Eco, Chopin, and the limits of intertextuality -- The appeal to structure -- On codes, topics, and leaps of interpretation -- Bloom, Freud, and Riffaterre : influence and intertext as signs of the uncanny -- Narrative and intertext : the logic of suffering in Lutosawski's Symphony no. 4.

This paper seeks to explore the various verbal (linguistic) interactions within the intersemiotic environment of the museum exhibition space. Drawing on notions of intertextuality in the social semiotic tradition such as those developed by Lemke, it begins with a theoretical account of intertextuality in the bilingual museum, before focusing more specifically on two case studies from museums in the PRC and Hong Kong in which Chinese language Source Texts are accompanied by corresponding English language Target Texts. In each (...) case the paper considers the particular relations that obtain between these co-spatially situated Source Texts, the strategies through which such intertextual usage is mediated in translation, and how the intertextual relationships of the Source Text cluster are reconfigured in the correspondent Target Text cluster. A number of factors are identified in the translation process, including discoursal shifts, re-prioritization and redistribution of Source Text material across different Target Texts, and the use of alternative types of lexicogrammatical repetition that seek to create a different form of recapitulation in translation, whether to correct perceived shortcomings in the original ST relationships, or for reasons of cultural or museological convention. (shrink)

This paper examines within the theoretical framework of intertextuality the mobilization of glocalization as an international marketing strategy in Nike’s and Adidas’s 2008 advertising campaigns in China. Intertextuality is seen as a form of mediation through which the glocalization strategy conducted within the domain of global marking is taken up in the domain of advertising communication. The paper also assumes the interrelations of intertextual performance to value orientations and group affiliations. By analyzing intertextuality in relation to affinity (...) groups, it aims to resolve to some extent the conundrum of Nike’s more successful than Adidas in the sportswear market of China in a social-semiotic perspective. Two print ads constituting a representative example of the corpus were selected for a qualitative analysis. The comparative analysis of intertextuality reveals the contrasting methods of glocalization applied by Nike and Adidas in their 2008 advertising campaigns, thus offering an explanation for Nike’s triumph in competition with Adidas in China. (shrink)

This article examines intertextuality in digital humour through a combination of tools from pragmatics and decoloniality. The study draws on a dataset of Spanish image macros that intertwine highbrow and lowbrow intertextual references. The analysis is framed by key theoretical concepts at the discursive and hierarchical levels. Specifically, three domains of the colonial matrix of power (knowledge, humanity and governance) are used as analytical categories to identify specific intertextual strategies and hierarchies present in the data. The visual and verbal (...) components of the items are analysed through critical discourse analysis with attention to their salient signs. The use of the colonial matrix of power as an analytical tool for identifying hierarchies in intertextual references stands out as a methodological application with the potential to be further replicated in discourse analysis. (shrink)

Angels of Power, by Australian lesbian playwright Sandra Shotlander, illustrates political strategies described by American lesbian philosopher Jeffner Allen. In the play three female members of Australian parliament align to force regulation of new reproductive technologies. Using essentialist, materialist, liberal, and radical feminist arguments, the characters practice sinuous strategies through loading and layering female signs (intertextuality) in order to eradicate patriarchal signification and reenact a contemporary version of ancient Amazons taking over the Acropolis.

Retrieval database artwork, unlike other artwork, does not present fixed, preset and stable contents; it is formed as external data are retrieved from different sociocultural contexts and combined into the artworks’ content. This article aims to address the intertextual relationships between retrieval database artworks and the mass-produced texts from which the database artworks retrieve their data. After briefly discussing the difference between retrieval database artwork and participatory database artwork, and exploring the main concept of intertextuality, we address why (...) class='Hi'>intertextuality is essential and beneficial in understanding retrieval database artworks. Two selected works are used to demonstrate that, as the artwork is executed, the meanings and relationships of retrieval database artwork are ever-changing, and the authorship is constantly shifting due to the viewer’s participation. Shifting authorship in retrieval database artwork is caused by the daily mass cultural production of original text, which might or might not be retrieved by the database to be incorporated into the artwork. We conclude that retrieval database artworks cannot separate themselves from mass data. The dynamic intertextual relationships between the work and its ongoing retrieval of content from other cultural productions, as well as the viewers’ contributions to the work, simultaneously shape and reshape the work and its authorship. (shrink)

The ArgumentA scientific work presupposes a body of texts that are a condition for its intelligibility. This paper shows that the study of intertextual reference — of the ways a text indicates its relation to other texts — provides a fruitful perspective in the study of science that deserves more attention than it has hitherto received. The paper examines intertextual reference in early nineteenth-century mathematics, first surveying a variety of mathematical texts in the period and then examining in detail W.R. (...) Hamilton's work on quaternions.Three questions are addressed: (1) What forms of intertextual reference are employed? (2) What is the range of intertextual reference? (3) What are the functions of intertextual reference? The answers to the first two questions provide an unexplored perspective on the institutional changes in science during the period. The transitional status of the period in the development of later professional science is reflected in the relative openness in the forms of intertextual reference employed and the range of texts to which reference was made. In virtue of these features the period is particularly fruitful in the study of the functions of intertextual reference. With some major qualifications, the paper defends a Mertonian view that intertextual reference needs to be understood in terms of the claim to intellectual property rights. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

This article explores intertextual aspects of Chinese newspaper commentaries on the events of 11 September 2001. Newspaper commentaries in China are often a hybrid genre that combines the characteristics of comprehensive news reports and opinion articles. Informed by genre theories and discussions of intertextuality in different disciplines, this article examines the micro-genres of the data collected and investigates how the Chinese writers include and use outside sources and how they position themselves as writers in relation to other sources. The (...) analysis reveals that Chinese writers tend to use the explanatory micro-genre often with attributed but unidentified external sources or sources with high status for keeping a distance from these sources in the writing. This suggests that the writers tend to avoid personal authorship and responsibility for what they write. The article also discusses the textual and intertextual features in relation to the roles of the press in the Chinese context. (shrink)

African traditional religion is a highly non-dogmatic spiritual lifestyle that is practiced by millions of people around the world. Some African scholars argue that it is related to the religion practiced by the African Egyptians during the Dynastic Period. This study examines the nature of African traditional religion in an effort to determine the common attributes of the religion of the continent. In fact, the focal point of this study is the West African religious experience. To make this examination, the (...) study used an intertextual, soteriological analysis of African traditional religion by isolating key elements in the Yoruba, Dagara, and Ibo cultures. Specifically, this project determined that enough intertextual relations existed in oral and written literatures of the West African people to define a particular and common response to the environment. ;Principal elements isolated included sacrifice, salvation and culture, modes of revelation, divination, and African resilience in the face of invasions, colonization, and various outside religious assaults. The soteriological value of Yoruba, Dagara, and Ibo cultures, particularly as it relates to cosmology, symbolism, and ritual, was found to be the fundamental basis for the African traditional religious moral system. (shrink)

Intertextuality – instances of texts linking to other texts – is a key concept with which CDA accounts for discursiv...

Intertextuality (mutual illustration) is a common rhetorical device in ancient Chinese and has been used many times in Laozi (Dao Dejing). Intertextuality (mutual illustration) is of unique significance for understanding the linguistic structure and philosophical thoughts of Lao-zi. According to the current research on mutual illustration rhetoric on ancient Chinese, the forms of this rhetoric in Laozi can be divided into mutual illustration of single sentence, of multiple sentences and of ellipsis and antisense. There are only two references (...) to mutual illustration in the annotations of Laozi in the past dynasties, and most of the commentators ignore the importance of mutual illustration in understanding Laozi. By interpreting Laozi through mutual illustration rhetoric, we can make innovations in understanding methods, understanding contents and philosophical thoughts. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Intertextual Biography in the Rivalry of Cratinus and AristophanesZachary P. BilesMore than a decade ago, Malcolm Heath provided an influential explanation for charges of plagiarism between comic poets when he posited a growing store of ideas that were recycled as quickly as they were invented. As a result, "Anything put on stage in a comedy would become public property and be absorbed into the repertoire, so that all comic (...) poets contributed to it; and all drew on it, although each would aim to give a new and original twist to the material which he borrowed, so that the repertoire constantly evolved. If this was so, then any poet could lay claim to originality... and any rival could make a counterclaim of plagiarism."1 These remarks have important implications for the study of Old Comedy, not least in exposing the irony of such assertions as that of Antiphanes (Poiēsis, fr. 189 K-A), which overstates generic distinctions between tragedy and comedy on the score of originality. Beyond merely acknowledging comedy's essentially adaptive nature, Heath's position suggests that a certain degree of allusiveness was, as it were, built into the genre. Unfortunately there are few opportunities to test the potential insights that follow from Heath's general proposition since the corpus of comic fragments poses so many questions of plot, context, attribution, and-always important for this kind of study-chronology.There is one sequence of plays, however, that has attracted attention since antiquity as an example of comic poets responding to one another and for which valuable insights can still be gained by building on Heath's thesis. In 423 Cratinus took the prize against Aristophanes' Clouds with Pytine, a play in which Cratinus boldly portrayed himself as the hero while borrowing heavily from Aristophanes' caricature of him in Knights the previous year. While interest in the relationship of these plays has been renewed in recent years, the convergence of issues pertaining to adaptation, intertextuality, and rivalry has not been fully explored. Besides discussing these ideas as they relate to Knights and [End Page 169] Pytine, I shall extend the thread of artistic borrowing at either end, first by positing a stage autobiography of Cratinus that both predates and inspired Knights, and then by tracing elements of intertextuality between Wasps and Pytine. Generally speaking Heath's model proves to be of great value; however, my study makes an important modification by treating competition as a vital aspect of comic poetry.2 The intertextuality of these plays primarily depends on poetic biography, and the notion of competition is central to my understanding of stage biography as comic poets employed it either to assert their own superiority or malign their rivals. After examining the biographical interplay in the rivalry of Cratinus and Aristophanes, I end by applying the intertextual model more generally to Wasps, a play that advertises itself as a competitive response and whose intertextual relationship with Pytine can be viewed as a function of competitive strategy.IThe trail of evidence begins with a scholion on Knights 400. Commenting on the chorus's elusive response to Cleon ("If I don't despise you, may I become a blanket in Cratinus' house!"), the scholiast writes:(= Pytine test. ii K-A)3 [End Page 170]Certain errors about Cratinus' retirement aside,4 the scholiast shows himself to be a reliable witness to the play by his knowledge of the plot and ability to cite the text in the continuation of his commentary (fr. 193). Thus, with the exception of treating the more fully developed caricature of Cratinus as a drunk in the Knights parabasis as the actual source of inspiration for his self-portrayal in Pytine, generations of scholars have followed the scholiast's characterization of Pytine as a redemptive play, however exaggerated this biographical (mis)representation may have been in both plays. Two recent studies have raised objections to the traditional understanding of Knights and Pytine. Troubled by a certain feeling of allusiveness in the jokes about Cratinus in Knights and Acharnians, Keith Sidwell hypothesizes a source for the audience's familiarity with details of Cratinus' life by arguing that his stage "biography " was not an Aristophanic... (shrink)

The article highlights the impact of globalization processes on formation of dominant worldviews and guidelines, as well as ways and means of representing the latter. The state and prospects of studying intertextuality as an important element of modern world discourses in the projection on the national cultural background are studied. Attention is drawn to the high degree of development of both theoretical and applied aspects of intertextuality of discourses by representatives of academic communities of different countries and fields (...) of knowledge, which gave grounds to establish the polydiscursive and interdiscursive nature of the object of analysis. Orientation of domestic experts on parameterization of mainly specific manifestations of intertextuality within certain discourses at the level of isolated intertexts and presence of gaps in the theoretical description of the phenomenon in the context of national specificity is stated. Emphasis is placed on the definite variability of the terminology due to the interdisciplinary nature of discursiveness and, accordingly, intertextuality. A complementary link has been established between postmodernism as the dominant philosophical worldview and the intertextuality of discourses. The specifics of the intertextuality of contemporary Ukrainian literary discourse with regard to various scientific studies are clarified. The concept of “intertextual memory” is introduced and justification of its use is given. The need to apply the term “postmodern intertextuality” in relation to contemporary literary discourse is considered. The common and distinctive features of the manifestation of intertextuality in literary and journalistic discourses are traced. The specifics of intertextuality of Ukrainian journalistic discourse are described. It is established that the precedent character of the communicative act is of exceptional importance for realization of intertextuality in journalistic discourse. (shrink)

The Sanskrit D?rgh?gama manuscript is a Sarv?stiv?da/M?lasarv?stiv?da text containing a collection of ancient canonical Buddhist s?tras, composed in Sanskrit and written on birch bark folios. This collection had been lost for centuries and was rediscovered in the late twentieth century. In this paper, I examine key instances of intertextuality between a new edition of a s?tra from the Sarv?stiv?da D?rgh?gama – the Sanskrit Pras?dan?ya-s?tra –, the Pali Sampas?dan?ya-sutta, and Chinese???? – the three corresponding versions of this text in the?gama/nik?ya (...) collections of the Sarv?stiv?da, Therav?da, and Dharmaguptaka schools. Hence, contradictions among the texts that are not easily explainable will be shown, uncovering apparent confusion among the creators of these texts and hopefully shedding new light on our understanding of these texts. (shrink)

In order to interpret the work of British photographer Miles Aldridge and gain insight into the semiotic ambiguity of his photographs, this paper relies on the capacity to decipher the photographs’ relationship to other arts such as Italian cinema and in particular, to the work of Italian film director Michelangelo Antonioni. From the perspective of this present study, the decisive role of semiotics in relation to photography is that it promotes an interactive process between artist and spectator. The methodology employed (...) in this study to demonstrate how previous systems of language inspire a semiotic dialogue and produce multiple interpretations is a combination of Umberto Eco’s concept of open work and French narratological theories of hypertextuality. Through an examination of the Italian cinematic influence in the work of Miles Aldridge, this paper demonstrates how generating interpretations becomes an essential element of a photograph’s aesthetics. (shrink)

: Julia Kristeva coined the term intertextuality in 1966, and since that time intertextuality has come to have almost as many meanings as users. No small task, I clarify what intertextuality means for Kristeva and her mentor/colleague, Roland Barthes before criticizing their concept of intertextuality and its application in interpretation. Because no rational and coherent concept of intertextuality is offered by Kristeva, Barthes, or their Epigoni, I conclude that intertextuality should be stricken from the (...) lexicon of sincere and intelligent humanists. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Journal of Ancient History Jahrgang: 5 Heft: 2 Seiten: 228-279.

Mikhail L. Gasparov. Intertextual analysis today. The paper provides a discussion about recent results and perspectives of intertextual analysis — the method that has been a contemporary with Tartu-Moscow school. The connections between the classical philological methods and intertextual analysis are described, together with specifying the concept of intertext and emphasizing the need for the correctness of a researcher, because such an analysis always carries a danger of overinterpretation. Several examples are used to illustrate how the imagination of a researcher (...) can create arbitrary allusions that are not based on the original text and are usually misleading. As a result, the text under study will not become more clear, vice versa, it turns to be less understandable. (shrink)

Edward Conze suggested that the first two chapters of the Ratnaguṇa (hereafter “the 41 verses”) were the earliest Mahāyāna text. Yet the origin of the verses and their relationship with other prajñāpāramitā texts have been murky. Through five levels of analysis, this research argues that the 41 verses were most likely the verse section of the Sūtra of Mahā-prajñāpāramitā Pronounced by Mañjuśrī Bodhisattva (SMPMB) and later became independent and expanded. The five levels of analysis are as follows. First, the Mahāyāna (...) origin narratives, the Mahāyāna sutras, and ancient Indian Buddhist art all point to Mañjuśrī as the most likely architect of the prajñāpāramitā doctrine. Second, as an early Mahāyāna text, the SMPMB’s narrative shows that Mañjuśrī pronounced prajñāpāramitā and the Buddha sanctioned it. Third, the Tibetan Ratnaguṇa bears the line “Homage to Holy Mañjuśrī” in its beginning, and the text is usually found in conjunction with “The Recitation of Mañjuśrī’s Attributes.” Lexical items also show high parallelism between the 41 verses and the SMPMB. Fourth, a semantic intertextual analysis demonstrates full and complete intertextuality between the two texts. That is, the two texts can fully annotate each other. Finally, a content analysis of the references to the “one four-line verse” (yi si ju ji 一四句偈) in Mahāyāna texts indicates that it is most likely a corrupted reference to the 41 verses. The research further notes that intertextuality between the 41 verses and other prajñāpāramitā sutras cannot provide explanations for the observations in the above analysis, thus excluding alternative explanations. Finally, the research notes that how to attain wisdom deliverance was a widely explored subject from the Buddha’s time to the early schools. Mañjuśrī’s prajñāpāramitā doctrine is the most sophisticated interpretation of the Buddha’s teaching on “see things as they really are” and thus constituted the foundation of early Mahāyāna Buddhism. (shrink)

If we try to arrive at the simplest and most universally valid definition of the representation of reality in literature, we may dispense with grammatical features such as verisimilitude or with genres such as realism, since these are not universal categories. Their applicability depends on historical circumstances or authorial intent. The most economic and general definition, however, must at least include the following two features. First, any representation presupposes the existence of its object outside of the text and preexistent to (...) it. Readers feel, and critics pronounce, that the text’s significance depends on this objective exteriority, even though this significance may entail destroying the commonplace acceptance of the object; indeed, negating something still presupposes that something. Second, the reader’s response to the mimesis consists in a rationalization tending to verify and complete the mimesis and to expand on it sensory terms . The metalanguage of criticism accordingly prolongs and continues the text’s mimetic discourse, and critics evaluate representation in terms of its precision and suggestive power. Both processes—presupposition and rationalization alike—assume that referentiality is the basic semantic mechanism of the literary mimesis.There are, however, literary representations almost devoid of descriptive content, or so vague and so skimpy that their object cannot be analyzed or rationalized in sensory terms. Criticism is hard put to explain why readers feel compelled to evaluate them. And yet these texts not only lend themselves to interpretation but they are especially apt to trigger and control the reader’s hermeneutic behavior. In short, the represented object eschews referentiality yet refuses to vanish altogether, becoming instead the verbal vehicle of an interpretive activity that ends up by making the object subservient to the subject.1 1. See Roland Barthes et al., Littérature et réalité , esp. my paper, pp. 81-118, on the referential fallacy. Michael Riffaterre, University Professor at Columbia University, is the editor of Romantic Review. He is presently working on a book about Anthony Trollope . His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Syllepsis,” appeared in the Summer 1980 issue. (shrink)

The article highlights the possibility of considering the works by P.A. Florensky through the prism of an intertextual approach. In order to fully determine the relevance of the intertextual approach to the study of this issue, the article articulates such concepts as intertext and intertextuality, and Florensky’s legacy itself is considered from the point of view of Barth’s idea of the Text. А program for studying Florensky’s works is proposed based on the conclusions. This program consists in considering the (...) author’s legacy with an emphasis on reading the text and the meanings embedded in it without searching for borrowed the other philosophers’ ideas. At the same time, the article summarizes the importance of preserving the figure of the author as the creator of the text, although in a situation of reducing his role, as opposed to the intertextual approach where the role of the author is eliminated, replaced with a scriptor. Intertextual optics allows us to characterize Florensky’s texts in terms of their high ability to generate new texts and inherent meanings. (shrink)

Literature is open to psychoanalysis as is any other form of expression—this much is obvious. Less so is the relevancy of analysis to the specificity of literary texts, to what differentiates them from other linguistic utterances; in short, the literariness of literature.The analyst cannot avoid this problem of focus. If he did, he would treat verbal art as a document for purposes other than an understanding of its defining difference. He would simply be seeking one more set of clues to (...) the workings of the human mind, as the sociologist or historian exploits literature to explore periods or societies through their reflection in its mirror.The only approach to the proper focus must be consistent both with the analyst’s method and with the natural reader’s practice. The analyst requires free association on the part of the analysand, and he matches this free flow of information with an attention equally open to all that is said. It is only after a passive stage of “evenly-hovering attention,” or, as the French nicely call it, écoute flottante, that he seizes upon clues to build a model of interpretation. These clues are revealed to him by anomalies such as parapraxes and repetitions or deviant representations, as well as formal coincidences between what he hears and the corpus of observations on linguistic behavior accumulated since Freud. The reader, on the other hand, is faced with a text that is strongly organized, overdetermined by aesthetic, generic, and teleological constraints, and in which whatever survives of free association is marshaled toward certain effects. The reader himself is far from passive, since he starts reacting to the text as soon as his own way of thinking, and of conceiving representation, is either confirmed or challenged. The text tends therefore not to be interpreted for what it is, but for what is selected from it by the reader’s individual reactions. A segmentation of the text into units of significance thus occurs, and it is the task of the critic to verify the validity of this process. In pursuing this goal he must restrict himself to a segmentation that can be proven as being dictated by textual features rather than by the reader’s idiosyncrasies, by those elements the perceptions of which does not depend on the latter and that resist erasure when they are in conflict with such individual quirks. The analyst’s advantage in identifying such features is that he is trained to recognize the above-mentioned anomalies and to explain them by repression and displacement, that is, by the traces left in the surface of the text by the conflict between its descriptive and narrative structures and the lexicon and grammar that we call the unconscious. Michael Riffaterre, University Professor at Columbia University and a senior fellow of the School of Criticism and Theory, is the editor of Romantic Review. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Syllepsis” and “Intertextual Representation: On Mimesis as Interpretive Discourse”. (shrink)

The article offers a reading of “Through the Panama” by Malcom Lowry in light of an intertext connected with Polish literature. Lowry mentions a short story “The Lighthouse Keeper of Aspinwall” by the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz, the Nobel prize winner for the whole of his literary output. What Lowry stresses in his intertextual allusion is the perilous illumination that the eponymous lighthouse keeper experiences. The article contends that the condition of the lighthouse keeper anticipates that of the Lowry protagonist (...) who in “Through the Panama” fears death by his own book, or, to take Lowry’s other phrase, being “Joyced in his own petard.” Basing her analysis on Mieke Bal’s idea of a participatory exhibition where the viewer decides how to approach a video installation, and can do so by engaging with a single detail, Filipczak treats Lowry’s text as a multimodal work where such a detail may give rise to a reassessment of the reading experience. Since the allusion to the Polish text has only elicited fragmentary responses among the Lowry critics, Filipczak decides to fill in the gap by providing her interpretation of the lighthouse keeper’s perilous illumination mentioned by Lowry in the margins of his work, and by analyzing it in the context of major Romantic texts, notably the epic poem Master Thaddeus by Adam Mickiewicz whose words trigger the lighthouse keeper’s experience, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose text is quoted in the margins of “Through the Panama.” This choice allows to throw a different light on Lowry’s work which is also inhabited by echoes of futurist attitude to the machine and the Kafkaesque fear of being locked in one of the many locks of the canal “as if in experience.”. (shrink)

The study of Buddhist texts can inform us of the way scriptures were composed, as well as illuminate the reasons behind their production. This study examines the phenomenon of borrowing and reusing portions of texts without attributing them to their ‘legitimate authors’ within the Buddhist world of contemporary Tibet. It shows that not only is such a practice not at all infrequent and is often socially accepted, but that it is used in this case as a platform to advance specific (...) claims and promote an explicit agenda. Therefore, rather than considering these as instances of plagiarism, this essay looks at the practice of copying and borrowing as an exercise in intertextuality, intended as the faithful retransmission of ancient truths, and as an indication of the public domain of texts in Tibet. (shrink)

In this work, the peculiarities of the communicative space in the novel of modern German writer Bernard Shlink ‘The Homecoming‘ are considered. These peculiarities include literary, historical and sociological context and intertextual sub-bases of the novel containing sense bearing matters relevant for all times and nationalities; dialogic relations, expressed in the strategy of communication of characters of the novel. It is proved that the communicative space is not limited in the novel by antiquity, but rather includes token for German mentality (...) works, motifs and images. The famous Faust’s dilemma is being played up in the novel. Revealing in the mythological images models of main psychological types and conflicts connected with the type of the personality, B. Shlink creates in his novel a number of Odysseuses, Penelopes and Telemaches. The Odysseus model manifests itself primarily in two main characters of the novel: Peter and Johann Debauers. However, the father personifies only destructive and immoral, which finally leads to his moral inability, the Odysseus-junior - Peter, who played Telemachus in the beginning of the novel, finds in his wanderings solid moral values. Perceiving the myth as a historical and dialectic process, B. Shlink, like Th. Mann, takes it as a peculiar cipher of the human experience, a model of development of the humanistic values, a prototype of mutual battle between progress and regress, which b. Shlink masterfully describes in a communicative space of his novel. (shrink)

Overturned Boat: Intertextuality of the Adapa Myth and Exorcist Literature. By Amar Annus. State Archives of Assyria Studies, vol. 24. Helsinki: The Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2016. Pp. xii + 144. $59.

Journal Name: Philologus Issue: Ahead of print.

Summary This paper argues that The Consolation of Philosophy by Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius and Either/or by Søren Kierkegaard bear certain striking similarities in their content, form, arguments, and in the way key ideas are expressed. It proposes that the explanation for this similarity could be causal dependency: The Consolation impacted Kierkegaard, consciously or unconsciously, in the development of Either/or. Regardless of whether this is correct or not, it further proposes that the correlation between these two works is close enough (...) that an intertextual reading is valuable for the comprehension of both The Consoluation and Either/or. This paper seeks to prove this by executing such a reading. (shrink)

Cowboy Bebop, a popular anime series set in the year 2071 onboard the spaceship Bebop, chronicles the bohemian adventures of a group of bounty hunters. This paper presents how the imaginary characters and their voices are conventionalized to fit hegemonic norms. The social semiotic of desire depicted in Cowboy Bebop caters to a general heterosexual market in which hero and babe characters represent the anime archetypes of heterosexual normativity. Scripted speech used in the anime functions as a role language which (...) indexes common ideological attributes associated with a character’s demeanor. This study focuses on how ideas, including heterosexual normativity and culture-specific practices, are reproduced in media texts in order to negotiate the intertextual distances that link the characters and audience. (shrink)

In this article I show how the concept of intertextuality as developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida can be applied to the political theory of constitutionalism. Such an approach carries with it the valuable democratic idea that all texts in society, including the political constitution, are in a dynamic relationship and reflect social pluralism. By analyzing and comparing intertextual theories, I develop the idea of the constitution as an open and emancipatory interpretative and textual category. I (...) show how intertextual theorizing contributes significantly to the democratization of a modern liberal constitutional order, offering distinct strategies for progressive political and social transformation. (shrink)

Weapons of Words: Intertextual Competition in Babylonian Poetry. A Study of Anzû, Enūma Eliš, and Erra and Išum. By Selena Wisnom. Leiden: Brill, 2020. Pp. viii + 280. $185.

The Wenzi: Creativity and Intertextuality in Early Chinese Philosophy. By Paul van Els. Studies in the History of Chinese Texts, vol. 9. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Pp. xiv + 233. $108, €90.

How do ideas come into being? Our contribution takes its starting point in an observation we made in empirical data from a prior study. The data center around an instant of an academic writer’s thinking during the revision of a scientific paper. Through a detailed discourse-oriented micro-analysis, we zoom in on the writer’s thinking activity and uncover the genesis of a complex idea through a sequence of interrelated moments. These moments feature different degrees of “crystallization” of the idea; from gestures, (...) a sketch, a short written note, oral explanations to a final spelled-out written argument. For this contribution, we re-analyze the material, asking how the idea gets formed during the thinking process and how it reaches a tangible form, which is understandable both for the thinker and for other persons. We root our analysis in a notion of language as social, embodied, and dialogical activity, drawing on concepts from Humboldt, Jakubinskij, and Vygotsky. We focus our analysis on three conceptual nodes. The first node is the ebbing and advancing of language in idea formation – observable as a trajectory through linguistically more condensed or more expanded utterance forms. The second node is the degree of objectification that the idea reaches when it is performed differently in a variety of addressivity constellations, i.e., whether and how it becomes understandable to the thinker and to others in the social sphere. Finally, the third node is the saturation of the idea through what we call intrapersonal intertextuality, i.e., its complex and dialogically related re-articulations in a sequence of formative moments. With these considerations, we articulate a clear consequence for theorizing thinking. We hold that thinking is social, embodied, and dialogically organized because it is entangled with language. Ideas come into being and become understandable and communicable to other persons only by and within their different, yet, intertextually related formations. (shrink)