ENLIT 202 Module 2 Notes by Stephanie Sy

Intertextuality by Graham Allen

stephaniesy825 — 2023-09-06 08:10:09 UTC

Tar

stephaniesy825 — 2023-09-06 08:11:14 UTC

The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe

stephaniesy825 — 2023-09-06 08:11:29 UTC

The Origins of the Gothic

stephaniesy825 — 2023-09-06 08:11:44 UTC

Popularized in the 18 and 19th century
Involves the supernatural (or the promise of), often involves the discovery of mysterious elements of antiquity, usually takes its characters into strange or frightening old buildings
Usually pegged with romance

The process of extracting meaning from texts

stephaniesy825 — 2023-09-06 08:24:15 UTC

Modern theory argues that texts cannot independently create meaning, as they are made from the systems, codes, and cultures that they are from (1).

Hence, intertextuality is "moving between texts", where the text becomes an intertext, and the process is intertextual.

Origin of "Intertextuality"

stephaniesy825 — 2023-09-06 08:27:13 UTC

Saussure, the relational word

stephaniesy825 — 2023-09-06 08:31:45 UTC

- synchronic system of language - language as it exists at any moment of time
- diachronic element of language - evolves through time
- "producing specific acts of linguistic communication" (parole) out of the available synchronic system of language (langue)
- "The reference of the sign is to the system, not directly to the world" (9).

Much of intextuality's major theories can be traced back to Saussure's notion of the differential sign.

Bakhtin, the social word

stephaniesy825 — 2023-09-06 08:31:51 UTC

"language exists in specific social situations and is thus bound up with specific social evaluations" (17) >> social specificity

- "utterance" - a word which captures the human-centered and socially specific aspect of language, has no neutrality, is dialogic, their meaning and logic dependent upon what has been previously said and on how they will be received by others.
--- addressivity of the word and utterance (word is a two-sided act) (20)
--- speech genre
- "Langage" - 'language-speech...the sum total of all manifestations of the verbal faculty' - a thoroughly individual entity that language stands in opposition to

"Dictionaries are the graveyards of language"

Kristeva, Tel Quel, Production

stephaniesy825 — 2023-09-06 11:21:45 UTC

- Written during the transition from structuralist to poststructuralist
- A replacement of scientific and rigid terms to uncertainty and subjectivity

Barthes

stephaniesy825 — 2023-09-06 12:13:46 UTC

"Literary meaning can never be fully stabilized by the reader," since every connection will lead to endless new connections (3).

The Literary Sign

stephaniesy825 — 2023-09-06 13:17:11 UTC

- Authors work with two systems: language in general and of the literary system (plot, genres, tropes)
- "The literary work is viewed not as the container of meaning but as a space in which a potentially vast number of relations coalesce" (12).
- "...the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original" (13, from blockquote)

Dialogism (21)

stephaniesy825 — 2023-09-06 13:44:38 UTC

Radically social and interpersonal dimensions can be promoted or repressed

"Carnivalesque" - carnival, through grotesque or debauch images, "celebrates the unofficial collective body of the people and stands against the official ideology and discourse of religious and state power" (21).

Polyphony - "A hero's discourse about himself and his world" (an image of voice) - "we do not see him, we hear him" (23). All characters have voices, even the narrator (in the novel)
Heteroglossia
Double-voiced discourse - "dialogic relationships can permeate inside the utterance, even inside the individual word, as long as two voices collide within it dialogically"
Hybridization

For Bakhtin, the author still exists, but is not the guiding authoritative voice. They cannot spin their characters out of an original imagination, as they exist as reiterations, parodies, transformations and other kinds of appropriations of existing speech genres, utterances and words associated with particular ideological, class and other distinct social and cultural positions (24).

Semianalysis (34)

stephaniesy825 — 2023-09-06 14:30:15 UTC

Communication and meaning present knowledge and intellectual work as a product, a commodifiable object of value. ... ideas are only valuable if they are consumable. Kristeva tries to go against this with semianalysis.

"Texts as always in a state of production, rather than being products to be quickly consumed" (34).

"Ideas are not presented as finished products but are presented in such a way as to encourage readers themselves to step into the production of meaning" (34).

"...the point is that communication and what which breaks communication apart (significance) are in a constantly antagonistic relationship with each other. The text is the site of this struggle, and Kristen's new semiotics seeks to analyze it at the same time as being subjected to it" (35).

Dialogism to intertextuality (35)

stephaniesy825 — 2023-09-06 14:37:53 UTC

Kristen's early work Desire in Language

The Bounded Text
- "Concerned with establishing the manner in which a text is constructed out of already existent discourse" (35). [Similar to Bakhtin]
- "The text is not an individual, isolated object, but, rather, a compilation of cultural identity." - so same with Bakhtin, texts cannot be separated from the larger cultural or social textuality out of which they are constructed (36).
- practice and productivity - "Texts do not present clear and stable meanings; they embody society's dialogic conflict over the meaning of words"
  - ex. a novelist using natural, artificial, God, justice
- "A text's structures and meaning are not specific to itself, ... each of [the text's] constituent parts as an ideologeme " (37).
  - "If we accept that words such as natural or justice are the subject of immense social conflicts and tensions, then their existence in a text will represent an ideologeme" (37).
- Destroys the concept of "inside the text" and "outside the text" - they are one and the same (or one giant thing).
Word, Dialogue, Novel
- Poetic language and the "literary word" as an "intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writers: that of the writer, the addressee (or the character), and the contemporary or earlier cultural context" (38-39).
- Horizontal axis (subject-addressee) and vertical axis (text-context)
  - Subject of utterance - a character speaking or thinking
  - Subject of enunciation - a narrative act, (ex. a person who writes something, and then someone else picks it up and reads it years later - they are distanced from the utterance, the writer becomes a subject of enunciation).
  - Language and loss of subject - usage of pronouns as substitution, and therefore the sentence on its own can be repeated by anyone, and so loses its uniqueness.
- Ambivalence [from Bakhtin's heteroglossia and hybridity]
- Kristeva basically fights back against Western theory's concepts of wanting to repress plurality and the single, unquestionable truth.
  - There is no 0-1 dichotomy (true-false, nothing-something), it is always 0-2 (nothing-double, both A and not-A). 1 has been omitted.
  - This also goes against Hegelian dialectics
    - Kristeva: "It does not strive towards transcendence but rather toward harmony, all the while implying an idea of rupture (of opposition and analogy) as a modality of transformation" (47).

Transposition (47)

stephaniesy825 — 2023-09-07 00:46:15 UTC

"Intertextuality has to do, for Kristeva, with desire and with the psychological drives of the split subject" (47)

Split between the conscious and unconscious, reason and desire, the rational and irrational, the social and the pre-scoail, the communicable and the incommunicable.
Desire, where the subject is implicated (body and history) and symbolic order, reason, intelligibility (in reference to Lacan)
- "the subject in language is always being temporarily fixed and positioned as an 'I' or a 'you' or as a part of a collective 'we'" (compared to the child before speech, unable to distinguish itself between its own body and its mother's).
The semiotic vs the symbolic (different from semiotics, as a general science of signs, this is meant to be the two components of the signifying process) (49).
- The subject is split between two signifying fields
- Symbolic: involves socially signifying language operating under the banners of reason, communication, and the ideal of singularity and unity.
- Semiotic: involves the 'language' of drives, erotic impulses, bodily rhythms and movements retained from the infant stage prior to the subject's splitting during the theta phase
  - At its heart is the chora (receptacle - associated with the maternal body). Is 'unnameable, improbable, hybrid, anterior to naming, to the One, and to the father.'
    - We do not completely lose our relation to the pre-speech infant fluidity of the self - it bubbles up in poetic language disturbing the monologic order of the symbolic field (49).
- The split subject in language describes the tension between a socialized, symbolic discourse and an unassimilable, anti-rational and anti-social semiotic language of instinctual and sexual drives. [Carnivalesque?]
- "No text, however radical, is purely semiotic; the semiotic always manifests itself within the symbolic" (50).
  - Phenotext - part of the text bound up with the language of communication, which displays definable structure and appears to present the voice of a singular, unified subject
  - Genotext - part of the text which stems from the 'drive energy' emanating from the unconscious and which is recognizable in terms of 'phonematic devices' such as rhythm and intonation, melody, repetition and even kinds of narrative arrangement.
    - Wants to disturb, rupture, undercut the phenotext
    - In rational, scientific or legalistic documents, traces of genotext may be almost completely obliterated.
    - On the other hand, works like Ulysses, lacking in regular syntax, is like genotext unleashed.

Revolution in Poetic Language (53)

stephaniesy825 — 2023-09-07 01:12:56 UTC

Kristeva styles intertextuality as a third operation within the semiotic process; the passage of one sign system to another, which involves an altering of the thetic position - the destruction of the old position and the formation of a new one.

Also called transposition

Polysemy (multiple meaning)

Freud, on the analysis of dreams (52-53)

stephaniesy825 — 2023-09-07 04:08:27 UTC

Condensation - one sign collects into itself a host of meanings or signifiers (52)
- A ring in a dream might symbolically condense ideas and desires concerning a host of aspects of life: marriage, religious faith, sexual desire, economic stability or instability
Displacement - a sign from another area of signification stands in for the real content of the dream
- A surreal dream centering on a cake might be a symbolically displaced working-through of the dreamer's desires for a person associated in the unconscious with cakes.

Condensation and displacement can be seen as two operations in the semiotic process.

Bakhtin or Kristeva? (56)

stephaniesy825 — 2023-09-07 04:19:20 UTC

The oppositions between them offer us a series of questions:

Is intertextuality an historically informing term, or is it essentially ahistorical?
Does intertextuality open the text to history, or to yet more textuality?
Is intertextuality a manageable term, or is it essentially unmanageable, concerned with finite or infinite and overwhelming dimensions of meaning?
Does intertextuality provide us with a form of knowledge, or does it destroy what was previously considered to be knowledge?
Is the centre of intertextuality in the author, reader, or the text itself?
Does intertextuality aid the practice of interpretation, or resist notions of interpretation?

Barthes, From Work to Text (61)

stephaniesy825 — 2023-09-07 04:23:41 UTC

Essentially, the traditional view of text is that its material existence provides stability, repeatability, and security to its contents. However, Barthes says that this security is "based on the 'civilization of the sign'

Derrida

stephaniesy825 — 2023-09-07 08:47:31 UTC

différance
im too dead to type notes for this one

The Origins of Gothic pt 2

stephaniesy825 — 2023-09-07 09:03:32 UTC

Gothic truly came alive in the thoughts and anxieties of her characters; fear of the supernatural than the supernatural itself
New Gothic motif: a character's sense of encountering a double of him, hence the popularity of Freud's concept of the uncanny
Further exploited by Edgar Allan Poe, who turned gothic motifs into an exploration of extreme psychological states (he was fascinated by fear). The beginning of gothic becoming 'horror'
Gothic then becomes influential in mainstream Victorian fiction - imitations of the supernatural within narratives that were otherwise attentive to the realities of time, place and material constraint
- Wuthering Heights - the Gothic idea that entering an old building means entering the stories of those who have lived in it before (hauntedness)

Gothic Elements in Tar

patriciaocampo1 — 2023-09-07 13:17:41 UTC

Haunting of the red headed figure (this is probably Krista <- Lydia's former student)
Indigenous spectrality - there were scenes that depict an indigenous man staring at the camera (Lydia).
Kené pattern - this seems to follow Lydia everywhere, suggests a connection to Krista.
Paranoia - Lydia is often sleep deprived because of sounds she hears at night, she's often spooked by other characters.
Old woman/disheveled neighbor - another (subtle) element of decay. Might be good to note the old woman died.
Setting - From sleek apartments to cheap hotels
Power dynamics - Lydia is in a position of power compared to the other characters (Francesca, her assistant and also a musician whom Lydia often overlooks; Krista - teacher-student dynamics; Sharon, Lydia's wife who also plays in the orchestra)

Summary

patriciaocampo1 — 2023-09-07 13:22:26 UTC

The movie's about the descent of a renowned conductor into madness after a former student committed suicide. Lydia Tar is accused of abusing her position as maestro to gain sexual favors from women. From conducting the Berlin Philharmonic, the movie ended with Tar conducting music for a Monster Hunter convention in the Philippines.