Intertextual Network Research Articles

Recyclage des discours sur l'Afrique et inscription de la doxa métropolitaine dans les romans de Léonora Miano

The image of Africa which emerges from Miano's trilogy entitled Suite africaine is that of a self-destructive continent, unstable, ravaged by wars and undermined by misery. This picture is in accordance with that of the Western media which, through stereotypical images, describes Africa as a continent which is destroying itself. This article starts with the numerous identified clichés that these books conceal and from the status of the narrator to question the degree of autonomy that the author allows herself, knowing that the stereotype relies on the pre-constructed and proceeds by repetition. The objective is to see, via the study of the intertextual network that spans the novels of Miano, whether, by establishing a repeated subject, the Cameroonian writer does not obscure the diversity of the cultural experiences of the South as well as her vision of postcolonial marginality to register her works in the system of cultural exchanges between the North and the South, solely as a conduit of the dominant discourse.

Gothic: New Directions in Media and Popular Culture

Gothic: New Directions in Media and Popular Culture

What’s Hidden in Gravity Falls: Strange Creatures and the Gothic Intertext

What’s Hidden in Gravity Falls: Strange Creatures and the Gothic Intertext

The Only Way Out Is In: Girl 6, Sex Work, and the Color Line

This article situates Spike Lee's neglected collaboration with Suzan-Lori Parks, Girl 6 (US, 1996), as part of a broader shift in Lee's understandings of race in the neoliberal era. Its main character, simply called Girl 6 (Theresa Randle), aspires to be an actress, but after a director humiliates her at an audition by demanding the right to inspect her body, she begins disembodied phone sex work. Most critics of the film either emphasize the main character's growth or observe that her interiority remains unavailable to viewers despite the film's extensive use of close-ups. Taking those close-ups alongside Girl 6's interpolation of 1970s blaxploitation film and television, this article argues that the film is as concerned with the elision of public and private spaces for racially marked figures as it is with the reduction of positive black representation to commodified style. The article concludes by briefly tracing Girl 6's representational logics through Lee's controversial She Hate Me (US, 2004), which again uses the spectacle of sexual availability to underscore the creation of the private sphere as affective labor. Ultimately, this article argues that, in drawing on an intertextual network of allusions and on the spectacle of sex, Lee's recent films move beyond representation to the production and value of race in order to imagine new political and aesthetic strategies adequate to a new regime of black visuality.

Will the real Oedipus please stand up? Metatheoretical perspectives on Oedipus as a unifying function and psychoanalytic theory development

Is psychoanalysis scientific? Which Oedipus is the “correct” Oedipus? Questions like these have divided psychoanalysis and fueled debates about it since its inception. In this paper, I explore these issues by outlining and adopting an “intertextual” perspective, not to answer such questions but to establish a metatheoretical position that might enable us to step outside of them to consider the broader relationship between theory, myth, literature, and the clinical session. I discuss how concepts such as narcissism and the Oedipal arrangement signify a deeper need for affiliation beyond the content of the myth itself but from within the psychoanalytic field; that they provide a flexible resource but also accrete a historical residue presenting as inertia against a unified psychoanalytic approach. In doing so, the term theory drift is developed to argue that psychoanalytic theory might in part develop through idiosyncratic “etymological” processes that reflect an obligation to retain concepts such as Oedipus and a reluctance to break with existing forms and practices. Finally, I discuss emergence and how it signifies the imponderability of the literary and clinical material with which psychoanalysis works, and look to actor network theory to conceptualize the fluid, intertextual networks within which we exist.

Amos Poe’s neo-noir stage

At the time of its release Frogs for Snakes (1999), written and directed by Amos Poe, was criticized for its alleged formalism and gratuitous violence and some facile digs at Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Redressing these predominantly negative assessments, the present article views Poe’s overtly theatrical crime movie as a neo-noir parody which joins a considerable part of David Mamet’s dramatic and cinematographic output to classics like All About Eve, Guys and Dolls, The Apartment, All My Sons and On the Waterfront. Either these provided plot situations, characterizations and genre features or else the involvement of their creators in the HUAC – from Mankiewicz and Wilder through Miller, Kazan, Rossen and Schulberg – extend the intertextual network of Frogs for Snakes from its inset production of American Buffalo into a critique of the human expendability behind the American way of conducting business which the noir genre frequently equates with crime and shady dealings. The reception of Frogs for Sa es thus repeated that of American Buffalo in that its middle-class audience failed to see the point of the crooks’ ineffective negotiations, erupting in the junkshop’s demolition and Bobby’s beating, yet falling short of any actual heist. More importantly, the noir references in Frogs for Snakes, prolonging those in Poe’s earlier output, bring out the genre’s dramaturgical influence on Mamet’s drama prior to the release of his first consummate noir exercise, House of Games (1987). Conversely, the social awareness underlying the noir genre and its Depression era predecessors challenges the common critique about American Buffalo’s inconsequentiality and neo-noir’s superficiality. This critique was also levelled against the erotic thrillers of Brian De Palma, who directed Mamet’s screen adaptation of the noir TV series, The Untouchables (1986), and whose Dressed to Kill and Body Double are alluded to at the start of Frogs for Snakes.

Reading Games in the Greek Novel (review)

Reviewed by: Reading Games in the Greek Novel Anastasia Natsina Eleni Papargyriou , Reading Games in the Greek Novel. Oxford: Legenda, 2011. Pp. xii + 186. Hardback. $89.50. Eleni Papargyriou's first book is a most welcome addition to the scarce number of studies on Modern Greek Literature that focus on reader response. The ambiguous title explores the games that literary works evoke as part of the reading process (reading games). It also studies the reader's response to and interpretation of the various games (reading games), which feature in the five novels examined in the book, whose publication dates span the years 1935 to 1975. Investigating the notions of game and playfulness with regard to Modern Greek literature, Papargyriou traces a line of works that challenged the literary establishment of their time within the wider context of modernism. The first two chapters are introductory, placing the overall project in theoretical and historical contexts respectively. The first offers a succinct review of theories of play and games, and it focuses mainly on the aspect of play most akin to the reading experience, which is the creation of a fictional level in which participants immerse themselves. Furthermore, drawing from mostly European literary examples, it traces a shift in the form of playfulness—and the text's demands on the reader—from modernism to "post-WWII metafictions" (8): in modernism, playfulness is mainly based on the manipulation of knowledge, which leads to a "poetics of agonistics," whereas in late modernism and/or postmodernism, playfulness is increasingly linked to randomness. The second chapter examines the literary scene of the 1930s, which ushered modernism into Modern Greek letters. It outlines the lucidity, sombreness, and [End Page 350] lack of stylistic innovation of the period's dominant prose works, in stark contrast with the much more obscure and experimental (albeit equally sombre) poetry of the time. It discusses the provocation of the literary establishment by authors of the periphery (focusing on Yannis Skarimbas) and interestingly finds in the latter's playfulness a way to (re)negotiate their place in the establishment, unlike that of satire and parody, whose overt criticism tends to exclude them from the literary establishment. The second chapter is mostly a lucid and informative introduction to the third, which elaborates further on Skarimbas's work, focusing on his novel Mariambas (1935) and its multilayered intertextual practices. The third chapter illuminatingly discusses different approaches to intertextuality; in contrast to the limited, awed, and "educational" use of European intertexts exhibited by established prose writers such as George Theotokas and Angelos Terzakis, Skarimbas playfully blurs the boundaries between "reading and borrowing, citing and rewriting" (56) his multiple sources, as he bases his novel entirely on "intertextual imitation" (58). Instead of the passive consumption of the text instigated by the former writers' strategies, Skarimbas invites the reader's active attention to constantly move from text to intertext, by using implicit, explicit, and thematized intertextual references. This results in a text open to multiple "concretizations," as a game would be; this openness as well as the novel's own irreverent reading of its interetexts, render its "attitude—precociously—postmodern" (72). Intertextual games prove to be a key feature in Nikos-Gabriil Pentzikis's The Novel of Mrs. Ersi (1966) which follows its contemporary, characteristically postmodern, international trend of rewriting earlier works, in this case Yeoryios Drosinis's novel Ersi (1922). According to Papargyriou's insightful reading, Pentzikis rewrites Drosinis's novel by fictionalizing the latter's spots of indeterminacy, which challenges Dorsinis's neoclassical idealistic assumptions on a number of issues, among which the cultural centrality of Athens and a sense of timelessness. Furthermore, chapter four explains Pentzikis's playful stance towards his secondary intertexts, which he reformulates in a kind of collage that strips them "of their authoritative baggage, their ideological framework and their historical significance" (93). His technique encourages different readings based on the activation of multiple contingent relations among his sources. Papargyriou concludes that this work "perhaps heralds postmodernism in Greece" (93). Both chapters three and four, devoted to demanding novels, skillfully unravel the works' intricate intertextual networks, explain their playful character by detailing the role they ascribe to the reader, and make a significant...

Up and Down with Mary Rowlandson: Erdrich's and Alexie's Versions of “Captivity”

Up and Down with Mary RowlandsonErdrich’s and Alexie’s Versions of “Captivity” Yael Ben-Zvi (bio) In 1984 following the tercentenary of Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 captivity narrative, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, Louise Erdrich published a poem entitled “Captivity,” whose speaker the poem’s epigraph identifies as “Mrs. Mary Rowlandson.” The next decade saw the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus’s first transatlantic voyage and the publication of Sherman Alexie’s narrative poem “Captivity,” which reproduces the title and epigraph of Erdrich’s earlier work. The poems target the Rowlandson legacy, a construct of national memory that owes its cultural intelligibility to the silencing of potentially subversive readings, contexts, and meanings. Like the memory of Columbus, the Rowlandson legacy is composed of recurrent retrospective impositions of illusory semantic stability on a messy past, and Erdrich and Alexie contribute to it critically by complicating the memory, dimensions, and content of that past. As William Spengemann shows, “Columbus” is an unstable label with various meanings that have “changed continually over the centuries,” and while it “always has a referent,” each citation of that label emphasizes one of multiple “referents [that] differ markedly from case to case” (120–22, emphasis in text). Similarly, in the Rowlandson legacy repeated citations over diverse contexts and periods have detached its subject from her particular historical circumstances and reattached her to presentist national concerns. Thus, the immediate local success of Sovereignty and Goodness pales by comparison to its far wider posthumous appeal, which began in the 1770s when Rowlandson was cast as a protonational heroine.1 Mid-twentieth-century [End Page 21] scholars returned to Rowlandson to honor her as founder of the original genre of American literature, and later, feminist scholars recovered her again, casting Rowlandson as a founding mother of US literature and culture.2 Recovery efforts subsided by the century’s end as exceptionalist national perspectives on the genre, book, and author became outmoded,3 but the Rowlandson legacy hasn’t died. In the wake of 9/11, journalist Susan Faludi urged New York Times readers to remember Rowlandson as “key to our own experience” in the face of “the fear of home-soil terrorism” (“America’s” A29).4 Bringing the conflicts that shaped colonial New England to bear on contemporary geopolitics, Faludi classifies seventeenth-century colonization as “our original wilderness experience,” King Philip’s War as “our original war on terror,” and Rowlandson as the “original female captive” (Terror 13, 213, 219). In this typology Rowlandson becomes a harbinger of US liberties while the Wampanoag, Narragansett, and Nipmuck anticolonial campaign that subjected her to eleven weeks of captivity is reduced to a precursor of Al Qaeda’s attack. This historical logic fits what Jean M. O’Brien calls “firsting and lasting,” the imagination of New England as the absolute national origin that obliterates indigenous histories. As “the ‘first’ New Englanders are made to disappear,” O’Brien writes, “the colonial regime is constructed as the ‘first’ to bring . . . authentic history to the region” (xv). Since Sovereignty and Goodness made a particularly significant contribution to this process (33), I treat the Rowlandson legacy as the literary version of the historiographic dynamics that O’Brien studies. As Rowlandson was thought to have “inaugurate[d] a native American genre” (Stern 378),5 her “firsting” helped marginalize early Anglophone Native literature, and historian Jill Lepore locates the “lasting legacy” of Sovereignty and Goodness in “the nearly complete veil it has unwittingly placed over the experiences of bondage endured by Algonquian Indians during King Philip’s War” (126). I argue that Erdrich’s and Alexie’s “Captivity” poems pierce this veil by disrupting the exclusively national functions of the legacy’s affective and mnemonic investments. Dean Rader and Robin Riley Fast agree that Native poetry often emphasizes “hybridization” and [End Page 22] “dialogism” (Rader, “Epic” 128; Fast 13), and I foreground Erdrich’s and Alexie’s respective mobilizations of affect and memory in the service of a dialogic critique of hegemonic firsting that challenges the reproduction of historical identification. The creative power of these poems derives from their intriguing expansions of the intertextual networks that sustain the legacy. In terms of Rader’s analysis, they further...

Re-viewing Her Nights: Modes of excess in Indian cinema

This paper analyzes the debates around the regional language film Avalude Ravukal (Her Nights, d. I.V. Sasi, 1978), a controversial film produced by the Kerala film industry credited as being responsible for launching soft-porn cinema as a genre in India. This paper tracks the shifting circuits of Avalude Ravukal and its fractured aesthetic codes to analyze the role of cultural production in configuring the regional public sphere. The intertextual network of Avalude Ravukal and its reception, functions as a live archive of popular memory through which I can track the mutually constitutive relationship between the ‘excesses’ of cinema and moral anxieties within regional publics, especially around the figure of the prostitute. The paper demonstrates that in order to map the non-linear histories of Indian cinema, it is necessary to examine how this medium is enmeshed in vernacular socialities within the heterogeneous space of the nation.

Biblical and Rabbinic Ideas of Female Semen? An Intertextual Reading of Lev 12,2

ABSTRACT Reader-oriented intertextuality opens perspectives to see the in-terpretation of the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament and in rabbinic litera-ture in a new light. This article discusses possible readings of the crux inter-pretum Leviticus 12,2 in the New Testament (Hebrews 11,11) and in rabbinic literature. It shows that both play with manifold meanings and facets of texts from the Hebrew Bible in a sometimes associative way, linking different con-texts with one another and creating a new intertextual network.

Gender, Writing, and Performance: Men Defending Women in Late Medieval France (1440–1538) by Helen J. Swift

1140 Reviews made byWauquelin in recasting the inheritedmaterial. The very brief conclusion to the study of the sources ofWauquelin's Book i simply draws attention to the technique of interlace used to generate a continuous and homogeneous new work from generically and linguistically disparate sources, which also required very different approaches to harmonize them. The study of the sources of Book 11does not have an explicit conclusion, though both the chapters 'D'une source a fautre' and 'Hypotheses sur lesmanuscrits deWauquelin', which look respectively at the processes of rewriting and at themanuscripts available toWauquelin within the library of Duke Philippe le Bon, serve that purpose to some extent. The study in the second part of the volume, 'Un nouveau roman d'Alexandre', might also be considered a conclusion to all thathas gone before. It is,however, an autonomous studywith littlereference to sources of Wauquelin's processes ofwriting, thegeneric affiliations of his work, and the thorny question ofwhether theFaicts et conquestes should be considered a cyclic work or a compilation. Despite one or two dubious assertions, such as those on theplace ofproverbs in epic discourse, or the adaptation to chronicle rather than an epic discourse instanced by Wauquelin's habit of listing the constituent battalions of an army before a battle, this is undoubtedly the most interesting and important study in the volume for those interested in the wider literary questions raised by Wauquelin's work, and by fifteenth-century Burgundian literature in general. The third part of the volume presents, in almost entirely descriptive terms, the miniatures of themanuscripts BnF fr 9432 and Petit Palais, Dutuit 456, the latterbeing Heriche-Pradeau's base manuscript forher edition. It ismost regrettable thatnone of the forty-three illustrations is in colour. University of Edinburgh Philip E. Bennett Gender, Writing, and Performance: Men Defending Women inLate Medieval France (1440-1538). By Helen J.Swift. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2008. xv+285 pp. ?55. ISBN 978-0-19-923223-9. In this studyHelen Swift examines thehistory of the querelle desfemmes as itdeve loped afterChristine de Pizan: from Martin leFranc's Champion des dames (c. 1440) to JeanBouchet's Jugementpoetic de Vhonneurfemenin (1538). Her study aims to rectify two biases in themodern critical reception of thismaterial. One of these she terms the ethical' bias: thatdefences ofwomen authored bymen cannot be sincere, and that the only authentically pro-feminine voice to emerge from latemedieval French literature is that of Christine de Pizan. The other is the aesthetic' bias, according towhich thefifteenth- and early sixteenth-century texts in this tradition are seen as repetitive,monotonous, and even annoying. Swift brings out the 'liter ariness' of the texts, analysing the strong intertextual networks within which they must be read, and the often subtle and complex ways inwhich a given text engages with a tradition leading back at least as far as theRoman de la Rose. And, making use of contemporary theoretical insights about the performativity of gender, she also shows that?whatever the actual biases and agendas of the historical authors may have been?the texts do interrogate and deconstruct essentialist notions of MLR, 104.4, 2009 1141 gender in various ways. In the firstchapter Swift borrows theDerridean concept of 'spectropolitics' in order to coin the term 'spectropoetics': a text is 'haunted' by anterior texts and discourses that, paradoxically, must be foregrounded and kept alive for the very purpose of refuting them and laying them to rest. Swift's analysis of the Champion des dames, including illustrations and marginal annotations in both manuscripts and early printings, brings out this intertextual dynamics, while also shedding light on its shifting reception by fifteenth-and sixteenth-century readers. The second chapter, on debate poems, examines the textual mise en scene of rhetorical performance, aswell as tracing the literaryappropriation of often very technical aspects of legal terminology and procedures. The third and final chapter focuses on the representation ofwomen and the construction of gender in a series of querelle texts.Exemplary women might be portrayed as overcoming their feminine weakness and achieving amasculine ideal; or theymight be seen as surpassing the norms of either sex through a trulyexceptional greatness. Still others achieve great ness through traits, such as courage and chivalric prowess, thatmight...

Luiz Gama por Luiz Gama: carta a Lúcio de Mendonça

A carta de Luiz Gama a Lúcio de Mendonça, datada de 25 de julho de 1880, traz a história de vida do único ex-escravo brasileiro que se destacaria como homem de letras e líder dos movimentos abolicionista e republicano. Neste trabalho, pretendemos mostrar como esta carta, em geral considerada de forma isolada, se inscreve numa rede intertextual que modifica e multiplica seus níveis de leitura. Sua originalidade reside tanto no valor do depoimento como nos seus fenômenos enunciativos. Evocamos também a história inédita de um documento que só vem a lume nos anos 1930, cercada de uma polêmica que amplia hoje as possibilidades interpretativas. Por fim, analisar as fronteiras entre os gêneros epistolar e autobiográfico permite-nos questionar em que medida se trata realmente de uma “Autobiografia’, tal como esta carta vem sendo apresentada há mais de sessenta anos

GIOSEFFO ZARLINO AND THE MISERERE TRADITION: A FERRARESE CONNECTION?

Through Patrick Macey’s extensive research on Josquin des Prez’s Miserere mei Deus, the historical context of this monumental motet, especially its connection with the Savonarolan reform movement and its repercussions at the Este court of Ferrara, has received major attention. Above all, Macey has shown how this piece generated a whole cluster of compositions throughout the sixteenth century that bear musical, structural and/or textual references to Josquin’s work. One of the main elements of this intertextual web includes the use of Josquin’s soggetto ostinato – either literally or with slight variations – by composers such as Adrian Willaert, Cipriano de Rore and Nicola Vicentino, who were all connected with the Este court at a certain point in their careers. Macey’s discoveries have brought to light a highly intriguing reception history, to which other scholars have also contributed. In the present essay, I wish to add yet another piece of evidence to the afterlife of this Miserere tradition. I will focus on two lesser-known motets by Gioseffo Zarlino, Miserere mei Deus and Misereris omnium, both of which were published in his collection Modulationes sex vocum (Venice, 1566) (see Figure 1). Not only did they inscribe themselves in the intertextual network that was initiated by Josquin, but also they can be linked to the Ferrarese court in general and to Duke Alfonso II in particular.

Moments (inter)discursifs et emplois métaphoriques du champ dérivationnel de "ciment" dans la presse Chypriote-grecque. Une approche pragmatico-sémantique

This article intends to closely investigate a particular ad hoc metaphor, which concerns the verb "τσιμεντώνω" "cement" and its derivational fields as they are built upon or interwoven with dynamic intertextual networks in a newspaper. The diversity of usages that this metaphor goes through raises the problem of the semantic displacement or innovation. The study of the metaphorical use of the verb "cement" and its derivational field in a variety of contexts where they appear, leads one to problematize it in the light of the 'trigger utterance', historically and ideologically charged. In other words, the metaphor should be investigated within discursive and intertextual relations, which seem to be established in a newspaper. Semantic movements, multiple interpretations and readings, ambiguity and argumentation are the main problems that this metaphor typically raises in the present study. A textual, enunciative and componential approach will be here adopted.

The Decadent Writer as Collector and Flâneur: On Intertextual Networks and Literary Spaces in Huysmans

Etrange was the word most often used to describe J.-K. Huysmans' first published book, Le Drageoir aux epices (I873), and idiosyncratic group of short texts written at the borders of several genres, most notably the prose poem and the short story. Commentators most frequently call attention to the ways in which the Drageoir prefigures later aspects of Huysmans' style, first his naturalist and then his estheticist period. The editor of the recent critical edition repeats several times in his introduction that the Drageoir esquisse deja [les contours] d' oeuvre a venir and apparait comme un presage des engagements et demissions successifs envers les differentes esthetiques qu'il adoptera par la suite. (1) Such comments are, on one hand, a logical approach to an author's early work in which he is still experimenting with several styles and seeking his own literary voice. On the other hand, however, this approach to the Drageoir fails to address the text on its own terms. I argue here that Huysmans adapts and transforms the model of writer as flaneur in this early work while simultaneously figuring as a collector of various nineteenth-century textual traditions and conventions. A complex intertextuality below the surface of the Drageoir allows Huysmans to evoke, adopt, extend, parody, or reject a series of modes of writing in play during the I870's. Huysmans explores the literary territory of his period much as a flaneur might explore the city, moving with a purposeful aimlessness, receiving and reacting to various features of the landscape. It is worth pausing a moment over the concept of a collection and its relationship to the kind of literal and literary flanerie that Huysmans pursues. Naomi Schor notes the importance of both collecting and flanerie in Walter Benjamin's literary imagination, asserting that collecting, rather more than flanerie, is the activity that most closely approximates that of the author in that collecting and especially [...] book-collecting involves the retrieval and ordering of things past. (2) The texts comprising the work are heterogeneous in composition and arrangement, but the networks of images and approaches point toward an impulse to ordering, for a collection always implies a certain logic, or at least an invitation to seek similarities at or below the surface of the collected works. It is in this sense that Huysmans becomes a quasi-Benjaminian collector of texts. Benjamin asks of his own library: what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? (3) While Huysmans has assembled the collection, it becomes in turn the reader's task to impose a certain order upon it, by reading horizontally across its various texts and vertically between the Drageoir texts and literary works of the past which are evoked by the Drageoir. Huysmans' title prefigures some of the crossroads I shall explore. A drageoir is both a closed and an open space, a container that separates its content from its surroundings, without making that separation definitive, as a closed container would. Already in this image, Huysmans suggests a free-floating border between insides and outsides, a similar type of border, in fact, to that which exists between a descriptive text and the physical or mental landscape it traces. Such descriptive texts participate in the landscapes they describe, all the while remaining distinct from them. Gaston Bachelard hints at this relationship of texts to their objects in La Poetique de l'espace: L'espace saisi par ['imagination ne peut rester l'espace indifferent livre a la mesure et a la reflexion du geometre. [...] [I] l est vecu non pas dans sa positivite, mais avec toutes les partialites de 1' imagination. (4) For Louis Forestier, the interest of Huysmans' text lies in une rivalite entre les possibilites de l ecriture et un certain nombre de productions artistiques. (5) On this view, Huysmans uses the drageoir pour insister sur un desordre apparent du contenu ou, si 1'on veut, sur [. …

Balanchine's La Valse: Meanings and Implications for Ravel Studies

The interpretation of Ravel’s La Valse by George Balanchine (1904–83) opens up new avenues of study for Ravel scholars by inviting enquiry into a complex web of relationships among music, choreography, literature, and historical context. Specifically, the choreographer’s superb visualization of La Valse (1951) yields additional meanings and implications for Ravel’s music—and, more speculatively, for his biography. By extension, the question is raised as to what theoretical-critical framework(s) might help to probe these relationships. In engaging with these issues, I hope to show that Balanchine’s realization can mediate powerfully between so-called “inherent” musical meaning and meaning that emerges through an examination of sociocultural forces (theorized broadly after Nicholas Cook).1 Balanchine’s choreography, I would argue, successfully negotiates both poles to open up ontological issues and intertextual networks that emphasize some of Ravel’s most recognized musical attributes. Finally, in light of Benjamin Ivry’s controversial biography, I maintain that Balanchine’s work permits hermeneutic enquiry into the composer’s possible homosexuality, and his preoccupation with death.2

In Praise of Art and Literature

Travel literature is a hybrid genre constructed through a process of translations, intertextual movements, and trans-codifications between different art forms and diverse cultural contexts. The interplay of several discursive formations such as gender, “race”, ethnicity, class, and sexual preference informs the process of representation of the self and of “otherness.” The analysis of representation as a process and the study of the literary hybridizations that characterize travel writing as a specific genre reveal how travel literature can be interpreted as an oblique autobiography of the traveler, where his/her meeting with otherness embodies a crucial function in his/her hermeneutic journey towards self-discovery. In this essay, the travel writings of Anna Jameson (1794–1860) are read as a tool to deconstruct and reelaborate the identity and position of women within the social order, as well as to weave an intertextual support network for female education and emancipation. In her writings, art becomes the traveler's guide, connecting the familiar and the unknown, tradition and innovation, individual and collective identity, in a transnational dimension.

Jim Jarmusch’s Aesthetics of Sampling

JIM JARMUSCH'S AESTHETICS OF SAMPLING IN GHOST DOG - THE WAY OF THE SAMURAI ICE Cube's "Gangsta's Fairytale" (1990), Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg's "2 of Amerikaz Most Wanted" (1996), 50 Cent's "What Up Gangsta" (2003): from the end of the 1980s, in countless raps,(1) the gangster persona has inspired a host of MCs, who since then have adopted - and adapted - an imagery and themes the American film industry started dealing with sixty years earlier.(2) However, this cross-fertilization can work the other way round too. A director like Jim Jarmusch has chosen to invigorate Ghost Dog - The Way of the Samurai not only with the charismatic power of the black gangster, but also with a particularly rich intertextual network and an aesthetics of sampling clearly reminiscent of that taken up by rap artists since the end of the 1970s. Indeed, rap music's dominant feature...

Intra- and Intertextuality in Literary Translation: the Case of a Non-Contemporary Piece of Work

Any text can be regarded as a semiotic unity composed of an intervowen net of signs which interacts with other previous texts. It is believed that translators should bear in mind, first, the inter-semiotic interactions within the text, i.e., the intratextual set of relationships, to come out with a consistent, coherent target text, and, second, the inter-semiotic interaction across the text, i.e., the intertextual set of relationships, which allows readers to perceive certain suitable intertextual links. This paper aims to analyse the intra- and intertextual network of relationships of a literary text from a contrastive point of view, comparing Henry James's original Daisy Miller and two of its current translations into Spanish. It will be argued that had the Spanish translators taken into consideration the intratextual set of relationships of the source text at the time of producing a target text, some inconsistencies could have been prevented and a more cohesive, coherent and appealing text would have ensued. It will also be argued that the translators of this nineteenth-century piece of work should allow target readers to perceive certain intertextual links between their target texts and other texts written in Spanish at the time and other translated texts of works originally written in that century in order for target readers to get an equivalent effect to that perceived by current source readers and to render a faithful image of the writer.

Mothers of Invention: Feminist Authors and Experimental Fiction in France and Quebec (review)

Reviewed by: Mothers of Invention: Feminist Authors and Experimental Fiction in France and Quebec Barbara Havercroft (bio) Miléna Santoro. Mothers of Invention: Feminist Authors and Experimental Fiction in France and Quebec McGill-Queen’s University Press 2002. xvi, 348. $75.00 In this exhaustive and well-documented study, Miléna Santoro analyses selected novels by four francophone feminist writers, two of whom hail from France, and two from Quebec: Hélène Cixous, Madeleine Gagnon, [End Page 512] Nicole Brossard, and Jeanne Hyvrard. As considerable attention has already been devoted to the theoretical and philosophical issues surrounding French feminism, Santoro chooses to concentrate on the fictional writings of these four authors, who share 'similar political, ethical, and aesthetic goals with virtually identical creative strategies.' Postulating the existence of a transatlantic feminist community during the 1970s, Santoro claims that these women's experimental works constitute the final chapter of twentieth-century avant-garde writing. The focus of her analysis is on the mother figure, the representation of maternity, and the subversive use of language in the complex, original novels under scrutiny. The 'mothers of invention' announced in the title are multiple, as this expression refers to the four authors themselves, the 'birth' of their inventive scriptural strategies, and the various configurations of the mother that are proposed, revisited, contested, and valorized in their novels. Throughout this volume, Santoro demonstrates her vast knowledge of each author's oeuvre, of the critical analyses previously published on the novels in question, and of the social and political contexts of French and Québécois feminism of the 1970s. A different chapter is devoted to each of the four writers, and each of these chapters is divided into three sections: a brief introduction to the author's works, context, and career achievements; a consideration of the principal thematic concerns of the novel in question; and finally, an analysis of the experimental narrative strategies deployed therein. Santoro performs meticulous, close readings of each novel, showing a keen sensitivity to the text and an eye for detail. The book's opening chapter provides a useful survey of the social and historical background of the revival of feminism in France and Quebec in the 1970s, setting the groundwork for the analysis of the novels in the later chapters, and elucidating the notions of écriture féminine (feminine writing, as proposed by Cixous) and écriture au féminin (writing in the feminine, an expression used in Quebec). While much of this material has been reviewed elsewhere, Santoro's discussion has the merit of explaining the various 'similarities and reciprocal influences' between the different writers on both sides of the Atlantic. The final part of this chapter rightly calls for a revision of the male-dominated avant-garde canon, insisting on the inclusion of women's texts and specifically those penned by these four authors, given their disruptive use of language, coupled with their ethical and political stance. In the following four chapters, Santoro provides a detailed analysis of the four selected novels, beginning with Hélène Cixous's La. Concentrating on the novel's rewriting of several intertexts, Santoro charts the narrator's difficult metamorphosis from an initial moribund state - induced by patriarchy - to her eventual 'rebirth' as a joyful subject at the novel's conclusion. Santoro convincingly illustrates the importance of La's intricate [End Page 513] intertextual network, but this study could have benefited from more extensive recourse to theories of intertextuality, such as those of Gérard Genette (who is rather hastily dismissed in a footnote), Laurent Jenny, or others, especially given the preponderant role of the Egyptian Book of the Dead as La's major hypotext. Turning her attention to Madeleine Gagnon's poetic novel Lueur, which features the relationship between grandmother and granddaughter, Santoro again examines numerous textual devices, including intertextual references to classical myth and theoretical discourse, the construction and transmission of a 'specifically woman-centered ancestral memory or tradition,' the novel's emphasis on mother figures, death, language, and the body, and its innovative combination of different literary genres. A similar departure from traditional narrative conventions is observed in Nicole Brossard's L'Amèr ou le chapitre effrité, in...