Intertextual Process Research Articles

Text trajectories and media discourse

During the Democratic nomination for President of the United States (2007-2008), Hillary Rodham Clinton’s laughter became the subject of intense scrutiny by mass media and was dubbed, The Clinton Cackle. This paper investigates how the ‘cackle’ characterization was first established, and thus, formed the basis of an intertextual series (Hodges, 2011), wherein this re-presentation of Clinton’s laughter circulated across multiple discursive contexts. By examining various dimensions of the decontextualization and recontextualization of Clinton’s laughter as it ‘travelled’ across contexts (Blommaert, 2005), the analysis illustrates how the news media effectively reshaped the kinds of meanings and values attached to it and concomitantly (re)produced and reinforced a stereotypically gendered, negative (i.e., sexist, misogynist) perception of her. The paper concludes with a discussion of the significance of tracing the trajectory of this ‘text’ in terms of the ideological nature of the intertextual processes at work, and the implications for women politicians more generally.

Reflexos de Alice: Corpo, Gênero e escrita em Alice no Espelho, de Laura Bergallo

Por via de aportes teóricos vários, porque interdisciplinar se nos apresenta a produção epistemológica voltada ao exame do gênero literário infantil e juvenil, importa investigar a obra Alice no espelho (2005), de Laura Bergallo, com ilustrações de Edith Derdyk. Na narrativa juvenil em questão, a autora contempla a história de Alice, uma adolescente que desenvolve um processo doloroso e angustiante de anorexia nervosa. A partir de um intenso e constante processo de intertextualidade com o clássico de Lewis Carroll, a escritora trata de forma bastante literária o tema, em muito distanciando sua obra de um mero compêndio médico dos sintomas e do tratamento da doença. Por via do presente trabalho, objetivamos investigar a representação literária do corpo e o investimento intertextual realizado pela autora como um dos procedimentos estilísticos que conferem literariedade à obra.DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.15304/elos.1.1727

The Impact of Real News about "Fake News": Intertextual Processes and Political Satire

The Impact of Real News about "Fake News": Intertextual Processes and Political Satire

Responsibilised Resilience? Reworking Neoliberal Social Policy Texts

Responsibilised Resilience? Reworking Neoliberal Social Policy Texts

The Secret that Makes a Hero of the Weak: Intertextuality and Cross-Gender Identification in Amalia Kahana-Carmon's Early Prose

This article explores the early prose fiction of Amalia Kahana-Carmon, one of the “founding mothers” of contemporary Israeli literature. Lacking strong literary foremothers, Kahana-Carmon established her formative place in Israeli literature through an intertextual process based on crossgender identification with a male literary tradition which is thereby opened up to a new reading. The article examines the cross-gender intertextual process sketched out by Kahana-Carmon in her early prose, focusing on the story that became, in time, the one most identified with her: “Ne‘ima Sasson kotevet shirim” (Ne‘ima Sasson writes poems). As I would argue, the complex, gender-loaded literary dialogue with the Hebrew canon outlined in “Ne‘ima Sasson” laid the foundation for Kahana-Carmon’s poetics. This is a poetics (or, rather—ars-poetica) based on an ongoing confrontation with the male canon of Hebrew literature, a canon with which Kahana-Carmon identifies while at the same time exposing its gender-fluid aspects, which were not recognized by her male peers or by Hebrew literature scholarship.

The cultural mediational dynamics of literary intertexts: An approach to the problem of generative and transformational dynamics

The paper raises the theoretical question of the cultural mediational nature of literary intertexts from the point of view of generic and transformational dynamics. The intertextual complex as mediational operator is examined at two levels – (1) in the context of cultural diachrony by observing how the literary work establishes its place in the history of literature closely connected to the metapoiesis of the text; (2) at various kinds of intratextual interlevel movements regulating the evolution of a whole intertextual system within the work. Differentiating the ontological, generative and transformational conceptualization of intertextual poetics, an attempt is made to define the basic textual modes of the pretext, the intext and the intertext by describing their functionality in the building of an intersemiotic literary system. The relevant functions are grasped by shedding light upon the types of the sign of which the given signifying structures consist (here a terminological clarification and re-evaluation are added) and their textual semantics in terms of referential and relational quality (cf. the different versions of referential and relational semantics). In the first place, however, the paper aims at outlining the structure and content of the generic-transformational semiotic processes in which the dynamic aspects of intertextual semiosis are revealed. Within this framework, the processuality of the development of the intertextual signifying structure is elucidated, shown as a chain of reciprocal sign activities resulting in constantly evolving semantic shifts within the intra- and intertextual semiosis processes, all relying on mediational operations. Text examples are taken from and references made to works by A. S. Pushkin, I. S. Turgenev, F. M. Dostoevsky and J. M. Coetzee.

Intertextuality and Narrative Practices of Young Deaf Students in Classroom Contexts: A Microethnographic Study

AbstractThis study explores how intertextuality influences the narrative practices of young deaf children in two classrooms. Specifically, the study examines how variations in what texts are made available to juxtapose and variations in how texts are juxtaposed influence the narratives young deaf children produce. A major premise underlying these two purposes is that intertextual links are socially constructed by teachers and children. Data from each classroom was collected using ethnographic methods including participant observation 2.5 days per week in each classroom for six months, collection of classroom artifacts (e.g., student writing and drawing) and video recordings of select storytelling and story writing events. Data analysis involved transcribing the video recorded events, identifying potential instances of intertextuality in the transcripts and student written products, and coding for intertextual substance (the range of texts referenced) and intertextual process (how intertextual connections were constructed). Findings revealed two models of narrative practice in the classrooms: an individual model with a focus on a narrow range of narrative forms and structures aligned with formal curriculum and required assessments and a narrow range of potential intertextual connections; and, a shared model of narrative practice that involved a broader range of potential intertextual connections, social play, a focus on author‐audience relationships (where the audience were classroom peers) often eschewing formal narrative structures and forms, and the use of multiple modalities / sign systems. In one of the classrooms the individual model prevailed, while the shared model prevailed in the other. The findings suggest that over time deaf children, like hearing children, engage in, adopt, and adapt different classroom narrative practices dependent on the classroom social contexts of their production. The findings have implications for reconceptualizing narrative development and the assessment of spoken and written narratives.

Meditations on a Slippery Citation: Paul's Use of Psalm 112:9 in 2 Corinthians 9:9

Abstract A topic of scholarly debate in recent decades among interpreters of Paul's letters has been the degree of interpretive competence and effort that Paul expected of his readers in understanding his letters and (in particular) the meaning of his scriptural citations and allusions. In this article, I begin with some brief reflections on 2 Cor 1:13–14 as an indication of Paul's communicative intentions and expectations in the letter and on the kind of exegesis required for theological interpretation that accords with those intentions and expectations. I then examine Paul's citation of Ps 112:9 in 2 Cor 9:9 as a case study in the possibilities for theological interpretation of an exegesis that reads Paul's letters as communications intended for patient, communal, and intertextual interpretation. The focus of my inquiry is the ambiguous reference of the "he" in the scriptural citation and its rhetorical function within 2 Cor 8–9 and the larger context of canonical 2 Corinthians. I conclude that the surface ambiguity of Paul's language functions within an attentive reading community to provoke an enriched understanding of the relationship between divine and human grace and righteousness, which arises out of the social and intertextual process of resolving the ambiguity. The implications of this reading for theological interpretation of 2 Corinthians include a strengthening of the argument that Paul's description in 2 Cor 5:21 of believers "becom[ing] the righteousness of God" has in view not merely a transformation of status but a transformation of character and conduct.

Meditations on a Slippery Citation: Paul's Use of Psalm 112:9 in 2 Corinthians 9:9

Abstract A topic of scholarly debate in recent decades among interpreters of Paul's letters has been the degree of interpretive competence and effort that Paul expected of his readers in understanding his letters and (in particular) the meaning of his scriptural citations and allusions. In this article, I begin with some brief reflections on 2 Cor 1:13–14 as an indication of Paul's communicative intentions and expectations in the letter and on the kind of exegesis required for theological interpretation that accords with those intentions and expectations. I then examine Paul's citation of Ps 112:9 in 2 Cor 9:9 as a case study in the possibilities for theological interpretation of an exegesis that reads Paul's letters as communications intended for patient, communal, and intertextual interpretation. The focus of my inquiry is the ambiguous reference of the "he" in the scriptural citation and its rhetorical function within 2 Cor 8–9 and the larger context of canonical 2 Corinthians. I conclude that the surface ambiguity of Paul's language functions within an attentive reading community to provoke an enriched understanding of the relationship between divine and human grace and righteousness, which arises out of the social and intertextual process of resolving the ambiguity. The implications of this reading for theological interpretation of 2 Corinthians include a strengthening of the argument that Paul's description in 2 Cor 5:21 of believers "becom[ing] the righteousness of God" has in view not merely a transformation of status but a transformation of character and conduct.

RESPONSE TO FRED DONNER'S REVIEW OF PARABLE AND POLITICS IN EARLY ISLAMIC HISTORY: THE RASHIDUN CALIPHS (IJMES 43 [2011]: 570–71)

In his recent review of my book, Parable and Politics in Early Islamic History, in the August 2011 issue of IJMES, Fred Donner provides several opinions that are in need of correction. His initial impression that the “basic point of Parable and Politics” follows previous scholarship “in an attempt to work out how much is ‘fact’ and how much is literary invention” (p. 570) sets the wrong tone for evaluating studies on historiography. Far from being merely an opposition between true and false, the study of “fiction” in historiography is actually an analysis of construction not of truthfulness. The complexity of doing this lies in reaching for a multifaceted commentary that was originally intended not only in the individual reports but also through a process of intertextuality, which casts implications on a range of issues and on the representation of characters across a cluster of reports.

Infiltrations d’images: de la réécriture de la fiction pastorale ibérique en France (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles) by Marta Texeira Anacleto

Literary History and Criticism edited by Marion Geiger ANACLETO, MARTA TEXEIRA. Infiltrations d’images: de la réécriture de la fiction pastorale ibérique en France (XVIe –XVIIIe siècles). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. ISBN 978-90420 -2630-8. Pp. 393. 80 a. As the popularity of the Amadis waned in France, another Spanish import, Los siete libros de la Diana (c. 1559), a pastoral novel mingling prose and verse by the Portuguese writer Jorge de Montemayor, launched a new fictional vogue. While La Diana is well known to L’Astrée scholars, Marta Texeira Anacleto shifts our attention from the novel to its translations. Drawing extensively on translation theory, she treats French translations of La Diana, its continuations, and imitations by Figueroa, Lope de Vega, and Cervantes, as part of a broader continuum of rewritings—increasingly distorted “images” that include autonomous French pastorals. The book focuses on three sets of translations: a large late Renaissance group (1578–1614), a cluster from the 1620s, and a trio published between 1699 and 1784. Anacleto first examines how the works’ peritexts track changing conceptions of translation, from the sixteenth century, when translation helped define literary French, through seventeenth-century ‘belles infidèles,’ to Enlightenment efforts at cultural preservation. She very interestingly demonstrates how translators shaped their works’ reception through titles, dedications, and tables of contents as well as their explicit statements. In her treatment of the translations proper, Anacleto describes the initial appearance of multiple translations of La Diana, each claiming to correct earlier errors, as exemplifying the Renaissance search for the ideal reproduction of the text’s meaning as well as its best expression in French. Despite their “fidélité,” translators subtly transpose Spanish love discourse into the language of budding honnêteté. The second group at once reflects the intervening success of L’Astrée and legitimates the “écriture narrative française” d’Urfé’s novel inspired (158). Suppressing anything foreign, translators of the 1620s effect major formal transformations, especially in their treatment of verse (164ff.). The third group includes the only translation by a woman—Gillot de Saintonge’s fusion (1699) of La Diana and its continuations into an idiosyncratic nouvelle galante. Unlike seventeenth-century translations, Enlightenment versions of La Diana (1733) and Cervantes’s Galatea (1784) exhibit the works’ alien qualities (252), which they elucidate in explanatory notes. Yet even as translators acknowledge historical distance, they manage to accommodate their public’s Rousseauist sensibilities. The book’s third section examines indigenous works with intertextual relationships to La Diana. Anacleto depicts works whose titles acknowledge this relationship as at once subverting and prolonging the mirroring procedures of translation. The concluding chapter, devoted to L’Astrée and its epigones, locates translation within the broader intertextual process of aesthetic autonomization. L’Astrée is at once a reading of earlier translations and a profoundly original work, resulting from the injection of an “élément d’étrangeté” into the French system (318). Like La Diana, it inspired its own imitations, but these offer only a sterile “écriture de la citation” (289). This is an enlightening book whose exploration of seldom considered material has much to teach us, both about the evolution of the French novel and about 1156 FRENCH REVIEW 85.6 translation’s contributions to the literary system. It is not, though, easy to read. Prone to abstract theoretical formulations, Anacleto does not always supply the needed illustrative example. More important, her book would have profited from an initial overview of the Spanish source texts and their translators. Familiarity with La Diana is a minimum requirement for navigating Anacleto’s allusive treatment of characters, plots, and conventions. Contextual information about the translations is scant and is offered piecemeal: we learn in a note, for example, that Chappuys also translated Ariosto and Castiglione (108). Given Anacleto’s emphasis on cultural transfer, moreover, one wishes for more information about the mentality the originals evoke. Her insightful reminder that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries installed translations within “la grande métaphore qu’était La Bibliothèque Française fixée par Sorel” (62) makes us long for a fuller account of what was transformed in the process. Dartmouth College (NH) Kathleen Wine BARROVECCHIO, ANNE...

Intermediality, Rewriting Histories, and Identities in French Rap

In her article "Intermediality, Rewriting Histories and Identities in French Rap" Isabelle Marc Martínez analyzes aspects of French hip hop culture. As an example of resistant cultural manifestations, hip hop scenes all over the world develop strategies to subvert mainstream values and to replace them by new de-localized, contesting identities via intermedial and intertextual processes. In France during the 1990 rap was intended to reassess French national history and national self-perception. Foundational hip hop bands such as Assassin, Ministère AMER, IAM, and NTM aimed at discrediting official narratives concerning the French culture's colonial and social past. hip hop artists, who viewed themselves as poets in a romantic vein, invested themselves with a responsibility that was political, ethical and aesthetic. From this position of poetic superiority, they attempted to alter official narratives by questioning and reviewing the educational system of France. The outcome of these resistant strategies was the forging of new multicultural and multiethnic identities of French culture, which have been in fact partly appropriated by mainstream culture and politics.

Condensating into vivid portraits : l'intertestualità nascosta nella poesia di Medbh McGuckian

The following essay aims at investigating the semantic and intertextual denseness of McGuckian’s poems, going beyond her supposed incommunicability. She has often highlighted the “balancing” and “clarifying” power of her own poems, and the unbiased reader will realise that they do contain an immediate and outspoken quality. This is often mysteriously conveyed by certain images which emerge from the intermingling of textual and intertextual places. Usually, in many of her works, McGuckian quotes or refers to wide parts of some texts, whose source is not indicated. Sometimes her poems rise from the way these fragments are interwoven, even without any ‘new’ word, in order to define and confirm a contemporary and intimally feminine poetical identity. This essay will discover and enlighten some of these intertextual processes and devises, which, necessarily, add meaning to her already semantically and iconographically dense poetic visions.

Implicit Biblical Motifs in Almodóvar's Hable con ella and Volver The Bible as Intertext

Abstract: This article explores implicit biblical motifs in two films by Pedro Almodóvar: Hable con ella (2002) and Volver (2006). Implicit motifs designate echoes to biblical texts that have textual basis but cannot be proven intentional. The article starts by providing some theoretical basis by referring to the notion of intertextuality and suggesting criteria. It then traces biblical motifs in the two films mentioned above (both in individual scenes and in the general plot), whether they occur directly, through gender or generational reversals or through the mediation of other texts. The reinterpretation or transgression of biblical motifs shed light on the film's own cultural context and on the intertextual process in general.

Intertextuality, mediation, and members’ categories in focus groups on humor

This paper extends studies on intertextuality into a more explicitly interactional context. I examine the actual process of intertextuality where comedy audiences construct recombinant selves through making sense of various membership categories as well as through making sense of a certain kind of comedy. The examination of this process requires receptive research; however, most studies leave the interpretive process unanalyzed. Conducting both a sequential analysis and a membership categorization analysis will reveal that categories are not “pre-formed” but “per-formed” in situ. To illustrate these points, I report on a receptive study of Local comedy in Hawai‘i.

History and Tourism: Intertextual Representations of Florence

The act of worldmaking involves various and complex representations that “produce” places, cultures, institutions, individuals, and heritages. The subject has emerged as a strong concept in the recent conceptuality of Tourism Studies/Tourism Sciences. In this review article, Staiff makes it clear that a lead heritage locale or tourist destination city like Florence (and visitors to Florence!) is (are) unavoidably ensnared in such practices. In this article, the reviewer explores the interrelationship between the various historical representations of the city, and in particular, the myth of Renaissance Florence and the recent revisionist constructions of the 15th century. It suggests that a process of intertextuality is at work in both “tourist Florence,” as a place, and in the way the visitor makes sense of the city within networks of meaning continually being created. Further, this review article explores the coincidence of Florence as a specular culture in the 15th century—one where everything is deemed to mirror everything else—and a tourist display culture in the 21st century and what this coincidence reveals about the role of representation in the past and the role of representation and worldmaking in the present through the mediating agency and authority of tourism, and its collaborative inscriptive industries.

Trashing The Prime Minister's Bride: Public Dismay and Intertextual Media

In 2006–2007, the romantic affair between Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen and white-collar worker Susan Kuronen received unprecedented attention in the national media. Analyzing the coverage of the affair and its aftermath in Finnish evening papers through Sara Ahmed's notion of affective circulation, the present article investigates the drawing of public and private boundaries through the public reviling of Kuronen for revealing intimate details concerning Vanhanen's private life. As the couple's relationship unraveled, the evening papers began fashioning class differences between the parties both previously characterized as “ordinary” and middle-class, labeling Kuronen as common and trashy. Addressing the dynamics of class and gender at play, the article shows that although Kuronen was accused of continuously revealing her private life, she actually gave few interviews herself. Rather, the popular press reused the same comments and quotes extensively in an intertextual process of circulation through which Kuronen was crafted into a highly affective media figure and an object of considerable public dismay. In addition to exploring the intertextual working practices of the popular media, the article investigates the effects of the circulation of affect from evening papers to online discussion forums as underpinned by social hierarchies, the uses of privacy as a politician's media strategy as well as the risks that this involves.

Sociology, Aesthetics, Expertise

Sociology, Aesthetics, Expertise Tony Bennett (bio) In proposing a theory of literary reproduction, Pierre Macherey distinguishes its concerns from those of a theory of literature, dismissing the latter as a chimerical quest for an impossible object. Literature, he says, does not exist except as a “historical fiction,” a construction of “the literary genre that is Criticism.” But what does exist, he continues, “and in a perfectly real way, is the literary.” What difference does he see between the two? Literature’s existence is posited in essentialist terms as consisting in a particular set of formal properties, while the literary is construed as an open-ended, dynamic set of intertextual processes which carries its form, conceived as a more fluid set of possibilities, “ahead of itself, by opening up the field of its own modifications, and of their own exuberant proliferation.” If literature consists of a definite textual corpus, the literary is “a complex of processes, dynamically articulating among themselves the labour of writing and the labour of its reproduction—and this independently of a normative ideal which would try to substitute for this ceaselessly pursued movement the illusion of an identity, a stability or a permanence.”1 What can it mean to say that literature is a fabrication, but that the literary exists in “a perfectly real way?” If the labor of a particular form of expertise (criticism) is acknowledged in the first case, what forms of expertise are involved in the processes through which the dynamic reinscriptions of the literary are effected? How are they constituted and exercised? These are the questions I pursue by considering how issues concerning the social articulations of literary and artistic phenomena might now be most usefully posed in the light of new approaches to the concerns and procedures of sociology that have been developed since the “sociology of literature” moment of the 1960s and 1970s. I begin by reviewing what I take to be the distinguishing characteristics of this moment, especially with regard to its concern with the differentia specifica of literature and/or the literary. I shall pay particular attention to the logic of explanation which interpreted these and the aesthetic more generally as a particular set of metaformal properties that was to be accounted for with reference to the organization of social relationships of various [End Page 253] kinds: between classes; the social relations of literary production; or the historical dynamics of literary and artistic fields, for example. I then review a range of subsequent intellectual developments which call into question such constructions of the relations between the literary, the aesthetic, and the social. I chiefly have in mind here the varied strands of assemblage and actor-network-theory whose commitment to flat ontologies, in which texts, devices, knowledges, techniques, and technologies interact with each other in complexly articulated material ensembles, calls into question the explanatory role attributed to the various forms in which the social was invoked in the “sociology of literature” moment. My primary interest here is in how these new theoretical settings displace earlier concerns with the aesthetic, construed as a set of metaformal properties to be given a social explanation, to focus instead on its role as a product of particular forms of expertise whose exercise is tangled up in a distinctive set of processes and apparatuses for ordering and organizing particular kinds of subjectivity. In illustrating these concerns, I look at how investigations of the relations between social, literary, and artistic phenomena might be reordered in the light of Jacques Rancière’s account of the varied “emplotments” of the relations between the “life of art and the arts of life” associated with what he calls the aesthetic regime of art.2 I shall, however, work both with and against the terms Rancière proposes for understanding the properties of this regime: with, in so far as his remarks concerning its capacity for effecting a redistribution of the sensible treat it as a historically distinctive dispositif; against, in so far as his formulations validate specific aspects of the operations of this dispositif as a form of metapolitics that transcends the mundane politics of the state, bureaucracy, and the ethical aspects of social life. By way of...

Understanding and Integrating Multiple Science Texts: Summary Tasks are Sometimes Better Than Argument Tasks

One of the major challenges of a knowledge society is that students as well as other citizens must learn to understand and integrate information from multiple textual sources. Still, task and reader characteristics that may facilitate or constrain such intertextual processes are not well understood by researchers. In this study, we compare the effects of summary and argument essay tasks when undergraduates read seven different texts on a particular scientific topic, finding that an instruction to write summaries may lead to better understanding and integration than an instruction to write argument essays. We discuss several possible explanations for this result. We also found that beliefs about the certainty of knowledge in some instances can moderate the effect of task on comprehension performance.

INTERTEXTUALIDADE OU PLÁGIO? - CONSIDERAÇÕES TEÓRICO-PRÁTICAS

In this essay the author tries to aprehend the mechanism of the process of intertextuality, by considering it a dynamic and enriching act of (re)creation of the literary text. The author illustrater her proposal with a series of examples trying to reveal the nature and the technique of the inter-relationship between the texts used along the work, to emphasize the reach of the new dimension of the reading critic resulting from the true intertextuality at last, the essayist relates, by way of confrontation, the characterization of intertex­tuality and plagiarism.