Intertextual Dialogue Research Articles

«A Sublime Look at Horror»: The Function of Ornamental Poetics in V. Zazubrin’s Story Sliver

Purpose. The article presents an analysis of V. Zazubrin's story Sliver (1923) from the perspective of ornamental prose on the background of the crumbling purity of literary genres.Results. The focus on the high genre is evidenced by the capital letter of the pronoun in the subtitle of the work: «A Tale of Her and of Her», i. e. about the Revolution and Her again. In contrast to this intention, the apocalyptic imagery of the work presents the revolutionary era in the corridors of a terrifying world. The poetic layer of the text is shaped by the lyrical voice of the protagonist, enhanced by the ornamental richness of the associations. The poignancy of his inner bout, based on the attraction for revolution and repulsion from it, heightens the emotional tension of the entire work.Conclusion. At the level of intertextual dialogue the influence of Blok's poem The Twelve on the poetics of Sliver is palpable. This is evidenced by the characteristic details of the plot: the atmosphere of the night, the street, the wind, the Chekist rampage, which correlates with the rampage of the elements, as well as the mosaicism of images and the intermittent rhythm of the narrative. Accompanying stylistic elements in the story are the poetics of contrasts, the technique of counterpoint, the density of tropes, the hyperbolization of images, which reproduce the dissonant «music» of the red terror.

Unveiling the Stylistic Features of Tayeb Salih's "Season of Migration to the North: A Postcolonial Analysis"

The book represents the fullest example of stylistic analysis within an important novel in the postcolonial canon-Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North. The research provides a deep linguistic, structural, and thematic insight into how Salih's stylistic options build a peculiar picture of postcolonial themes, cultural identity, and the difficulties and contrasts of cultural exchange. While situating the bilingual narrative, symbolic imagery, and satirical moments of intertextual dialogue and celebration of oral traditions in their historical and cultural context, it proves how such features set the tone and atmosphere of the novel and give further depth to its themes. By doing so, Salih's style refutes and rebukes colonialist discourses, while engaging readers in a critical consideration of postcolonial identity, power relationships, and cultural exchange. These findings underline the continuous popularity of the novel and its status as a strong work of postcolonial literature, with much to offer about the postcolonial condition and its representation in literature.

The Strange Career of a Black Utopia Ethiopia, The Land of Promise. A Book with a Purpose, by Charles Henry Holmes (aka Clayton Adams)

This essay presents archival information about Charles H. Holmes and argues that his understudied novel, Ethiopia, The Land of Promise (1917), represents an important chapter in the history of Afrofuturism and American speculative fiction. The literary critical relevance of Ethiopia emerges forcefully from Holmes’s intertextual dialogue with other utopian and science fiction authors, such as Martin R. Delany, Sutton E. Griggs, Pauline E. Hopkins, Frances E.W. Harper, Edward Bellamy, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Holmes’s critique of Jim Crow segregation enables the articulation of a “distinctly revolutionary” project for African American futurity.

Solar sacrifice: Bataille and Poplavsky on friendship

ABSTRACT This article reconstructs the forgotten friendship between Georges Bataille and the Russian émigré poet and philosopher Boris Poplavsky. Comparing their solar metaphysics, I focus on conceptions of friendship, sacrifice and depersonalisation. First, I retrace Bataille’s relationship to early Surrealis and Russian circles in interwar Paris, with a focus on his friendship with Irina Odoevtseva. I then offer a novel reading of Poplavsky’s poetry through the lens of Bataille’s philosophy, analysing a recurring motif that I call ‘dark solarity’. Uncovering a hidden intertextual dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I argue for Poplavsky’s lasting impact on Bataille’s anti-Icarian sun cult. Finally, my paper demonstrates how Poplavsky’s writings on solar sacrifice, excess and friendship left marks on Bataille’s vision of a solar community, embodied in the secret society Acéphale. The dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I finally suggest, is a missing piece in the entangled history of Russian and French philosophy, as well as an original contribution to discourses on friendship in twentieth-century continental thought.

Интерпретация образного строя картины «Сын человеческий» Р. Магритта в рекламном продукте 2008 г. концерна Volkswagen AG: компаративный подход к анализу рекламы как текста культуры

Through a comparative approach, the research aims to identify the ways in which the advertising artist Kirill Chudinskiy (the 2008 Volkswagen AG advertising campaign) interprets the imagery of René Magritte’s work “The Son of Man” and to discover the main means of representing the cultural meanings of the classical painting in the advertising product. The paper examines the features of Chudinskiy’s creative interpretation of the images of the classic painting masterpiece, as well as various means of artistic representation (allusion, symbol, allegory, depersonalization, antithesis, anthropomorphism), which help create the image of the advertising reality. The scientific novelty of the research is accounted for by the fact that the comparative approach to studying an advertising product (poster) allows for deciphering the content of the cultural dialogue between a contemporary artist and the legacy of the past; revealing the aesthetic value of a digital painting; and identifying affective techniques used in the process of creating a mass product and provoking the consumer to perceive the experience of classical art through the discovery of cultural text structures. In addition, the studied advertising product of 2008 by Volkswagen AG has not previously been the focus of researchers’ attention. As a result, it was found that, firstly, the interpretation of the image of the central character in Magritte’s work allows the advertising artist to create a hero of his time, expose his vices, while simultaneously engaging the viewer in an intertextual dialogue. Secondly, by offering his own compositional solutions in the poster, Chudinskiy, to some extent, provokes the viewer, ironically commenting on the subordination of modern people to the world of things, while simultaneously encouraging the viewer to acquire a thing, i.e., a product, through advertising. Thirdly, by transforming the images of the sky, the sea, and man, which are symbolic on the canvas of the Belgian surrealist, Chudinskiy, on the one hand, actualizes the reality of the advertising product, and on the other hand, inspires the recipients with the idea that they will become part of this reality the moment they acquire the product. Fourthly, the creator’s intellectual game with the recipient through the work of art encourages the consumer to decipher the cultural text, i.e., to engage in cognitive activity, relying on knowledge, associations, and memory.

The Road Not Taken: Dante’s First Eclogue and Virgil’s Career

Near the end of his career, Dante wrote two eclogues, instigating a literary fashion which was to outlast the Renaissance. These poems—Dante's only known compositions in Latin verse—were prompted by a verse epistle from Giovanni ‘del Virgilio’, in which the humanist scholar goaded Dante to compose a martial epic in Latin celebrating contemporary Italian military victories, which would prove him a worthy successor to the author of the Aeneid. Dante’s response is an elaborate bucolic recusatio, which engages in a rich and intricate intertextual dialogue both with Virgil and with his correspondent. Through a pattern of allusions emphasizing the theme of land-confiscation and dispossession in Virgil’s Bucolica and his denunciation of the avarice and violence of contemporary Rome in the Georgics, Dante makes the case that his own career has fulfilled the noble aspirations which Virgil himself compromised, when he abandoned the idea of a cosmological epic, entertained in the second Georgic and chose instead to glorify war and the emperor in the Aeneid.

VIOLÊNCIA E MEDO EM A ILHA DA IRA DE JOÃO DE JESUS PAES LOUREIRO

This work intends to analyze some representations of violence and fear in the dramaturgical narrative A Ilha da Ira (1975), by João de Jesus Paes Loureiro. This investigation is built on the hypothesis that the character “A Velha”, the ruler of the island where the actions of the narrative are developed, is characterized according to the elements of the Dictator and strongly associated with Sovereignty. To account for this hypothesis, we use two formulations to analyze the narrative, namely: the relationship between history and fiction; the appropriations directed to the mythical imaginary as a response to the conflicting reality, associated with the history-fiction relationship. As for the story-fiction pair, we note that the narrative dialogues with a set of references to authoritarianism in the Amazon – the uprising of Cabanagem and the 1964 Civil-Military Dictatorship. In relation to the real-imaginary, intertextual dialogues with elements of classical mythology – the Medusa myth; and mythical-legendary – the Amazonian legend of Matintaperera. In this way, we consider some theoretical questions, to understand the study about violence and fear and its ramifications in the process of understanding and analyzing the narrative. In this context, our starting point is the reflections of Walter Benjamin, Jaime Ginzburg, Elias Canetti and Tânia Sarmento-Pantoja to articulate the studies of violence and fear in the literary work.

The metafictional Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye: intertextual dialogues in a graphic narrative

Diferentes são os recursos explorados pelas narrativas contemporâneas endereçadas aos jovens. Nesta esfera está a narrativa gráfca A arte de Charlie Chan Hock Chye, corpus com relevância histórica, social e artística do presente estudo. Objetiva-se, a partir de uma perspectiva da metafcção nas linguagens verbal, imagética e gráfca, compreender de que forma a obra multimodal de Liew incita o leitor a conhecer os bastidores da criação artística desta e de outras obras, promovendo um esmaecimentoentre o real e o fccional. Além disso, buscamos destacar como o autor aborda, simultaneamente, a história de Singapura e a biografa de um cartunista fccional renomado, rendendo uma homenagem às históriasem quadrinhos. Para isso nos utilizaremos das teorias de metafcção (Hutcheon, 1984; Waugh, 1988), da intertextualidade (Genette, 2006) e da linguagem dos quadrinhos (Postema, 2021)

Verax and Mendax: Dialectics of truth and power in Citizenfour and Risk

Citizenfour (Laura Poitras, 2014) and Risk (Laura Poitras, 2016) are two documentaries about two controversial whistleblowers, Edward Snowden and Julian Assange respectively. It would seem natural to deploy the documentary genre to tackle the theme of whistleblowing, but this does not mean that the goal of the documentary is the same as that of the whistleblower. To compare the goals of documentary films and whistleblowing, an examination of the search for truth is of primary importance; hence the recourse to explore dialectics in both films which not only revolve around tensions but also dialogues on many different levels. To complicate this analysis even further, in both films Laura Poitras is also a participant. This article looks at the negotiation of power dynamics between filmmaker and subject, explores the intertextual dialogue between Citizenfour and Risk and focuses on different types of reception by the audience and filmmaker.

Reading Karen Blixen in different cultures. “Sailor-Boy’s Tale” (“Skibsdrengens Fortælling”): What is lost and gained in self-translation?

The paper analyses Karen Blixen’s short story “The Sailor-boy’s Tale”, which opens her collection “Winter’s Tales” (1942), in comparison with the Danish translation made by the author in the same year. The Danish text is considered the result of a process of auto-translation, recoding, and adaptation of the text for the Scandinavian reader. In the Danish version, the prose is more rhythmic and the descriptions are more vivid, which enhances the sensual authenticity. However, allusions to English and American authors and quotations are translated into Danish, which obscures their significance as markers of intertextual dialogue. Additionally, the dialogue with Scandinavian pretexts and paintings familiar to the Danish reader becomes more pronounced.

Distorting Reality through the Crystal Mirror: Dialogue Between Literature and Painting in Waterhouse’s Representations of the Lady of Shalott

“The Lady of Shalott” is a lyrical ballad written by the English Victorian poet Alfred Tennyson. There have been a wide variety of interpretations of this poem. It has also been a source of inspiration for various artistic expressions, such as art, literature, and music. The purpose of this paper is to examine the process of reverse ekphrasis in two paintings produced by the painter John William Waterhouse: The Lady of Shalott and I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, Said the Lady of Shalott. On the other hand, Nicole (Nick) Loven’s film adaptation of the poem incorporates a circular intertextuality process that revolves around the interaction between images and words. Thus, the narrated text becomes a visual image. The conversion stage of the process of reverse ekphrasis, in which Tennyson’s source text is transformed into Waterhouse’s target text, depends on a specific moment depicted in the poem “The Lady of Shalott,” as conveyed through the lady’s words. Waterhouse’s intertextual dialogue with Tennyson’s poem involves a process of reverse ekphrasis. This interaction between image and word is later transformed into another visual representation. The word transformed into an image is then converted back into an image using a film version.

Between Eros and Love

Love is a common theme in the Western poetic tradition and gives rise to deep reflections on the vicissitudes of human existence at least since some works of Greco-Roman antiquity. This paper addresses the idea of poetry as a remedy for the affections caused by this feeling, based on what is suggested by the intertextual dialogue of two works: Idylls 11 by Theocritus, which presents the song of the amorous sufferings of Polyphemus in the face of Galatea; Eclogues 2 by Virgil, where the shepherd Coridon sings of his unrequited love for the puer delicatus Alexis. With the aim of presenting these ancient poets, interpreting their metapoetic reflections and proposing a parallel understanding of their works, I will proceed on a philological basis to advance an intertextual interpretation of their positions.

Dialogues with Pushkin: From Tchaikovsky to Stravinsky and The Rake’s Progress

A key feature of the study of Russian opera has been its interest in ‘page-tostage’ adaptation of canonical works of literature. Behind this research story, in many respects, there is only the fact that a significant number of Russian operas are really based on literary primary sources. The contribution of philologists who have studied this subject on a par with specialists in the history of music also played a role in its credibility. This logocentric approach overlooks, however, another tradition, one in which the libretto is the product of a negotiation between agents and where the relationship between the source text and operatic adaptation is attenuated. The work that most fully subverts the ‘pageto-stage’ tradition and fully incorporates the librettist as a co-creator of the finished composition is The Rake’s Progress, with music by Igor Stravinsky and words by Wystan Hugh Auden and Chester Kallman. It may seem eccentric to see The Rake’s Progress as a Russian opera, yet as this chapter argues, it is certainly an opera shaped by aspects of Stravinsky’s Russian origins, upbringing, and education, and somehow spoken ‘in translation’. In particular, it engages in a series of intertextual dialogues with the legacy of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades.

Documentary Form and Spectral Citizenship in Madhusree Dutta’s 7 Islands and a Metro

Despite its aesthetic experimentation, its intervention into urgent questions about citizenship and belonging in contemporary India, and its attention to the most iconic of Indian cities, Mumbai, Madhusree Dutta’s 2006 documentary film 7 Islands and a Metro—and Dutta’s work more broadly—has yet to receive the critical attention it demands. Addressing this gap, this article examines Dutta’s use of spectrality to structure her search for a documentary form that makes room for Mumbai’s marginalised subjects to narrate themselves into its representational histories and contemporary spaces. Key to Dutta’s approach is a visual dialogue between the city’s historical ghosts and its spectral citizens—those who exist in a state of dispossession and social invisibility in the present, such as women, migrant workers, casteised and Muslim subjects, and the urban poor. Through this spectral framework—a dialogue between the living and the dead, which is also an intertextual dialogue between the past and the present, the fictional and the actual—Dutta’s film probes the complexities of representation and self-representation, agency and access to story-making processes and platforms. Dutta’s formal play foregrounds the multiple ways in which the city and citizenship are mediated, represented and claimed, and the multiple ways in which spectral subjects are produced and displaced. Her aesthetic experimentation—particularly her use of spectrality and performative modes of representation—enables reflections on the ways in which spectral subjects seek to render themselves visible in the city and claim themselves as active agents and participants in the making of Mumbai.

“Ozyn shigyr” in Modern Tatar Poetry

The article for the first time considers the most active form of modern Tatar poetry - “ozyn shigyr”. It is noted that this form is not identical to the “long poem”, it has oriental roots. In Tatar literature, “ozyn shigyr” with its unique thematic and aesthetic features was formed in the 1920s and 1930s in the era of experiments to create “new poetry of the revolutionary time”. The revealed features of the genre “ozyn shigyr” of this period are a contextual background for studying the functioning of this form in modern Tatar poetry. The focus is on the work of the young poet Lilia Gibadullina, the author of three poetry collections. In her work, “ozyn shigyr” occupies a leading place, the analysis of her most famous poems to the modern Tatar reader allows us to determine the structural, figurative and motivational features, aesthetic attitudes, artistic preferences of the genre. So, in “ozyn shigyr” by L. Gibadullina, the main place is occupied by existential-evaluative motives. The lyrical heroine analyzes the events of her life, and repeated symbols or symbolic images turn them into the history of the people, the country, humanity in general. Among the identified techniques, the flickering of motives and intertextual dialogue are important, with the help of which a multiplicity of contexts and meanings is created. Thus, it is established that the genre of “ozyn shigyr” in modern Tatar poetry has its own characteristics that arise in dialogue with the traditions of Tatar poetry and make its form different from the “long poem”.

“Mocking Eternities”: Writing Beyond the Ending of Possession, or A.S. Byatt’s Intersections between Academia, Literary Criticism, and Fiction

Abstract In 1995, a two-page-long letter signed by Professor Maud Michell-Bailey – which furthermore enclosed two original poems by Christabel LaMotte – prefaced a special edition on women poets in the academic journal Victorian Poetry. The letter and poems invite a critical return to Possession, since they are a complex game in which made-up characters come to life and actual people are fictionalized. They also raise significant theoretical issues while appearing to break free from the limitations imposed by what Victorian Poetry editor Linda Hughes has correctly described as “overdetermined readings, simplification, distortion” (6). In doing so, they masterfully create a parodic and intertextual dialogue in an inverted mirror game that blurs the lines between the real and the imagined and invites the reader to engage in an active participation. When combined, Maud’s letter and LaMotte’s poems offer an intriguing look at the fruitful fusion of A.S. Byatt's critical and literary imagination. Therefore, this article explores Byatt’s intersections between academia, literary criticism, and fiction by analysing her metafictional discourse on fictional Victorian poems vis-à-vis the real contemporary academic journal in which they were published.

Questioning the Canon: Counter-Discourse and the Minority Perspective in Contemporary German Literature by Christine Meyer

Reviewed by: Questioning the Canon: Counter-Discourse and the Minority Perspective in Contemporary German Literature by Christine Meyer Bethany A. Morgan Questioning the Canon: Counter-Discourse and the Minority Perspective in Contemporary German Literature. By Christine Meyer. Translated by Dustin Lovett and Tegan Raleigh. Boston: De Gruyter, 2021. Pp. 343. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 978-3110674361. Christine Meyer’s Questioning the Canon masterfully treats the representative works of Rafik Schami, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Feridun Zaimoglu through a postcolonial methodology to reveal their overlooked counter-discursive aspects. In response to a field of scholarship that lags behind its Francophone and Anglophone counterparts, Meyer calls for the necessity of utilizing a postcolonial approach to Germanophone literature and its authors originating from stigmatized countries. This work questions the power relations between the center, the canon, and the margins. Utilizing Genette’s theories of “hypertext” and “hypotext,” Meyer shows which authors have written into the canon and essentially asserted themselves as “successors” to canonical authors. Meyer exposes the problems with a literary canon as a collection of texts approved for universality by cultural and academic institutions. From a position inferior to the main subject of discourse in canonical texts, the un-, under-, or misrepresented, such as women and ethnic and sexual minorities, question the ability of canonical authors to universally represent the human experience. For her methodology, Meyer convincingly demonstrates both the validity and importance of approaching German-language “migration literature” from a postcolonial perspective, which originated with “orientalism” and has developed through “mimicry” and “third space,” “subalternity,” and “writing back.” The main difference between the German-speaking canon and the Anglophone or Francophone canon lies in the aims and discourse itself. Rather than uncovering a colonialist or racist ideology in the canon, German-language authors of “migration literature” endeavor to “de-ethnicize” and “denaturalize” the canon by uncovering cosmopolitan and hybrid elements already within. The German canon does not contain the same cultural imperialism or notions of expansionism, but rather focuses on its own “cultural nation.” Moreover, Meyer points out that Germany’s immigration population does not come from colonized subjects but rather from Turkey or from nations conquered by other colonizers. Despite these differences in colonial and immigration histories, Meyer does not excuse the German canon from its share of literary protests but rather [End Page 342] shows how a postcolonial approach unveils a power struggle between the margins and center analogous to that between writers in post-colonial regions and the colonizer. In considering the conditions under which Germany’s contemporary literary canon has developed, the fraught twentieth century required the redefinition of a common patrimony and cultural foundation upon which to build its Kulturnation. Schami, Özdamar, Zaimoglu, and others have entered intertextual dialogue not only with canonical German authors but also with Shakespeare and authors of the larger Western canon. By rereading authors such as Adelbert von Chamisso, Heinrich Heine, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in a “minor” mode, contemporary authors of “migration literature” recontextualize these authors into a decentered space. Beginning with chapter two, Meyer introduces the counter-discursive strategies of her representative authors, including metatextuality and rewriting. Continuing through chapter six, Meyer involves us in her fruitful close readings of numerous texts to show how they write back from the East, test national traditions by diversity, write oppositionally, and utilize a bottom-up approach. Rafik Schami even writes directly to some of these authors. He adopts the position of a grandchild to Chamisso in the epistolary preface to Chamisso’s 1990 biography. To address “Harry Heine,” Schami chooses an interview in which he and Heine realize they have political persecution, exile, and marked status as a historical minority in common. Meyer reads Schami’s epistolary and interview writings as postcolonial in that he assumes a position of successor and kin rather than outsider. In Schami’s corrective (re)reading of European classics such as the fairy tales and Dracula, he rewrites the Wolf as the misunderstood outsider and the Count as misrepresented. Meyer argues that these texts and yet another text in which a fictional sultan evaluates Goethe’s corpus all point to Schami’s postcolonial tendencies to scrutinize the canon and to...

Double Meaning in Sophocles’ Electra 1110–1111 and the Tragedy’s Denouement

In Electra 1111 there is a pun on the word Strophios, suggesting that Orestes is a “trickster”. After examining the differences of the accentuation of the word in the MSS, I consider the significance of the pun for interpreting the denouement of the tragedy. Much of the tragedy provides an intertextual dialogue with Aeschylus’ Oresteia but, in contrast to Aeschylus, the main emphasis of the curse on the family falls on Pelops not Atreus. The tragedy was first performed during the Peloponnesian War. All previous versions of the myth from the 6th century onwards seem to have had a political bias. If we take into account the subtlety of Sophoclean irony, Electra can be read as anti-Spartan. In the Peloponnesian War the Delphic Apollo was pro-Spartan (Thuc. 1.118.3). His oracle, enjoining Orestes to use deceit in his revenge, frames the whole dramatic action. Proverbially, wolves were known for deceit. In several passages of Electra, Apollo is identified as Lykeios “wolf-like”, noticeably at l. 1379, before Electra enters the curse-ridden house.

“A very long, unpredictable, and illogical route.” The Cosmogonical Mash-Up of Primo Levi’s The Truce


 This article highlights and analyzes the cosmogonical motifs in Primo Levi’s The Truce. Based on six different motifs, it underlines the role of creation myths in Levi’s attempt to polymerize his cultures. Levi sets a temporal concept “figure” and, by fusing different mythologies, epitomizes the epochal shift between pre- and post-Auschwitz, between Poland and Belarus. The intertextual dialogues between Biblical and classical literature create a significant and highly symbolic backdrop for Levi’s picaresque adventures during his return to Turin, signifying his first attempt to combine reality with literature, myth, and fiction.

Una Antígona para tiempos de supervivencia: Lo heroico y lo sucio en Antígona del dramaturgo cubano Yerandy Fleites

Abstract: This essay analyzes Antígona (2008) by Yerandy Fleites to show how the author tackles the current Cuban political situation by rewriting the Sophoclean tragedy. Fleites adjusts the Greek myth to the Cuban context by means of parody and an intertextual dialogue with both Jean Anouilh's Antigone (1944) and Peruvian poet José Watanabe's Antígona (2000). The study then unpacks the idea of dirtiness and Fleites' depiction of the female heroine to demonstrate how the dramatist proposes hybris as the main psychological driver behind the Cuban Antígona (and that, to an extent, of the generation she represents) to suggest possible avenues for sociopolitical change. At the same time, this study considers the interpretations of Fleites' Antígona that Cuban directors Pedro Franco and Julio César Ramírez respectively brought to the stage in 2013 and 2020. Ramírez's reading in particular provides an understanding of Antígona in the context of the protests that occurred on November 27, 2020, when intellectuals, writers, and artists demanded that the Cuban Ministry of Culture recognize their rights and their freedom as citizens.