Tekstanalyse

Session Eight: TRAVEL WRITING.

Richard Holmes, ”In Stevenson’s Footsteps”•Conclusion, evaluation and quiz

Agenda

• An introduction to intertextuality and postmodernism

• Richard Holmes, ”In Stevenson’s Footsteps”

• Evaluation of the course

• Assignment Four

Intertextuality

[…]the multiple ways in which one literary text is made up of other texts, by means of its overt or covert citations and allusions, its repetitions and transformations of the formal and substantive features of earlier texts, or simply its unavoidable participation in the common stock of linguistic and literary conventions and procedures that are ”always already” in place and constitute the discourses into which we are born. (Abrams, 317)

Graham Greene, ”I Spy”

• At last he got his courage back by telling himself in his curiously adult way that if he were caught now there was nothing to be done about it, and he might as well have his smoke. He put a cigarette in his mouth and then remembered that he had no matches. For a while he dared not move. Three times the searchlight hit the shop as he muttered taunts and encouragements. ’May as well be hung for a sheep,’ ’Cowardly, cowardly custard,’ grown-up and childish exhortations oddly mixed. (535)

Idioms

• I might as well be hanged/hung for a sheep as a lamb.

• Cowardly cowardly custard, can't cut the mustard!

R.L. Stevenson, Travels with a Donkey …

Intertextuality:

• John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, from this world to that which is to come (1678-1684): pp. 14, 32

• Romance:– Quest– Pastoral– Picaresque

An introduction to intertextuality and postmodernism

Marcell Duchamp, Mona Lisa (1919)

An introduction to intertextuality and postmodernism

”Homer Scream”

”Lisa Scream”

Edward Munch, ”Skriket”

An introduction to intertextuality and postmodernism

An introduction to intertextuality and postmodernism

An introduction to intertextuality and postmodernism

Portrait conventions

Consequences of intertextuality: postmodernism

• Any text is an intertext - a text which is made up of other texts

• From work to text:– the death of the Author and the birth of the

text– The author is no longer the origin and end of

meaning– Texts have no beginnings or endings

Richard Holmes, "In Stevenson's Footsteps"

• the non-fictional aspects, especially essay memoir and autobiography

• the aspects of displaced romance: quest, picaresque, pastoral

• the allegorical aspects, especially concerning reading and writing

• The intertextual aspects

Course Evaluation

Assignment Four: The Quiz