Intertextual Allusions Research Articles

"Véren és bűnökön át..." Martin Kušej rendezéseinek politikussága és pszichoanalitikus olvasata

The Bayerische Staatsoper presented Kušej’s interpretation of Macbeth in 2008, a piece of oneiric visual dramaturgy that combined the superimposed power struggles and personal tragedies within a post-apocalyptic scenography. This paper highlights cinematic intertextual allusions and takes a psychoanalytical approach to Kušej’s interpretation of Verdi, focusing primarily on the questions of power hunger, the motif of childlessness, the symbolic/metaphorical images of death and (among other things) Freud’s concept of the uncanny.

An Analysis of Intertextuality in William Blake’s Companion Poems: The Lamb and The Tyger

This study undertakes a thorough analysis of the aspects of intertextuality and their undertones in William Blake’s companion poems:The Lamb (1789) from the Songs of Innocence and The Tyger (1794) from the Songs of Experience. These poems are often read side by side since they are described as counterparts to one another reflecting Blake’s dualistic ideology on the conflicting states of the human soul (good vs. evil). The researchers adopted Charles Bazerman’s(2004) theory in analyzing intertextuality within texts. The analysis of the poems revealed that there are 22 instances of religious and literary intertextual allusions within both poems and their type of textual integration was mainly description. In addition, a great percentage of those allusions consist of religious undertones which help reflect the dualistic approach that Blake adopted in his volumes of poetry.

Style of religious texts as a potential hindrance in interpreter training

According to the thematic progression model of Janikowski (2011) religious texts can be used at the early stages of interpreter training. The reservations against such placement of allegedly stylistically sophisticated texts are scrutinised in the following paper by means of (1) developing a set of features of spoken religious discourse and (2) empirically testing their frequency in a convenience corpus. The results do show an unexpectedly high level of metaphorical saturation of spoken religious texts (1.4 per minute of speech), but they also show that only 8% of these metaphors were unconventional and that speakers sometimes employed special means of facilitating metaphor processing. Additionally, the appearance of other markers traditionally recognised as elements of religious style (intertextual allusions, markers of higher register and other figures of speech) was only marginal. Thus, the results support the use of religious texts as the second stage in thematic development, however, with a set of recommendations.

The Role of Architecture in Constructing Gameworlds: Intertextual Allusions, Metaphorical Representations and Societal Ethics in Dishonored

In this article, we present a close analysis of the role that the steampunk industrial Victorian architecture in Dishonored (2012) has in constructing the player’s experience and knowledge of the gameworld. Through various intertextual allusions and metaphorical representations, we argue the architecture works as an important storytelling element, contextualizing information that the player learns and conveying information about the game’s main characters, similar to the ways that architecture is utilized in other visual media such as television and film. In addition, we also argue that the architecture in Dishonored plays a crucial role in conveying to the player information about the morals and values of the fictional society, key to the game’s moral-choice gameplay.

Il perpetuum mobile del desiderio Cox di Christoph Ransmayr e la raffigurazione letteraria del cosmopolitismo settecentesco tra esotismo e vanità

The article sets out to analyse Christoph Ransmayr’s latest novel Cox oder Der Lauf der Zeit (2016) in the light of recent criticism. The complex relationship between 18th-century cosmopolitanism and its fictional adaptation features prominently in the novel. Our focus is upon the making of characters’ identities, the literary and visual techniques of narration (especially intertextual allusions and ekphrasis), and the coalescence of time, decay and desire as displayed in the novel.

Shame (2011) de Steve McQueen. El cine en segundo grado: la hipertextualidad

El objetivo de este trabajo es proponer la existencia de una relación transtextual de hipertextualidad entre Shame (2011), película dirigida por el director británico Steve McQueen, y American Psycho de Mary Harron (2000), adaptación cinematográfica de la novela homónima de Bret Easton Ellis (1991). El fundamento de esta hipótesis descansa tanto en la similitud de los respectivos argumentos y de los recursos cinematográficos (estructurales, transtextuales y retóricos) empleados en las dos películas, como en la intención artística de los cineastas. En un trabajo subsiguiente, se identificará y analizará una serie de citas intertextuales de diferente procedencia también presentes en el filme de McQueen. La superposición de diferentes discursos convierte a Shame en un rico palimpsesto transtextual que proyecta su propio significado a partir de la suma de las significaciones de sus textos subyacentes. Parafraseando la fórmula del semiólogo literario francés Gérard Genette, cuya metodología ha servido de base para el análisis, Shame de Steve McQueen resulta un buen testimonio de “cine en segundo grado”.

Revisiting the ‘Problem’ of Anthropomorphism through Ceridwen Dovey’s *Only the Animals* (2014)

In Ceridwen Dovey’s short story cycle, Only the Animals, inter-textual allusions to established fictional animals are imposed onto settings of human conflict and ventriloquised through diverse animal subjects. This paper defends narrating from a non-human animal perspective, not as a radical act, but as a move to reinvigorate our conceptions of human-animal relations. Meaningful encounters between human and non-human animals are presented with a recognition of the impossibility of full and mutual inter-species understanding. The juxtaposition of the limits of figuring literary animals with human/animal intimacy and incomprehension marks Dovey’s work as a logical progression of some ideas presented in J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. This paper reads Dovey’s deployment of textual self-referentiality and overt intersection with Coetzee’s work in Only the Animals as a reflexive writing form that works to critique another representational dispossession: that of anthropocentric realism. Both works understand that humans do not share language with non-human animals but we often meet questions of the animal through stories. This makes the stories we tell highly significant; indeed – vital – components of the cultural landscape.

More than “Noise”: Music as Pacemaker in As You Like It

ABSTRACTMusic in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It has often been described as accessory and irrelevant to the plot, as if it could be extracted without harm to the play. This, however, underestimates the power of music to function as pacemaker in early modern drama. An examination of the placement of the songs in As You Like It shows music’s essential role in controlling the dramatic movement, and offers ways of creating communal performances between actors and audience. Music thus governs the structure of the play, as well as its tone and the experience of it. An exploration of music on the Elizabethan stage sets up the discussion of each song in the play through its musical kind, textual history, and agency at the specific moment of the pastoral plot. Songs allow intertextual allusions, points of rest, and creation of fellow feeling between audience members and actors that are intrinsic to both plot and experience of Shakespeare’s drama. Rather than accessory, music in As You Like it, it will become clear, assumes another power to effect change both in its play-world, as well as in ours then and now.

Hannibal in Gades: An Inquiry into the Poetic Technique of Silius Italicus in "Punica" Three

Located in Punica Three, the description of Hercules’ temple and Hannibal’s prophetic dream serve as important instruments of both narrative and poetic techniques, both anticipating events to come and positioning the plot within the intricate nexus of symbols and intertextual allusions that appear to strengthen the Carthaginian’s resolve while simultaneously emphasizing the futility of his efforts. At the same time, the two may be studied as examples of sophisticated poetic technique, their reading heavily dependent on reader’s knowledge of the semantic framework of Greco-Roman culture.

Experiencing Time in Brian Cherney’s String Quartet No. 4 (1994)

Brian Cherney’s Fourth String Quartet (1994), in one movement lasting half an hour, is striking for its formal coherence and diversity of materials. The work achieves large-scale cohesion not only through an intricate interplay of three simultaneously unfolding “main structures”—four attacca movements in one, on one level, seven sections forming certain temporal proportions, on another, and four cycles of “breathing rhythms” derived from the same proportions on a third level, as documented in the manuscript sources—but also through the continually fluctuating tension we experience throughout the movement between ontological and psychological time. Pierre Souvtchinsky’s notion of a “counterpoint” between “ontological time” (i.e., clock or real time) and a particular music’s inherent time shaped by “the material and technical means by which [the] music is expressed” is referenced to demonstrate how in Cherney’s quartet fixed proportions and slow, stable polyrhythms active in the background afford space for foreground activity that has its own sense of time. The article further explores the notion of time in a second, metaphorical dimension, as concerns intertextual allusions in the quartet.

Roman som skuespill: Sjangerhybriditet i Erlend Loes Stille dager i Mixing Part

Abstract Erlend Loe’s novel Stille dager i Mixing Part (2009, Quiet Days in Mixing Part) focuses on a marital crisis of a Norwegian couple on vacation in Germany. The husband, Bror Telemann, is a dramaturg who dreams of writing a major play, and he tries in vain to begin to write one. The novel is a third-person narrative, but it actually contains few narrative passages: most of the text consists of dialogues. The text is, in fact, a hybrid of two genres – part novel, part play. This seems to be a consciously chosen aesthetic strategy on Loe’s part. The main thematic aspects of Stille dager i Mixing Part are tied up with drama and theatre in various ways. This article shows how genre hybridity, aided by intertextual allusions, contributes to representing these main aspects.

Disturbingly (Dis)Similar

Abstract In Apocolocyntosis 13 the figure of Narcissus is not a minor character with a solely ornamental function but part of a complex play of echoes, repetitions, and similarities. Exploiting the fact that this particular freedman of Claudius was named Narcissus, Seneca turns the figure into a mirror image of Claudius and uses it to make subtle intertextual allusions. In this way, he destabilises the identities of Claudius and Narcissus to ridicule Claudius even further and expose him as a weak and cruel princeps who is unable to recognise himself.

Visual pragmatics of intertextuality: ghosts from Wonderland in Jeanette Winterson’s Gut Symmetries (1997)

ABSTRACT Though intertextual allusions can be very legible and empirically verifiable, they more often elicit elusive flickers of recognition that we struggle to find a use for when interpreting texts. This paper explores the doubt inherent in textual interplay: considering intertextuality as a form of haunting, it focuses on fleeting references that make readers see the ghosts of characters and words past hovering between the lines. It does so by analysing Winterson’s Gut Symmetries (1997), a novel fascinated with the spectral quality of the universe described by contemporary physics, and the resonance between the paradoxes of quantum reality and the whimsical logic of Carroll’s wonderlands. Winterson's treatment of the Carrollian intertext signals a paradigmatic change in our attempts at making sense. In their visual liminality and stubborn reluctance to signify, intertextual creatures remind us that meaning is not within the sign, but emerges in the provisional, possibly infelicitous interaction between linguistic entities. This emphasis on the pragmatics of verbal and visual encounter between texts and readers calls for another theory of interpretation: one which considers the fragility of recognition, not as an obstacle to ‘proper’ practices of reading, but as the very condition through which meaning can emerge.

Original Copies in Georges Perec and Andy Warhol by Priya Wadhera

Reviewed by: Original Copies in Georges Perec and Andy Warhol by Priya Wadhera Warren Motte Priya Wadhera. Original Copies in Georges Perec and Andy Warhol. Leiden and Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2017. Pp. 204. $100.00. Recognizing that it may strike some people as a bit inconsonant to compare Georges Perec and Andy Warhol, Priya Wadhera argues a brief for that comparison early on in her book. Both of them are playful, she suggests; both challenged prevailing conventions; both worked within constraints while they pushed the limits of the possible; both overcame early critical indifference and established themselves as widely influential figures in late twentieth-century culture. Their respective practices converge upon the notion of the copy, she contends, and on the strategic manipulation of that notion in order to ask fundamental questions about the nature of art in our time. She proposes to parse their work in an attempt to put into evidence what is "original" in the copies that they put on display. "My focus lies primarily with Perec," Wadhera warns her reader in the introduction (3), and what follows bears that out, for she does not turn to Warhol with any sustained attention until the final pages of her book. Yet what she has to say about Perec and his mimetic techniques is compelling enough to compensate for that imbalance. Her discussion is devoted mainly to Un cabinet d'amateur (1979), a brief novel that entertains very strong inter-textual relations with what is often considered Perec's masterpiece, La vie mode d'emploi (1978). In the former text, Perec plays with the idea of the copy from first page to last, on a variety of levels: through ekphrasis on a first and most obvious level, but also, more subtly, through pastiche, mise en abyme, autoallusion, and other strategies still. Four principal questions interest Wadhera: "what is a copy, what is copied, how is it copied, and why is it copied?" (9). Addressing those questions, she postulates a useful typology of the copy in Un cabinet d'amateur, limning three broad categories: pastiches of art history and criticism; evocations of paintings; and intertextual allusions. Devoting several chapters to each of those categories, Wadhera examines them in pleasing, rigorous detail. Along the way, she visits certain other, related concerns. She thinks about forgery, for instance, and about the sometimes uncertain relations between the copy and the "fake." Calling upon the way that Gérard Genette understands intertextuality, she reflects on quotation, on plagiarism, and on allusion. Each of those gestures involves copying, of course, though in rather different modes. In her final chapter, entitled "Copy Play in Perec and Warhol," Wadhera underscores the ludic, articulative impulse that animates the best work of those artists, and she examines how they encourage us to reconsider the principle of authenticity and the value that we invest in it, a reconsideration that may have serious implications for the way we imagine the aesthetic artifact and its uses. [End Page 155] Warren Motte University of Colorado Boulder Copyright © 2019 L'Esprit Créateur

Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason by Mary Ann Caws

 Reviews ture. e book’s deep excavation of J. M. Coetzee’s interests in central Europe at the point of difficult transition from the Austro-Hungarian empire and its handling of the subversive intertextual allusion of Zoë Wicomb’s fiction demonstrates, among other things, that such writing is by its very nature global. Modelling a method of interpretation that is ultimately hopeful, this book has much to say about the fates of literary reading in uncertain times, and the potential expansiveness of scholarly interest against the segmentation and marketization of academic labour. U  B A R Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason. By M A C. London: Reaktion. . xx+ pp. £.. ISBN ––––. ere is a paradox in writing the biography of a writer who declared the self detestable , derided the notion of person, and excoriated Montaigne for attempting to paint a portrait of himself. Why risk reducing Pascal’s thoroughly anti-subjective project, grounded on extraordinary scientific, philosophical, and theological reflections , to the personal and the psychopathological? In this masterful short biography Mary Ann Caws avoids such pitfalls by focusing not on character but on Pascal’s style of life, and in so doing manages to introduce readers to the crux of his thought. Her Pascal is a ‘tense thinker’, who rarely spends time on ideas beyond his first brilliant intuitions and experiments, always afforded by circumstances and chance encounters. For Pascal, it is sufficient that these ideas contradict the obvious: there is void in nature, an object is an infinity of views, a machine can think, the fools are precisely those who think themselves smart, especially in politics, etc. A thinker of tensions who finds the Cartesian method naive, Pascal constantly stages contradictory perspectives on a complex universe. Each chapter links Pascal’s inventions to the pressure of circumstances. e theory of conical sections follows his move to Paris and his induction into Mersenne’s Académie. Pascal invents the calculator aer his father’s move to Rouen as a tax collector. e chance discovery of Jansenism leads to the first conversion and deepens Pascal’s relationship with his sister Jacqueline, a significant writer and actress. He invents probability theory during his ‘worldly’ period of active friendship with gamblers. is leads to the Wager argument (Caws manages to show its significance without repeating the accumulated scholarship). e second conversion follows the night of the Mémorial, a text Pascal wore sewn in the lining of his coat and which Caws reads as a poetic expression of the experience of the ineffable, leading to the first project of an Apology for Christianity presented to M. de Sacy. e war staged by Les Provinciales (a politicaltheological assault against the Jesuits as well as a phenomenology of bad faith) is linked to the miracle of his niece’s cure in Port-Royal. At the end of a trajectory linking peaks of thought to major events, Caws reads the Pensées not just as an anthropological and theological reformulation of all the strands of Pascal’s thought but also as a reflection on thinking and style which, to the modern reader, is a school of writing. MLR, .,   In places Caws could have gone further. In the Entretien with Sacy, Pascal did not just juxtapose Montaigne and Descartes, but built a philosophical ‘machine infernale’ where Stoicism and scepticism would reveal each other’s vanity, both for life and for salvation. As for the Pensées, Caws’s equation of fragment with aphorism is debatable. e Entretien, L’Esprit de la géométrie, several fragments marked as preface, chapter sections, and conclusion, and public readings given by Pascal of some of the Pensées assembled into bundles indicate a coherent apologetical project . Had he not died prematurely, he would surely have merged the fragments into chapters, while maintaining the aphoristic nature of many existential paradoxes pointing only to a solution beyond existence. More could be said in that regard on miracles and prophecies as irrational but indubitable proofs in history. Nietzsche and perhaps Char and Foucault could have been more explicitly discussed in the chapter on posterity, and the satirical Rondeau against the Jesuits needs...

Literary Forms, Techniques, & Methods of Study

Literary Forms, Techniques, & Methods of Study Christopher T. Begg 1837. David M. Carr, "Criteria and Periodization in Dating Biblical Texts in Parts of the Persian Period," Dating Biblical Texts, 11-18 [see #2364]. Employing literary, historical, and linguistic criteria, C.'s programmatic essay distinguishes between biblical texts produced early in the Persian period and those from later in that period. C. observes that literary texts from the beginning of the Persian period would be less likely to feature an emphasis on pentateuchal traditions (particularly Priestly pentateuchal traditions), less inclined to reflect Persian sponsorship (and perhaps more likely to feature extravagant hopes for a return to a sovereign Israel), and more likely to be written in archaic Hebrew. By the end of the Persian period and the beginning of the Hellenistic period, there appear texts with a more explicit emphasis on Persian sponsorship, links to the combined Pentateuch (with an increasing emphasis on Priestly traditions), and the occasional breakdown of archaic Hebrew literary dialect, including more mixing of Aramaic and other (especially Persian) isoglosses. Against this background, C. asks who might have been responsible for the Persian period texts found in the Hebrew Bible and finds it more likely that priests were the authors of most of the Hebrew textual materials in Persian-period Yehud (as opposed to a scenario in which both priests and non-priests shared a transferred control over major normative texts across this period). He concludes that a consistent differentiation feature across the Persian period appears to be the move from remnants of scribal diversity and old literary standards at the outset of the period to some breakdown of those scribal standards with the emergence of Priestly domination over scribalism toward the end of the Persian period. [Adapted from published abstract—C.T.B.] 1838. [Matt 1:1-17, etc.] Bernard Gosse, "The 42 Generations of the Genealogy of Jesus in Matt 1:1-17, and the Symbolism of [the] Number 42, Curse or Blessing in the Bible and in Egypt," StBSlov 10 (2018) 142-51. The genealogy of Jesus given in Matt 1:1-17 features 42 generations, thereby highlighting a number, which in the ANE and in the OT symbolizes a curse which does not [End Page 603] exclude the possibility of blessing. In the OT, the number is so used in the story of the succession of the kings in the Books of Kings and Chronicles (see the 42-year "curse of King Ahaziah" in 2 Chr 22:2), the Psalter (see the 42 psalms making up the Elohistic Psalter in Psalms 42–83, which raise the question of what is to happen thereafter), and the story of Balaam in Numbers 22–24 (where there is mention of 42 sacrifices for purposes of cursing that are ultimately oriented to blessing). This feature has parallels outside the OT as well, particularly in Egypt, in the Book of the Dead and the division of Egypt into 42 nomes. [Adapted from published abstract—C.T.B.] 1839. [Judges 13; 1 Samuel 1–2] Paola Mollo, "Did It Please God to Kill Them?" Hen 36 (2014) 86-105. M.'s article provides a literary comparison of the birth account of two famous and complex characters of the Bible: Samson (Judges 13) and Samuel (1 Samuel 1–2). She analyzes their birth stories in terms of their respective structures, motifs, concepts, and wording. In many cases, the two accounts directly mirror one another, while in others certain shared elements are transformed, or even stand in sharp opposition from one to the other. M. devotes special attention to the literary techniques employed in the two texts, by means of which they play with conventional elements and create intertextual allusions. M.'s final considerations about the narrative logic behind the two stories provides a comprehensive interpretation of the elements of contrast between them. Her article concludes by calling attention to a particularly intriguing parallel between them which she seeks to elucidate in light of the dynamic of similarity and difference at work in and between the two stories. [Adapted from published abstract—C.T.B.] 1840. [Judges 17–18] José Luis Sicre...

Inferno and Los Caprichos of a Translator. Translation of Intertextual References in Andrzej Bursa’s Poems

In his poetic output, Andrzej Bursa alluded to a variety of Polish and foreign artistic works: mostly poetry and prose, but not only (e.g. Goya’s Los Caprichos and Dante’s Divine Comedy). The paper discusses the intertextual allusions in Bursa’s poems and analyzes the translation techniques applied Kevin Christianson and Halina Abłamowicz (Utwory zebrane. Selected Poems, 2008). In the first part, a brief introduction of the issue of intertextuality and its translation is presented. The analysis concerns the function of those allusions and it leads to seeing what was preserved and what was lost in translation, and in what way it influences the final form of the English versions. As in a number of cases the translators did not use the already existing (and published) English translations of the quoted works, a question are asked whether the references remained recognizable.

Two New Allusions: Samuel Johnson and the Book of Common Prayer, Boswell, and Apollonius of Rhodes

ABSTRACTBoth Samuel Johnson and his disciple James Boswell were masters of deploying intertextual allusions to impart greater freight to their meaning. In Rambler 8 Johnson covertly alludes to the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, while in the Tour to the Hebrides Boswell alludes to Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica. In both cases, these allusions offer considerable insight into characteristic aspects of the art and minds of the two authors. They share a dedication to intertextuality as an important literary technique. However, the two examples reveal important differences: Johnson emerges as a traditional public Christian humanist, while Boswell reveals himself as a private, proto-Romantic confessionalist.

“A Vision for the End of Days”: Deferral of Revelation in Daniel and at the End of Mark

Abstract An important clue to the meaning of Mark 16,8 has not received adequate attention. The verse is an intertextual allusion to Dan 10,7. Daniel 10–12 establishes a pattern of revelation, concealment, and future revelation, in which the resurrection of the dead is apocalyptically deferred – its truth not confirmable until it happens at the end of days. A similar pattern of concealment and revelation characterizes Mark’s gospel. At the end of the gospel, the resurrection of Jesus is announced (and so revealed) in story time, but further concealed in discourse time. In the act of narrating, the message is once again revealed. With the omission of a resurrection appearance, however, the vision of the risen Lord remains concealed until the revelation of the Son of Man at the parousia.

Philology of Impossible: Some Remarks on the Translations of Leśmian's Poetry into English and German

The article analyses selected English and German translations of Bolesław Leśmian’s poetry, with a special focus on the solutions regarding versifi cation, rhythm, and language (dialectological structures, syntactical forms and neologisms characteristic of Leśmian’s poetic writing). The translation strategies employed by Sandra Celt, Rochelle Heller Stone, Michael J. Mikoś, David Malcolm, Karl Dedecius, are compared with the solutions used by other translators, including Czesław Miłosz, Janek Langer, Barry Keane, Cathal McCabe, Benjamin Paloff, Anita Jones Dębska, Ryszard J. Reisner, Marcel Weyland, Leo Yankevich, Marek Urban, Marian Polak-Chlabicz, Lorenz Scherlag. The article poses questions about the criteria of effective and congenial translation, and about the methods of domesticating (conventionalizing) translations. Special attention has been paid to the following problems of the translation of Leśmian’s poetry: linguistic innovation, demands of versifi cation, neologisms, references to Polish folklore, intertextual allusions.