Intertextual Study Research Articles

El Llibre d'Amic i Amat de Ramón Llull: modesta contribución al estudio de sus fuentes

Intertextual study of the Libre d' amici amat in the fields of spirituality, theology and literature, with special references to the latin patristic, the thought of the Cistercians and the Victorines, the legenda of Ami et Amile, etc. The method of filiations and sources is adopted, but with major corrections: the likeliness about themes and motifs has not only to be pointed; that first step must be prolonged by an interrogation about the sense and the function of these elements in the architecture, the systeme of a particular thought. The a. emphatises also how relevant to unify philosophy and poetics it is; in that way, he outlines the chief features of one possible tipology for the examplum in the Iullian opuscule.

Review Essay: Fashioning the Female Subject: The Intertextual Networking of Dickinson, Moore, and Rich

Reviewed by: Fashioning the Female Subject: The Intertextual Networking of Dickinson, Moore, and Rich Cynthia Hogue (bio) Fashioning the Female Subject: The Intertextual Networking of Dickinson, Moore, and Rich. By Sabine Sielke. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1997. 263 pp. Sabine Sielke’s Fashioning the Female Subject is an intertextual study of three paradigmatic American women poets — Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, and Adrienne Rich, and traces the historical transformations female subjectivity has undergone since the middle of the nineteenth century. Each of its three major chapters on Dickinson and Moore (Chapter 1), Moore and Rich (Chapter 2), and Rich and Dickinson (Chapter 3) puts these poets productively in dialogue with each other, as well as with other less representative but nevertheless significant poets, among them Sylvia Plath and Elizabeth Bishop. This study thus foregrounds and illuminates issues of representation of female subjectivity that recur, in different forms, for over a century, shaped by their particular cultural, historical contexts. The study’s well-nuanced psychoanalytic approach is enhanced by Sielke’s having read Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, among others, in the original. Sielke’s dialogic analysis thoughtfully asserts that “the difference between deconstructive and reconstructive writing practices is a difference within rather than between texts” (10). Because of the depth of Sielke’s comprehension of Kristeva’s La révolution du langage poétique, and consequently the integration of theory and interpretation that she is able to achieve in her application of this theoretical approach, there is a sense of scope and renewed urgency to her poststructuralist readings (indeed, her re-vision, one might say). In addition, Sielke not only builds on the work of such foundational critics in the field as Roland Hagenbüchle, Jean Garrigue, Joanne Feit Diehl, and Cristanne Miller, among others, but grounds her argument in extensive — and in Moore’s case, original — archival research. Although the book is strong overall, Chapter 1, “Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore: Select Defects — Disrupted Discourse and the Body,” is to my mind the most splendidly realized. Arguing that Dickinson and Moore share, in their language-conscious poetics, formal concerns not to conform to but to transgress linguistic boundaries and destabilize the speaking subject, Sielke explores the ways in which their radically gendered aesthetics put into signification the crisis of the male subject and question dominant representations of [End Page 118] the female as body. Both poets, Sielke asserts, project the female subject that emerges from this interrogation as a “third event” (Dickinson’s term): “a somewhat disengendered or in-between subject” (20). Pursuing the trail opened up by the poet Jean Garrigue in the 1960s, Sielke superbly considers Moore’s own contemplation of Dickinson, based upon thorough analysis of both Moore’s published review of a centennial edition of Dickinson’s Selected Letters (ed. Todd) and her unpublished reading notes from the 1930s. One especially appreciates what Sielke makes of some of Moore’s most abbreviated notes. On the back of one page of the unpublished notes, for example, Moore copied out poem 303 (“The Soul Selects”) and noted in the margins, “cf. Mallarmé.” Sielke then fascinatingly discusses the relationship of both poets to Mallarmé’s aesthetic of extremes, a discussion cogently mediated through Kristeva’s reading of Mallarmé. For example, critics will find Sielke’s analysis of one of Moore’s most enigmatic published comments about Dickinson, that is, “the independence of the subjunctive, and many another select defect,” as useful and acute as the chapter as a whole. Chapter 2, “Marianne Moore and Adrienne Rich: Daughters-in-Law or Outlaws?,” casts the dialogue between these two poets by way of Irigaray’s notion of mimicry, analyzing the destabilization of their poetic subjects by means of their employment of quotation and their valorization of the maternal. Sielke suggests that both poets use quotation and Irigarayan mimicry as a strategic acting out of the function that women historically have been assigned, reproduction, at the same time as they ironically undermine the very functions they expose. This chapter asserts both poets’ “subversive potential” through such textual travesties but also raises critical questions — “what exactly is being deconstructed, what is reinforced by Moore’s and Rich’s mimic performances?” (13...

Neil Wright, History and Literature in Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval West: Studies in Intertextuality. (Collected Studies Series, 503.) Aldershot, Eng., and Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum, 1995. Pp. xiv, 301, numbered nonconsecutively. $82.50.

Neil Wright, History and Literature in Late Antiquity and the Early Medieval West: Studies in Intertextuality. (Collected Studies Series, 503.) Aldershot, Eng., and Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum, 1995. Pp. xiv, 301, numbered nonconsecutively. $82.50.

Die werking van die musiekmotief in <i>De koperen tuin</i> van Simon Vestdijk

Simon Vestdijk is one of the most prominent figures in the literary awareness of the Netherlands. From an intertextual study between De toekomst der religie (The Future of Religion) and De koperen tuin (The Copper Garden) it emerges that the postulated view of reality is transposed in narrative form in the text-internal vision of reality in the novel. This transformation is concretized and manifested in visible terms in the character portrayal, especially with regard to music as the passion to which the main character dedicates himself. The many references to music in the novel gradually gain importance as a motif that becomes a symbol of different kinds of love. In the course of the narrative, and especially towards the end of it, there is a substitution of religious value contents in the main character who is led to humanistic love through music, so that this process of transvaluation of religion (in the wider sense of the word) becomes the main emphasis of the discourse of the novel, albeit in veiled form.

Country Parsons, Country Poets: George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins as Spiritual Autobiographers

64Book Reviews Mary Theresa Kyne, Country Parsons, Country Poets: George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins as Spiritual Autobiographers. Greenburg, Pennsylvania: Eadmer Press, 1992. 250 pp. $25.95. by John L. Idol, Jr. Intertextual studies of George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins have yielded dissertations, articles, chapters of books, and conference papers. Such studies will no doubt continue as readers explore the minds, hearts, art, and creative sources of these two priestly poets, both of whom wrestled to overcome powerful egocentric forces as they sought to make their lives and verse more Christocentric. With frank acknowledgment of her indebtedness to earlier commentators on the intertextuality of Hopkins' and Herbert's poetry, Mary Theresa Kyne seeks to place these two poets within the tradition of writers who use their verse or prose to reveal their spiritual conflicts as they prepare themselves to be abler messengers for God. Tracing that tradition carries her back, of course, to St. Augustine, who had wrenching reckonings and wrestlings. Kyne chooses not to spend much effort and time forging ties to St. Augustine or other spiritual autobiographers. Content to define the genre of spiritual autobiography and to indicate Herbert's and Hopkins' focused use of it, she finds the Ignatian Exercises a key component in the lives and art of Herbert and Hopkins. For the latter she can point to the specific day (September 16, 1868) that St. Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises came into his life. For Herbert, she can claim only that he, like many other seventeenth-century English devotional poets, turned to these guides to meditation to nurture his religious life. Like Louis Martz and others, she must rely on internal evidence to suggest the range and depth of Herbert's use of Ignatian meditative practices. From the letters and journals of Hopkins, she can trace a conscious and conscientious dedication to Ignatian exercises as Hopkins sought to enrich his spiritual life. Hopkins' life had its share of spiritual conflicts. He might well have said with Herbert that his poetry was "a picture of the many spiritual Conflicts that have past betwixt God and my Soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master: in whom I have found perfect freedom." Kyne sees both conflict and resolution, a clearly discernible movement toward acceptance, and eventual joy in Book Reviews65 the poetry of both periods of "(w)reckoning" and (w)restling." These qualities are visible in the work of each poet, but the use to which she puts the progression from conflict to resolution is more pietistic than aesthetic, for she wishes the reader to look to Herbert and Hopkins as models for achieving harmony with God. That is not to say that Kyne ignores the aesthetic — far from it. She knows, as Joseph Summers long ago observed, that Herbert viewed God as the great Artificer, a view shared by Hopkins. To exercise their poetic gifts to the highest was for them to express what was most God-like in their being. Those gifts could be blighted when God was, or was thought to be, absent and could be nourished again when God brought rain and helped them bud. Their relation with God thus entered centrally into how a poem or a series of poems found expression or form. The progression Kyne sees and traces can be handily summarized in her chapter titles: " 'Ah!' Creation: The Sacrament of the Soul's Encounter with God"; " 'The Dark Night of the Soul': A ^Reckoning of the Spiritual Life"; "The Cost of Discipleship: An Audit of the Soul's Account"; "The Soul's (W)Rest: God's Pay and Reprieve"; "Lenten Fast to Paschal Feast: The Church's Mystical Repast"; "The Unfinished Cornerstone." Her discursive method calls for pairings of poems for each chapter and then a thoroughgoing analysis of each as she relates the chosen poems to the author's spiritual growth and development. She also cites relevant letters, journals, biographies, and critical studies as she discusses the poetry. Her manner of using these materials betrays the fact that the book has not been scrubbed clean of all its dissertation qualities. Generally, Kyne has a securer handle on Hopkins than on Herbert, a condition resulting...

Intertextuality as parallelism in two South African poems

This article attempts a refinement of the notion of foregrounding as it functions in poetic language through sound repetition. Phonic foregrounding is viewed not only from the vantage point of the organisation of the individual text, or the oeuvre of a particular poet, as foregrounded against the background of the ordinary usage of sound in everyday speech, but also from the point of view that the text is part of a larger literary and social discourse. In analysing and interpreting the functional organisation of sound in two Afrikaans poems, principles for the study of intertextuality put forward by van Peer (1987) are examined and revised to include phonic foregrounding as a potential factor in establishing intertextual relationships.

Stance and intertextuality in written discourse

Previous theory of social aspects of intertextual meanings has not fully examined the role of cultural meanings inherent in writers' or readers' ideological stances. The purpose of this study of intertextuality in teachers' peer dialogue journal exchanges was to determine how intertextual meanings are constituted by partners' cultural attitudes or stance that link disparate aspects of journals. It also examined the degree to which teachers were willing to explore ambivalences associated with their stance. And, it examined the influence of teachers' social relationships on their willingness to challenge each other's ideas and opinions. Results of the analysis of two pairs of teachers exchanging entries in a composition methods course indicated that each pair explored intertextual meanings in terms of a particular stance. Two female teachers explored the relationships between journal writing, gender differences, and their own personal experiences in terms of a feminist stance. Two male teachers examined the relationships between student behavior, school rules, and their own classroom behavior in terms of their stance towards teaching. In both cases, having developed a strong social relationship through their exchanges, teachers were willing to challenge each other and to explore ambivalences associated with their stances.

Erasmian Folly and Shakespear’s King Lear: A Study in Humanist Intertextuality

Erasmian Folly and Shakespear’s <i>King Lear</i>: A Study in Humanist Intertextuality

Jeremiah 9:22-23 and 1 Corinthians 1:26-31: A Study in Intertextuality

Research Article| July 01 1990 Jeremiah 9:22-23 and 1 Corinthians 1:26-31: A Study in Intertextuality Gail R. O’Day Gail R. O’Day Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Journal of Biblical Literature (1990) 109 (2): 259–267. https://doi.org/10.2307/3267017 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Gail R. O’Day; Jeremiah 9:22-23 and 1 Corinthians 1:26-31: A Study in Intertextuality. Journal of Biblical Literature 1 January 1990; 109 (2): 259–267. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3267017 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveSBL PressJournal of Biblical Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Autour de Racine: Studies in Intertextuality edited by Richard E. Goodkin (review)

Autour de Racine: Studies in Intertextuality edited by Richard E. Goodkin (review)

How Context Determines Fact: Historicism in Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady

HOW CONTEXT DETERMINES FACT: HISTORICISM IN WILLA CATHER’S A LOST LADY Joseph R. Urgo* Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady is a deceptive work that can be mistakenly read as a lament for a more glorious past, a kind of ode to the pioneer era in western American history. However, the novel itself does not repre­ sent a longing for a singular, objective past. Rather, it explores the process by which selective events are historicized, the process by which an era, for example, may become either historically known or escape understanding through ahistorical methods of narration. In Cather’s novel, an understand­ ing of the past is achieved once events and narratives are contextualized. The problem lies in the fact that there are a number of potential contexts through which past events are communicated, not all of which are historical. History is represented in Cather’s narrative in stories about the past told by her characters and in the figure and fate of Marian Forrester. In all three categories of representation, historical understanding competes with mythic images, or tableaus, from the past that capture the imagina­ tions of characters and narrators and stand in the way of historical knowledge. Cather’s title suggests this strategy perfectly. A LostLady shows that much of what actually occurred in the pioneer era has been lost in the context of mythic accounts generated by pioneers and their admirers. Specifically, one admirer, Niel Herbert, fails to see Marian Forrester in her own historical and biographical context and insists upon seeing her as a “lost” ideal. Idealized (and idolized) images—ladies and histories—are generated at the expense of historical knowledge. It is not the past that is lamented in Cather’s novel, a past which is shown to be far from heroic or exceptional. Rather, A Lost Lady presents the problematics of historical representation. In particular, Cather’s novel portrays the way in which the past is dehistoricized and turned into, as she puts it, “pleasant memory.” A good deal of Cather criticism argues that Willa Cather saw the pres­ ent as a falling off from the past, a great decline from the heroic pioneer era when men and women settled, colonized, and personified historical foundation. A Lost Lady is read through this lens, and conclusions about the novel reinforce critical visions of Cather’s romantic, historical nostalgia. Susan J. Rosowski concludes that the regrettable inability to maintain “a pioneer spirit of the land” gives A LostLady its tragic theme and that “hope for the future lies with the ability ofmen and women to translate this spirit *Joseph R. Urgo is an Assistant Professor of English at Bryant College. Among his publica­ tions is a recent book, Faulkner’s Apocrypha: “A Fable,” Snopes, and the Spirit of Human Rebellion, issued by the University Press of Mississippi (1989). into life.”1 More recently, Rosowski has reinforced her view of the novel as tragedy, with Ivy Peters playing the role of villain, and the land itself acting as victim.2 Rosowski’s reading is echoed frequently. Ann Douglas sees Marian Forrester as “an emblem of a fading vision of a special order” in history.3 John J. Murphy, in an intertextual study, concurs, and he recognizes a pattern employed by Cather to “frame the story of a downfall of the heroine.”4 Criticism ofA Lost Lady centers largely on Cather’s view of the past, her historical consciousness.3 The novel, however, poses difficulties in get­ ting at Cather’s view of a particular historical era because it depicts the making of history, or the understanding of the past, as an ideological struggle among contending interests in the present. There is less concern in A Lost Lady with presenting a definitive portrait of the past than there is in depicting a present in which many minds compete for historical authority. Involved in this historicist struggle are complexities and align­ ments arising from social class, gender, age, and relative powers of imagina­ tion, articulation, and comprehension. One thing, though, is clear. In A Lost Lady the past is depicted as anything but definitive or static. The novel makes it reductively simplistic, and actually ahistorical, to state that...

“Sermons in Stones”: The Return to Nature in Tess of the d’Urbervilles

“ S E R M O N S IN S T O N E S ” : T H E R E T U R N T O N A T U R E IN T E S S O F T H E D ’ U R B E R V IL L E S G. GLEN WICKENS Bishop’s University E v e n within a corpus of texts as large as the nineteenth-century English novel, we would be hard pressed to find a more polyphonic work than Tess of the d’ Urbervilles (1891). With its conflicting voices and constantly shifting perspectives, Tess clearly belongs to what Mikhail Bakhtin sees as the second and most important line of the novel’s development. A novel in this tradition must represent the plurality of its era’s languages or ideological voices, bring­ ing them into a unity that is not logical and semantic but paradoxical and purely stylistic: a “ heteroglot” or “contradictory unity.” 1 Expecting the narrator of Tess to be self-consistent, critics have heard con­ fusion rather than complexity in the unadjusted impressions of a voice that reflects and refracts the “views of life prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century.” 2 Furthermore, “ the confusion is not merely in the abstractable philo­ sophical content of the novel, but inextricably woven into its verbal texture.” 3 The assumption here is precisely what the study of intertextuality seeks to discredit: that a text is “ an autonomous artifact which harmoniously recon­ ciles the possible attitudes towards a given problem,” rather than “ a dialogue with other texts.” 4 The lack of thematic unity in Tess, most apparent in its “ exploration of a number of ideologies of nature,” 5 is very much an intertextual matter. The narrator’s words about his object, the theme of nature, are inevitably entangled in someone else’s discourse about it, and always directed at the anticipated answer of the listener or reader whose apperceptive back­ ground, like the author’s, is made up of contradictory utterances on the same theme. The identity of the novel depends not on the exclusion of a “commentary which belongs to another order of discourse,” 6but on the way different modes of discourse are displayed and juxtaposed. If some discourse (s) anterior to the novel forms the background necessary for the author’s or narrator’s voice to sound, his words, in turn, create the context or frame necessary for a character’s speech to be heard. In both cases, we have not just speech within speech but discourse about discourse. In Tess, Hardy introduces a literary man, Angel Clare, to foreground a E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , x iv , 2, June 1988 critique of literary discourse as such. Present in many major novels, this type of character “ looks at life through the eyes of literature and . . . tries to live ‘according to literature’ ” (D I 413). By examining the intertextual dialogue in one of Angel’s excursions at Talbothays, we may begin to hear something other than confusion in Hardy’s treatment of nature. After living in London, Angel, who praises “pastoral life in ancient Greece” (179), returns to his native county and selects Talbothays dairy as a place to start a career in agriculture. Whatever his practical aims might be, his under­ lying motivation makes him, like every character in Tess, not so much an individual as an ideologue, “ a sample product of the last five-and-twenty years” (369). The emotional price of his intellectual liberty is a variant of Tess’s “ache of modernism,” “ feelings,” as the narrator says, “which might almost have been called those of the age” (177). The “ chronic melancholy” that accompanies the “decline of belief in a beneficent power” (169) impels Angel to seek in nature what he can no longer find in the “ old systems of mysticism” (462). In a scene that literally shows the “difficulties of passage” (202) that Tess and her pagan friends experience one “ Sun’s-day” (201) morning on their way to Church, Hardy also suggests that Angel’s transition from his Evan­ gelical upbringing to his avowed...

Trilogy of Treason: An Intertextual Study of Juan Goytisolo

Trilogy of Treason: An Intertextual Study of Juan Goytisolo

Comment on Friedman's "'I Go Where I Love': An Intertextual Study of H. D. and Adrienne Rich"

Comment on Friedman's "'I Go Where I Love': An Intertextual Study of H. D. and Adrienne Rich"

"I Go Where I Love": An Intertextual Study of H. D. and Adrienne Rich

"I Go Where I Love": An Intertextual Study of H. D. and Adrienne Rich

Trilogy of Treason. An Intertextual Study of Juan Goytisolo

Trilogy of Treason. An Intertextual Study of Juan Goytisolo

"Shaping Fantasies": Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture

SHAKESPEARE'S Duke Theseus formulates policy when he proclaims that lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact; that Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, / Such that apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends.' The social order of Theseus' Athens depends upon his authority to name the forms and his power to control the subjects of mental disorder. The ruler's task is to comprehend-to understand and to encompass-the energies and motives, the diverse, unstable, and potentially subversive apprehensions of the ruled. But the Duke-so self-assured and benignly condescending in his comprehension-might also have some cause for apprehension: he himself and the fictional society over which he rules have been shaped by the imagination of a poet. My intertextual study of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and symbolic forms shaped by other Elizabethan lunatics, lovers, and poets construes the play as calling attention to itself, not only as an end but also as a source of cultural production.2 Thus, in writing of shaping fantasies, I mean to suggest the dialectical character of cultural representations: the fantasies by which the text of A Midsummer Night's Dream has been shaped are also those to which gives shape. I explore this dialectic within a specifically Elizabethan context of cultural production: the interplay between representations of gender and power in a stratified society in which authority is everywhere invested in men-everywhere, that is, except at the top. In the introduction to his recent edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Harold Brooks summarizes the consensus of modern criticism: Love and marriage is the [play's] central theme: love aspiring to and consummated in marriage, or to a harmonious partnership within it (p. cxxx). But, as Paul Olson suggested some years ago, the harmonious marital unions of A Midsummer Night's Dream are in harmony with doctrines of Tudor apologists for the patriarchal family: marital union implies a domestic hierarchy; marital harmony is predicated upon the wife's obedience to her husband.3 Brooks' romantic view and Olson's authoritarian one offer limited but complementary perspectives on the dramatic process by which A

From Eliot's “Raw Bone” to Gyges' Ring: Two Studies in Intertextuality

From Eliot's “Raw Bone” to Gyges' Ring: Two Studies in Intertextuality

A Study of Intertextuality: Thomas Mann's Tristan and Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde

A Study of Intertextuality: Thomas Mann's Tristan and Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde Stevie Anne Bolduc University of Colorado When Ducrot and Todorov undertake to define intertextuality in The Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, they present a definition rooted in linguistics. Their major premise is that language contains not merely a descriptive orientation but also a dynamic thrust that gives full play to a creative, "differentiated infinity whose unlimited combinatorial never finds a frontier."1 They view the text as not existing in any one particular time niche; Rather, meanings anterior and posterior to the experiencing of the text at a given time become integral to its totality. In addition, they view the reader-writer relation as essential for intertextuality, forming two productivities that intersect, creating a new space with their intersection (Ducrot and Todorov, p. 357). This theory of language obviously can be extended to a wider perspective where intertextuality embraces character development, presentation of theme, setting, literary structure, and genre; the interface of these literary elements creates an inexhaustible potential for character interpretation and thematic amplification; the text then becomes open to a limitless genesis of significations. Intertextuality allows a fruitful perspective for analysis of the thematic implications of any given literary text, as well as analysis of character, setting, and symbolic implications. The novels and stories of Thomas Mann provide excellent illustrations of intertextuality in literature, for the precision of his writing technique, character development, and thematic presentation depends ultimately upon the complex interactions among the many elements of literary structure within one text and among several texts. Mann's early novella Tristan provides an eloquent paradigm for this point. He constructs his text upon elements of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde — specifically, a parallel plot structure, characterizations, and narrative line, and a contrasting setting and theme. 1. Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov, Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, tr. Catherine Porter (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 358. Stevïe Anne Bolduc83 Sophia Schnitman, in her excellent analysis "Musical Motives in Thomas Mann's Tristan," discusses the relationship of Thomas Mann's Tristan to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde and traces in detail Mann's use of leitmotif to support her thesis that Tristan has a musical structure based on Wagner's opera.2 Mann, however, uses not only leitmotif to provide a structural basis for Tristan, but also the three-part structure of Wagner's opera (exposition, climax, and resolution) and the triangle relationship of lovers. Further, Mann employs specific musical composition techniques in his literary context. The parallels to Wagner's musical structure enhance Mann's thematic contrasts to the famous Wagnerian love theme.3 In order to discuss the structural parallels between Wagner's opera and Mann's novella, one must distinguish between literary structure and musical structure. Literary structure refers to plot structure, narrative details, thematic development, character development, use of symbols, and setting. Musical structure is accomplished by means of thematic development: repetition, contrast, variation, and concentration, as well as the formal structural divisions.4 The literary structures of Mann's Tristan and Wagner's Tristan und Isolde contain many similarities ofnarrative line, plot division, setting, characterization, symbols, and language. In the love duet of the novella there are words and phrases that have been taken directly from Wagner's libretto.5 Mann employs the Wagnerian myth in his setting of night, but inverts the season. Spinell and Gabriele do not meet in the warmth of a summer evening; rather, they come together in a twilight that deepens into a cold and snowy winter night. The cold of winter contrasts with the luxuriant 2.Sophia Schnitman, "Musical Motives in Thomas Mann's Tristan," Modern Language Notes, 86 (1971), 399-414. 3.Robert Henry Riemann, in his dissertation The Role ofMusicin the Novels of Thomas Mann (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1971), also explores music as a structural element for Mann's novels; and Frank Young has done an exhaustive study of the literary allusions that form leitmotifs in Tristan in his dissertation Montage and Motif in Thomas Mann's 'Tristan' (Ph.D., University of Washington, 1972). 4.James Northcote-Bade has done an interesting...

A Study of Intertextuality: Thomas Mann's "Tristan" and Richard Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde"

When Ducrot and Todorov undertake to define intertextuality in The Encyclopedic Dictionary of the Sciences of Language, they present a definition rooted in linguistics. Their major premise is that language contains not merely a descriptive orientation but also a dynamic thrust that gives full play to a creative, differentiated infinity whose unlimited combinatorial never finds a frontier.' They view the text as not existing in any one particular time niche; Rather, meanings anterior and posterior to the experiencing of the text at a given time become integral to its totality. In addition, they view the reader-writer relation as essential for intertextuality, forming two productivities that intersect, creating a new space with their intersection (Ducrot and Todorov, p. 357). This theory of language obviously can be extended to a wider perspective where intertextuality embraces character development, presentation of theme, setting, literary structure, and genre; the interface of these literary elements creates an inexhaustible potential for character interpretation and thematic amplification; the text then becomes open to a limitless genesis of significations. Intertextuality allows a fruitful perspective for analysis of the thematic implications of any given literary text, as well as analysis of character, setting, and symbolic implications. The novels and stories of Thomas Mann provide excellent illustrations of intertextuality in literature, for the precision of his writing technique, character development, and thematic presentation depends ultimately upon the complex interactions among the many elements of literary structure within one text and among several texts. Mann's early novella Tristan provides an eloquent paradigm for this point. He constructs his text upon elements of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde specifically, a parallel plot structure, characterizations, and narrative line, and a contrasting setting and theme.