novels. This study...

La primera modernización teatral argentina y el surgimiento del teatro independiente

The emergence of the Independent Theatre movement was a determining factor in promoting theatrical modernization in Argentina. This study shows how Independent Theatre spurred the negation of national models and exercised a form of patricide that was much more effective than previous attempts at aesthetic and ideological rupture. The most important impetus behind modernization was Roberto Arlt, whose extraordinarily innovative work established rich intertextual dialogue with European models.

Uma análise semiótica da releitura de “o corvo” em os Simpsons

The present article analyzes the episode The Raven from the The Simpsons series, inspired by the homonymous poetic text by Edgar Allan Poe written in 1845. This episode dialogues with a well known classic of the American literature, which, when transposed to animation, brings new meanings to Poe´s text and this intersemiotic translation is able to provoke discussion about such reinterpretation. It is worth investigating how signs of the source culture from the nineteenth century have been translated into those of the target culture from the twentieth century; or to seek traces of irony in this intertextual dialogue with allusion to myths, deities, and figures from classical antiquity.

Palavra escrita (Bilac, Iessiênin e Augusto de Campos) e palavra cantada (Toquinho e Belchior): aspectos estilísticos do poema e da canção na Literatura e na MPB

Assumindo a Literatura e a Música Popular Brasileira enquanto práticas discursivas, nosso objetivo neste artigo é analisar os aspectos estilísticos de três enunciados dos gêneros poema e canção, produzidos respectivamente nas esferas discursivas literária e verbomusical, e que mantêm entre si um diálogo intertextual. Os textos analisados, sob a ótica dos estudos de Bakhtin e de seu Círculo, são o poema Até logo, até logo, companheiro, tradução de Augusto de Campos para texto de Sierguéi Iessiênin; a canção quase homônima, musicada por Toquinho a partir da tradução de Campos; e a canção Até mais ver, uma adaptação do poema de Iessiênin feita por Belchior, que dialoga também com o poema In extremis de Olavo Bilac. Em nosso estudo, verificamos como se dá a relação interdiscursiva, se de modo contratual ou polêmico, operada pelos autores-criadores Augusto de Campos, Toquinho e Belchior, a partir de Sierguéi Iessiênin.

‘God Save Our Queen!’ Percy Bysshe Shelley and Radical Appropriations of the British National Anthem

Introduction When Percy Shelley wrote ‘A New National Anthem’ in the months following Peterloo he was contributing to a tradition of radical appropriations of ‘God Save the King’ which had proliferated in the 1790s. Following the summer of 2012 in which the British national anthem was played on numerous occasions to celebrate the longevity of a monarch and sporting success, it seems pertinent to consider the provenance of this song. When the song ‘God Save the King’ emerged in the London theatres in 1745 under a new arrangement by Thomas Arne, it was as an anti-Catholic, xenophobic song aimed at boosting English morale following a defeat by Bonny Prince Charlie. What is less well known is that it was in fact an appropriation of an earlier Jacobite drinking song. This essay charts the evolution of this song through radical and loyalist incarnations thus illustrating the development of many popular ballads and songs during the eighteenth century and the ongoing battle for the ‘ownership’ of folk culture between the forces of radicalism and conservatism, a battle still being waged today. Radicals used the national anthem to harness the immediacy and accessibility of oral popular culture in order to disseminate ancient ideals of nation and liberty. Conservative appropriations, however, were designed to celebrate and support notions of monarch and empire through the creation of Self and Other. Different versions of ‘God Save the King’ originated in Wales, Scotland, Ireland and the United States, as well as England, thereby demonstrating widespread knowledge of the song and a desire to appropriate it for mainly radical purposes. Although ‘God Save the King’ is arguably a trope rather than a distinct genre, I demonstrate how, through an exploration of its literary evolution, it fulfils the function of a genre. According to Tilottama Rajan and Julia Wright, writers, including Shelley, were seeking to ‘alter the sociopolitical domain by using genre as a form of cultural intervention’ The intertextual dialogue created by these texts and their dependence on readers’ ‘horizons of expectations’ are illustrative of how many genres functioned in the Romantic period. The anthems share the framing device of a specific tune, which demonstrates both their inter-relatedness and how they reflect the shifting nature of national identity during this turbulent period. As Robert Branham aptly observes: ‘National songs inevitably occupy contested political territory and are frequently objects of contention between groups competing to define the nation’

Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire by Saikat Majumdar (review)

Reviewed by: Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire by Saikat Majumdar Marius Hentea Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire. Saikat Majumdar. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Pp. 248. $40.00 (cloth). In his 1924 essay “Boredom,” Siegfried Kracauer observed that it was becoming impossible “to find the peace and quiet necessary to be as thoroughly bored with the world as it ultimately deserves.” From Pascal to Lichtenberg and Cioran, there is a long history of witty aphorisms about boredom. Yet does boredom take on different forms, dependent upon history and culture, or gender and race? Saikat Majumdar’s Prose of the World shows how boredom and banality are conditioned by social forces, and makes a compelling case for the importance of boredom as literary affect through a global “archive” of four late-modernist colonial and postcolonial writers: James Joyce (Ireland), Katherine Mansfield (New Zealand), Zoë Wicomb (South Africa), and Amit Chaudhuri (India). If boredom is often considered to be a narrative lack—something that literature must, by its very nature, cover up or dismiss (one recalls “Mr Bailey, Grocer,” the unfinished novel that Biffen tries to write in New Grub Street)—Majumdar seeks to show how boredom lies at the very heart of a revitalized engagement with the experience of life-at-the-margins. According to Majumdar, the novel of spectacular and dramatic events is uncharacteristic to the postcolonial experience. The great milestones of history—such as the partition of India, or the struggle against apartheid—that seem to fuse individual and collective destinies into “national allegories” are rare things indeed, for the overwhelming experience of living beyond the metropole is conditioned by cultural lack, paralysis, immobility, and ceaseless routine. Majumdar’s book operates on two levels. Firstly, it seeks to understand the narratological status of the everyday, exploring how “the banality of eventlessness” (7) can serve as a structural basis for the literary text. Secondly, it addresses a “historically specific moment” (105) in which imperial domination comes in contact with the emergence of local cultural production. Prose of the World is most engaging when it reflects on the imperial backgrounds and specific historical concerns shaping its literary case studies through varied readings of “boredom.” For example, Majumdar deftly shows how a banal object like Bloom’s potato talisman bears suggestive symbolic significance against the historical backdrop of the Irish potato famine, as well as the country’s modern cultural reality. He also discusses how Mansfield’s fiction negotiated the historical shadow of violence within Maori-settler relations. The two chapters on Wicomb and Chaudhuri relate their works historically, but also contain engaging theoretical discussions of an anthropological turn in literary studies and the canonization of master narratives in postcolonial fiction. Although Majumdar claims that boredom, as a “noncathartic motif” (6), has been relatively sidelined in literary criticism, it is becoming a hot topic in the current late-capitalist moment. [End Page 572] The motif manifests itself in the form of IRS employees in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011) or of Norwegian “slow television,” showing hours of characters performing mundane tasks like sewing or chopping wood. Two other important recent critical inquiries into boredom not mentioned by Majumbar include Peter Toohey’s Boredom: A Lively History (2011) and Alison Pease’s Modernism, Feminism, and the Culture of Boredom (2012). While Toohey’s book engagingly relates the pleasure of ennui, Pease’s work is more solidly literary-historical, describing the construction of a collective feminist identity in early twentieth-century Britain through the optic of boredom and inactivity. This is a missed opportunity for a constructive intertextual dialogue, given Majumdar’s gendered readings of Mansfield and Wicomb. A more significant shortcoming of Majumdar’s book is that it does not substantively engage with boredom as a cultural and literary phenomenon in the metropolis. Majumdar’s philological investigation reveals that boredom is a key theme in the modern history of the novel form. As Samuel Johnson put it in his attack on literary fiction in The Rambler, no good could come from literature written for “the young, the ignorant, and the idle.” In other words, the novel’s ability to...

What is Hidden in Västerbotten’s Stomach?

The article investigates the complex intertextual dialogue between Torgny Lindgren’s Minnen (2010) and Augustine’s Confessions, from which Lindgren has taken the motto of his autobiography. By using the patristic intertext as a starting point, the investigation intends to show how Lindgren has constructed his image of Västerbotten. The article is divided into four parts. The first part (I), establishes the heuristic principles of the investigation, which adhere to the recent tendency in patristic studies to observe the heterogeneous character of Augustine’s world of thought. The second part of the article (II) charts parallels between text and intertext in their portrayal of grace, evil, and man. It emerges that those elements of Lindgren’s world view which are particularly closely related to Augustinian theology are also the ones that possess a particularly strong Västerbottnian character. This intertextual affinity can be explained not only with reference to the Lutheran tradition of Västerbotten, but also has to be related to the text’s specificstructure of memoria, which is unravelled in the remaining parts (III–IV). On the basis of modern cultural anthropological theories of memory, the third part demonstrates that most of the differences between text and intertext can be linked to the cultural memory of modernity, and document the rise and fall of industrial subjectivity. Lindgren embeds his autobiographical version of Västerbotten into the basic structure of modern memory, transforms it into a quasi-subject, and taints it with the symptoms of decay that plague the industrial ‘I.’ In the same as Western modernity, Minnen draws the majority of its metaphors of dissolution from Augustine’s paradigmatic doctrine of sin. The fourth part of the article (IV) aims to analyse the autobiography’s mechanisms of substitution. It is argued that these attempt—in analogy to many Western critics of modernity—to counteract the crisis of industrial cultural memory by reviving the Augustinian forms of memoria and creating a synthesis of pre-industrial and industrial. Within the quasi-subject of Västerbotten and its wealth of agrarian objects, Lindgren finds adequate metaphorical models for use in his compensatory project of counter-memory. The article concludes by observing that, just as Minnen’s productive dialogue with Augustine allows it to recapitulate the history of Western memory, Lindgren’s Västerbotten is elevated to the status of a universal symbol of European consciousness and its fate.

The Bhakta and the Sage: An Intertextual Dialogue

Comparing the Bhagavad Gītā and the Buddhist essay “Prajnā is Not-knowing” (Panruo Wuzhi 般若無知) yields interesting insights. The texts have similar dialogical structures and discuss complex philosophical matters. Rhetorically, both texts weave together quotations and allusions from other texts, make liberal use of paradox, and have decidedly spiritual intentions. Their differences, though, remain striking. They emerge from distinct circumstances and their original languages (Sanskrit, Chinese) differ markedly. Stylistically, “Prajnā” is more intellectual and less devotional, espousing a distinctly “this worldly” ideal; by contrast, the Gītā is more dramatic. While espousing “this worldly” ideals, the Gītā is more inclusive and thus more accessible to a broad audience; on the contrary, “Prajnā” has a subtler effect, its “dark” qualities appealing to a more select group. Therefore, while these texts are not “the same,” reading across their convergences and divergences can lead to a deeper understanding of mysticism and cross-cultural spirituality.

Writing Against the Current: The New Jewish Woman, Modernity, and the Critique of National Ideology in Y. Bershadsky's Novel <em>Neged hazerem</em>

This essay examines the figure of the New Jewish Woman in Yeshiahu Bershadsky’s nearly forgotten novel Neged hazerem (Against the Current; 1901). Whereas most Hebrew literature at the opening of the twentieth century turned to the smaller genres of the sketch, short story, or novella, Neged hazerem took on the expansive form of the novel to represent the larger social and spiritual transformations of the 1880s and 1890s, namely, the decline of the Haskalah movement, the undermining of Jewish tradition, and the rise of the Zionist Hibbat Tsiyon movement. The novel also diverges from much Hebrew literature of the period by drawing on the modernist figure of the New Woman, together with contemporaneous discourses on female sexuality, as the central vehicle for exploring the conflicts of Jewish modernity. This essay considers how Bershadsky adopts the figure of the New Woman from modernist discourse within a Jewish context to illustrate how the questions of secularization and the conflict between assimilation and tradition are presented as a drama that plays out around these female figures. It also considers how the New Jewish Woman is central to the novel’s representation of the national idea, where fantasies of the female body become imbricated within the national vision that the novel both constructs and explores. This essay argues that Neged hazerem draws on this figure and fantasies about her to engage in an intertextual dialogue with early Zionist texts, from Abraham Mapu’s Ahavat tziyon and Hibbat Tsiyon poetry, to the Zionist utopias that began to flourish at this time. Bershadsky, who did not join the Zionist movement, and remained critical of it, employs these New Jewish Woman figures to offer a vision of Jewish modernity that runs counter to the emerging national narrative, and points to the city in the Diaspora as the privileged locus for the reformulation of modern Jewish gendered identities.

‘In Transit’: Taxi Driving as a Mini Paradigm in Gaito Gazdanov’s Night Roads and Helen Potrebenko’s Taxi!

this essay will explore the experience of taxi driving in modernist Russian-French writer Gaito Gazdanov’s Night Roads and postmodern Ukrainian-Canadian writer Helen Potrebenko’s Taxi!. Both texts are exilic in nature (and as such, prime objects of comparative study), and both explore the geographic and social boundaries of the city in order to reveal the metaphysical and psychological boundaries of exilic/migrant identity. Across time, these two novels engage in a fascinating intertextual dialogue. Night Roads was written after Gazdanov left revolutionary Russia; Taxi! was published after Potrebenko migrated from her native Alberta to Vancouver. Both novels use taxi driving as a metaphor to reflect upon the human condition in the urban setting. Yet their fundamentally different aesthetics of the subject link the experience of taxi driving to various levels of the subject’s freedom, as well as to contrasting images of the city.

Vietnam and Beyond: Tim O’Brien and the Power of Storytelling by Stefania Ciocia (review)

Reviewed by: Vietnam and Beyond: Tim O’Brien and the Power of Storytelling by Stefania Ciocia Ty Hawkins Ciocia, Stefania. Vietnam and Beyond: Tim O’Brien and the Power of Storytelling. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012. 256pp. $99.95. With Vietnam and Beyond: Tim O’Brien and the Power of Storytelling, Stefania Ciocia has published the first scholarly monograph devoted solely to Tim O’Brien to appear in more than a decade. Ciocia attempts to elevate O’Brien to the status of a “world author,” which positions her to argue for the universality of major O’Brien themes. Of particular importance to her effort is his concept of “story-truth,” which she examines from myriad angles in a text that eschews a chronological treatment of O’Brien, favoring a thematic approach instead. Ciocia claims a desire to correct a certain “pigeon-holing” of O’Brien as solely a war author so that his work might be “judged against the parameters of great literature tout court” (2). However, her study falls short of that goal, largely because she fails to engage O’Brien with sufficient rigor. This lack of rigor results in a book whose synthetic capacity outweighs its generative potential. For Ciocia, there exists an odd contradiction at the heart of O’Brien’s reception. On the one hand, she writes, we engage O’Brien as an author whose concerns have global relevance. On the other hand, we confine O’Brien to the realm of US Vietnam War fiction. She wants us to understand that “Vietnam is for O’Brien a productive starting point for the treatment of wider themes with a deep, universal resonance... and for the development of thought-provoking formal experiments underpinned by a strong sense of one’s moral accountability” (2). Much of Ciocia’s study devotes itself to uncovering O’Brien’s skill in both of these areas; she is particularly interested in O’Brien’s contribution to postmodern literary aesthetics and O’Brien’s competence as a cultural critic. She sees these two aspects of O’Brien’s work as interdependent and reconciled through O’Brien’s devotion to “story-truth.” As those familiar with his canon will recall, O’Brien opposes “story-truth” to “happening-truth,” and privileges the former over the latter in a dichotomy perhaps guilty of laying the groundwork for a paralytic relativism. However, Ciocia does not challenge O’Brien on this issue, writing, [End Page 705] O’Brien firmly rejects the moral authority typically associated with experience, in favour of a fragile, and always provisional, personal connection with the Other, to be sought after in the endless refashioning of stories and in the imaginative identification with the plight of fellow human beings—an imperfect foundation for our ethical commitments, and yet the only foundation available to us at all. (12) Ciocia does offer intriguing ideas relevant to O’Brien’s place in literary history. She proves especially interesting when discussing O’Brien’s relationship to Joseph Conrad, whose novella, Heart of Darkness, has served as a major influence for a number of US Vietnam War writers and filmmakers. Ciocia distinguishes between Conrad’s modernism and O’Brien’s postmodernism by foregrounding the concept of performance, writing that O’Brien’s fiction “enacts the belief that truth can be painstakingly summoned and momentarily glimpsed through the performativity of the narrative act” (35). She offers an extensive close-reading of O’Brien’s story, “The Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” uncovering an intertextual dialogue of sorts between Conrad and O’Brien. Unfortunately, Ciocia pushes this too far. Her argument that protagonist Mary Anne Bell’s fate—Mary Anne’s performance, as it were—represents a kind of gender-bending transcendence is unearned. Rather, a better reading of the end of “Sweetheart” would uncover how the war subsumes Mary Anne, which in turn points to how The Things They Carried shows us the power of war to reinforce traditional gender norms. This is a crucial lesson in a war-themed text that otherwise proves unconventionally inviting to women readers, as Ciocia herself clarifies. Besides Conrad, Ciocia also traces O’Brien’s literary heritage to Hawthorne, Melville, and Hemingway, among other figures...

A leitura: entre expectativa e memória

In this paper, covering a reflective journey signalled by the indications running through the work of some prominent Portuguese authors, analyses the diverse ways of how the act of reading a text develops, by dissolving the voice of the author/poet within the experience of the reader. From the picture on the cover, until the title and the epigraph(s), the text announces and anticipates itself to the reader, creating an expectation that it will be consummated only through its full reading. The aesthetic experience of the author, which is represented/recognized through the intertextual dialogue, in a progressive manifestation of its metamorphic memory, superimposes images which trigger an effect of hesitation and suspense on the reader. Thus, the fictional world, synecdoche and symbol of a real environment, becomes a common ground to the writer and the reader, tangling them in a game of perceptions and recognitions, where their memories and their ghosts, revealed through a panoramic lens, come to the surface, making them accomplices or promoting their separation.

Shakespeare in Company by Bart Van Es (review)

Reviewed by: Shakespeare in Company by Bart Van Es Tim Fitzpatrick (bio) Bart Van Es . Shakespeare in Company. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xiv + 357 + 12 b/w illus. $45.00. This is an important book that ably treads the fine line between, on the one hand, explaining or even discounting the artistic work by recourse to a consideration of its conditions of production, and, on the other, consigning it to an autonomous decontextualized realm of "universality": There is inevitably a connection between the literary features of a work and the material conditions of its creation. Of course, lines of poetry are crafted by individuals, but they are also moulded by surrounding social contexts and tailored to specific practical demands. (37) The author claims, and makes his argument with considerable sophistication, that the strength of his approach lies in the welding of theater history to textual criticism—an approach that enables the development of a complex argument that, without minimizing their artistic and literary merit, places Shakespeare's plays in their historical context of production and delineates the ways in which they reflect that context: This book has set out a history of Shakespeare's writing that is based on his evolving material circumstances and institutional affiliations.... It could be said to bring together two separate stands of current thought on the playwright. On the one hand there is the work of theatre historians, doing more and more to uncover the practical realities of early modern performance.... On the other there is a more literary criticism that explores the classically informed wit of the playwright and connects him to a Renaissance culture of imitation. (309) At its center is the argument "that Shakespeare's decision to become a stake-holder in the theatre industry transformed and would continue to affect the way that he wrote his plays" (2). But Shakespeare was always, Van Es argues, writing "in company": initially in the literary company of other playwrights, with whose works the early plays are in intertextual dialogue; then in the company of actors when he joined the Lord Chamberlain's Men; then in the closer company of sharers and householders at their new fixed venue, the Globe; and finally again in the company of playwrights through collaboration and (again) intertextual links to the work in particular of Fletcher. Van Es stresses "the deep, fibrous intertextuality of Shakespeare's early work" (28); his suggestion that it is "often spectacularly imitative" (36) has important ramifications for reading characters such as Aaron in Titus Andronicus, or Richard III. He then links already well-attested stylistic developments around 1594 to the fact that at this time Shakespeare became a sharer in the Lord Chamberlain's Men (81). He argues for the significance of an emerging interest in the mechanics [End Page 410] of a play's preparation for the stage in Love's Labour's Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream (79), a move to relational characterization (93), and evidence of writing for the skills and profiles of the performers of the company (98). "The company—its sharers, its hired men, and its apprenticed boy players taking women's and children's parts—were the matrix through which he could structure his thinking" (111). This put Shakespeare in a unique position among his contemporaries (125), a singularity further increased with the building of the Globe in 1599: "During these early years of the fellowship Shakespeare was singular as a playwright within a company of relative equals, but with the construction of the Globe the nature of this singularity would change" (146). The author's treatment of the Globe period (1599 until the long-postponed initiation of Blackfriars in 1608) concentrates on Shakespeare's relations with Robert Armin and Richard Burbage, and the extent to which their particular talents and "roles" fed into the plays: "More fully than any other player, Armin illustrates the effect of Shakespeare's position as a sharer and housekeeper. The two men were bound together in a close association that left its imprint on at least five plays" (193). Van Es argues that the initiation of the Blackfriars as a second performance venue in 1608 was another watershed, but...

Critical & Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings

Critical & Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales: An Intertextual Dialogue between Fairy-Tale Scholarship and Postmodern Retellings