Postmodernism Intertextual Dimensions Course

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Course 1

Postmodernism and its re-workings

Inspired by Nietzsche’s nihilism and a general reaction against elitism and rationality, postmodernism
imposes itself as an attempt to challenge all modernist values. Coinciding with the post-industrial period,
late capitalism and post-structuralism, it starts with an acknowledgment of ambiguity, plurality and
destabilisation of all certainties; interested in a diversity of “cultural signs” postmodernism announces a
new aesthetics of the social, the political and the historical which are more actively inscribed within the
fictional discourse. Reworking on various elements coming from Marxism, linguistics, post-structuralism,
psychoanalysis, existentialism or phenomenology, postmodernism offers a new perspective upon social and
human sciences.
The origins of postmodernism are still a matter of debate since different critics place them at different
moments and explain them through various circumstances and intentions, either as a continuation or a
rejection of modernism, or finally as a synthesis of the two drives. The fact is that at a certain moment, the
“metanarratives” of modernity together with its claims of centrality, rationality and epistemological
ambitions seem inappropriate to represent an ever changing reality. In literature the end of modernism or at
least its transformation into something deeper is marked by the abuse of the modernist seriousness through
irony, parody and pastiche giving up all claims of originality and uniqueness, in a total embrace of
eclecticism and plurality. Popular culture stops being regarded as inferior and becomes a rich source of
influences which destabilise the boundaries between high and low culture so far indestructible according to
modernist principles. Every type of authority in every possible field is challenged and undermined through
the works of the theorists who try to define postmodernism and of the writers who put all these principles in
practice.
Besides François Lyotard’s distrust for the “grand narratives” postmodernism brings along a relativisation
of traditional values and a reversal of approaches. Sharing certain issues with post-structuralism,
postmodernism proclaims an “anti-elitism, anti-authoritarianism. Diffusion of the ego. Participation. Art
becomes communal, optional, anarchic. Acceptance. At the same time, irony becomes radical, self-
consuming play, anthropy of meaning.”1 Proposing decentralisation, dissemination of the self, relativisation
of temporal and spatial dimensions, pluralisation on the ontological level leading to indetermination and
ambiguity, postmodernism also suggests a blurring of boundaries, mixture of genres and cultural codes
increasing the possibilities of intertextual analysis. Parodic and playful, self-reflexive and decentred,
postmodern art, literature included, escapes a final definition of postmodernism as it offers a combination of
contradictory tendencies and of parodic re-working upon the achievements of the Past. Either praised for its
disturbing reading of the past or criticised for its mixture of high and popular culture depriving art of its
originality and meaningfulness, postmodernism gathers under this concept a multitude of reactions from its
theorists.
Jean François Lyotard is recognised as the critic of postmodern culture and its meta-narratives which he
analyses and finally replaces by innumerable smaller narratives still preserving a master one – the scientific
metanarrative; he is particularly interested in language, discourse and narrative and the way they are shaped
by the “language games”. He sees Nietzsche and Heidegger as the founders of postmodernism pushing
forward the modernist assumptions by creating a metaphysics of “presence” involving subject, reason or
will. His definition of postmodernism implies the “incredulity toward metanarratives”, generated by a
number of changes which he analyses in The Postmodern Condition. “To the obsolescence of the
metanarrative apparatus of legitimisation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy
and of the university institution which in the past relied on it. The narrative function is losing its functions,
its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative
language elements – narrative, but also denotative, prescriptive, descriptive, and so on. Conveyed within
each cloud are pragmatic valences specific to its kind. Each of us lives at the intersection of many of
these.”2 Promoting heterogeneity, plurality and dissensus, Lyotard declares himself against Habermas’s
modernist consesus. The latter’s position is one of defending philosophy against what he considers to be the
postmodern irrationality; he argues for a type of “post-rationalist modernity” based on such principles as

1
Selden, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory, p.109
2
Hasan in Selden, p.72
representationalism and intersubjectivity implying that communicative practices should be founded upon
consensus in a democratic context3.
Frederic Jameson attacks postmodernism as a cultural phenomenon of late capitalism for its loss of
uniqueness and originality through pastiche and parody. He proves his interest in such theoretical issues as
the death of the subject, the culture of the simulacrum in a postmodern, over-technologised society, which
engenders the proliferation of the “fake” (trompe l’oeil). Linda Hutcheon shows herself interested in the
poetics and politics of postmodernism seen as a ”double-codedness” and theorised in terms of irony, de-
naturalisation and duplicity. Her works emphasise the role of “borderline texts”, of parody and irony in
postmodern literature, its specific features of “provisionality” and heterogeneity, ex-centricity and
marginality; closure is contested while the alienated otherness is foregrounded.

“Of all the terms bandied about in both current cultural theory and contemporary writing on arts, postmodernism must be the
most over- and under-defined. It is usually accompanied by a grand flourish of negativized rhetoric: we hear of discontinuity,
disruption, dislocation, decentring, indeterminacy and antitotalization. […] Postmodernism is a contradictory phenomenon, one
that uses and abuses, installs and then subverts, the very concepts it challenges.”4

The postmodern treatment of the problems of simulacrum and representation of reality (Baudrillard)
increased the interest in intertextuality; the tendency to mix codes and signs, verbal and non-verbal patterns
of representation, high and low cultural elements, imitation, pastiche and borrowing become obvious. Linda
Hutcheon, Brian McHale and Frederic Jameson speak about parody and pastiche as the defining elements of
the age. Intertextuality becomes now a way of bringing back to life a whole host of styles and discourses.
John Barth (The Literature of Exhaustion) thinks that if originality coming from newness is no longer
possible then it is forced to appear from strange re-combinations of old elements, re-writings and re-
evaluations of the past.
Lyotard’s challenge of “grand narratives” is equated by Hutcheon’s questioning of the traditional “modes
of knowledge” and of conventional patterns of representations. One of the commonly challenged fields is
History and its discourse; the postmodern claim that no historic event is directly rendered, as it is always
mediated by a narrative act through which it is represented. History comes to be read from paratexts –
interviews, documents, official accounts, reports, etc. – that may construct a plurality of perspectives of the
same event. The historiographic metafiction, a literary genre highly theorised by Hutcheon and McHale, is
the most representative illustration of the process of history relativisation.
Ihab Hassan theorises postmodernism as related to literature, philosophy and sociology; Gilles Deleuze
and Felix Guattari promote a combination of post-structuralism and political radicalism rejecting both
Freudian psychoanalytical ideas and capitalist principles. They see schizophrenia as the disease of
contemporaneity conventionally disguised under social practices.5 Schizophrenia and the split it implies
becomes one of the most important features of postmodernism often theorised and approached from
different perspectives.
Richard Rorty discusses postmodernism under the influence of post-Heideggerian philosophy. He
focuses upon the ironic re-contextualisation suggested by the postmodern texts which attempt to disguise
what is repressive and to legitimate the arbitrary. The shift operated in his works goes towards a
phenomenology of power. Praising postmodernism for its eclecticism and celebration of plurality which
gives it ludic inclinations, he also draws attention upon its possible consequences linked to loss of creative
imagination and the exaggerate stress placed upon “cultural successorship” and the already-written.

“The schizophrenic deliberately seeks out the very limit of capitalism: he is its inherent tendency brought to fulfilment, its surplus
product, its proletariat, and its exterminating angel. He scrambles all the codes and is the transmitter of the decoded flows of desire.
The real continues to flow. In the schizo the two processes are conjoined: the metaphyscal process that puts us in contact with the
‘demonical’ element in nature or within the heart of the earth, and the historical process of social production that restores the
autonomy of desiring-machines in relation to the deterritorialized social machine. Schizophrenia is desiring-production as the limit
of social production.”6

3
Lyotard in Cahoone, p. 482
4
Hutcheon, Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 3
5
see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
6
Deleuze and Guattari in Cahoone, p. 420
Everything which was considered to be stable and certain in modernism is now relativised and seen from
a different perspective.

Modernism Postmodernism
Doxification (dependence upon dedoxification
a (total rejection of
form of authority authority and of theoretical
boundaries)
rationalism s tressing the irrational, the magical (
suspension of disbelief)
discipline playfulness, textual openness
ambivalence ambiguity
totalising representations re-contextualisation
epistemological crisis (attempt toontological crisis
know, to recreate a world (acknowledgement of a diversity of
by combining fragments) possible worlds)
Eurocentric de-centred, ex-centric
unity, uniqueness eclecticism, heterogeneity
homogeneity diversity
seriousness irony, humour
originality parody, pastiche
cultural hysteria cultural schizophrenia

Many critics emphasise different theoretical points around which postmodernism constructs its aesthetics,
giving it new directions and seeing it from various perspectives. The most frequently discussed problems
are grouped in binary oppositions: modernist representation / postmodernist “presentation”, originality /
parody, unity and coherence / plurality and ambiguity, Eurocentrism / literature of the Other (feminism,
postcolonialism, lesbian or gay literature, etc). Postmodernism accepts the inherent constitutive otherness of
the text originating in its exclusive, oppositive and hierarchical organisation, focusing upon the absences in
the text, upon the marginal and the excluded. Critics distinguish between historical postmodernism
(explaining the movement as a necessary step in the evolution of modernism not longer able to fit a new
society), methodological (based on antirealist and antifundamentalist principles) seen as a negation of
everything modernism held sacred and positive postmodernism (interested in offering new perspectives
upon old things) where intertextuality can also be included as a means of using tradition only in the purpose
of ironising and parodying it.
• parody – becomes the most characteristic postmodernist element as it “paradoxically both incorporates
and challenges that which it parodies.”7
• irony – which affects the treatment of tradition, history, “grand narratives” and implicitly all postmodern
writings
• eclecticism – prophesising plurality, the interplay of heterogeneous elements and syncretism
Postmodernism also brings new dimensions to the concept of intertextuality as the blurring and mixture of
genres, parody, relativisation of the canon, combinations of cultural signs become its favourite elements.
New tendencies are brought forth in music, painting, cinema, photography and architecture which start
borrowing from one another specific techniques and distinctive features. Harold Bloom considers
intertextuality as being engendered by the “anxiety of influence” even if he demonstrates that influence is
totally different from what intertextuality means; for him, the “reading” of any type of “text” (be it literary,
musical, photographic, etc.) is equated with re-writing and inter-reading.

Reference texts:

“Whether we use a model of double encoding or one of ideological “unmarking”, the point is that
postmodernism has been both acclaimed and attacked by both ends of the political spectrum because its
7
see Hutcheon, Poetics of Postmodernism
inherently paradoxical structure permits contradictory interpretations: these forms of aesthetic practice and
theory both install and subvert prevailing norms – artistic and ideological. They are both critical and
complicitous, outside and inside the dominant discourses of society. […] Theorised from these points of
intersection, a postmodern poetics would account for the theory and art that recognize their implication in
that which they contest: the ideological as well as aesthetic underpinnings of the cultural dominants of
today – both liberal humanism and capitalist mass culture.” (Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism)

“What is labelled as postmodernism includes the following diverse and often contradictory phenomena:
neo-conservative ideology, reactionary sentiments, cynicism, a rejection of narrative structure, parody,
stylistic promiscuity, pastiche, schizoid culture, excremental culture, a preference for visual images over
words, fantasy, a ‘post-tourist’ search for spectacle, the epistemological equivalence of past and present,
end of the Eurocentric perspective, commercialism, nihilism, and a penchant for ‘hyper-reality’ in which
distinctions between the real and the unreal are no longer valid. Above all, postmodernism is defined as an
attack on the ‘myth’ of modernity, the belief that the progressive liberation of humanity shall occur through
science.” (S. Mestrovic, The Coming Fin de Siècle)

“Postmodernism extends modernist uncertainty, often by assuming that reality, if it exists at all, is
unknowable or inaccessible through a language grown detached from it. Postmodernism investigates instead
what worlds can be projected or constructed by texts and language.” (Randall Stevenson, Modernist
Fiction)

“Virtually, in every kind of intellectual endeavour, postmodernism tries to show that what others have
regarded as a unity, a single, integral existence or concept, is plural. This is to some extent a reflection of
structuralism, which understood cultural elements – words, meanings, experiences, human selves, societies
– as constituted by relations to other elements. Since such relations are inevitably plural, the individual in
question is plural as we.. Everything is constituted by relations to other things, hence nothing is simple,
immediate or totally present, and no analysis of anything can be complete or final. For example a text can
be read in an indefinitely large number of ways, none of which provides the complete or true meaning.”
(Lawrence Cahoone, From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology)

Schematic Differences between


Modernism and Postmodernism

Modernism Postmodernism

romanticism/symbolism paraphysics/Dadaism

purpose play

design chance

hierarchy anarchy

matery, logos exhaustion, silence

art object, finished process, performance


word

distance participation

creation, totalization deconstruction

synthesis antithesis
presence absence

centering dispersal

genre, boundary text, intertext

semantics rhetoric

paradigm syntagm

hypotaxis parataxis

metaphor metonymy

selection combination

depth surface

interpretation against interpretation

reading misreading

signified signifier

lisible (readerly) scriptible

narrative anti-narrative

grande histoire petite histoire

master code idiolect

symptom desire

type mutant

genital, phallic polymorphous

paranoia schizophrenia

origin, cause difference-difference

God the Father The Holy Ghost

Metaphysics irony

determinacy indeterminacy

transcendence immanence

(Hassan "The Culture of Postmodernism" Theory, Culture, and Society, V 2 1985, 123-4.)
Course 2

2. Defining intertextuality

Intertextuality (Lat. “between texts”) designates the relations between different texts, the manner in
which one text exists within another. It can also be interpreted in terms of deviation as it analyses and takes
advantage of the contrast between two textual sources through contact and evocation. Between texts there can
be a whole range of combinations.
Intertextuality can refer to direct allusions, references beyond the text, to clichés, pastiches and parodic
re-workings. Mikhail Bakhtin is the first to have established the bases of the field by referring to trans-
subjectivity as to the manner in which texts interact with their contexts and receivers. The concepts introduced
by Bakhtin are later on popularised in the West and revised by Julia Kristeva who consecrates the term of
intertextuality. The French critic Gérard Genette introduces the term of trans-textuality - a complex,
concentrated version of the concept of intertextuality; in his work Palimpsestes he uses a special type of hyper-
textual relation between an anterior model - the hypotext (the source) and the resulting product - the hypertext.
Due to the fact that the text is considered to be not only a structure but the centre of a whole network of
references, it offers the reader the possibility to go from a horizontal to a vertical reading by means of
associations and analogies. This type of reading is interested not only in the text’s direct references and
allusions but also in what the text leaves out to be inferred. The process of reading is always a dynamic one
consisting of selecting and organizing textual elements into coherent structures, sometimes excluding or
foregrounding others, envisaging the text from a particular perspective or shifting from one perspective to
another.

The traditional theories on intertextuality define it according to the historical and cultural relations
established between different texts, taking into account the various textual sources which generated the final
text. The idealist critical school speaks of intertextuality in terms of influences and sources inscribed in what
Laurent Jenny considers to be an “obsession with immanence” that is a visibly marked preference for
biographical research, genesis of the text and more or less chaotic combinations of critical readings). The
modern theories of the text, starting with the formalist understanding of the concept to its semiotic dimensions
stipulate that the meaning of a text can never be identical to itself because of the multiplicity of readings we
can associate to it which give that meaning different contexts so that there is a constant interchange and
circulation of elements. These elements can never be fixed within rigid frames of interpretation. There is no
meaning which is not interwoven in an open-ended play of signification.
Present critical approaches speak about a cultural textuality and intertextuality according to which the
text is not only a type of reality organized by means of verbal and written signs; it also represents any type of
cultural reality constructed by using different other systems of signs. This fact has been noticed and discussed
for centuries. Leonardo da Vinci, in his treaty The Comparison of Arts operates a confrontation between the
structures and the techniques of constructing musical, pictorial or poetic works. Examples may be taken
especially from the medieval period when society was rigorously governed by strict cultural codes. Here
intertextuality operates through associations of texts built with verbal signs according to some semantic rules,
with others, achieved by means of figurative signs following an iconic model but still offering the same
“reading” of reality. Dante’s literary work offers other examples of intertextuality for the artist combines
dimensions of his own creativity with philosophical speculation, mysticism or metaphysics. The poet, attracted
by different modes of intellectual speculation characteristic for his own period, identifies within different texts
some intertextual models which he uses in his own text.

Intertextuality can operate in these given situations:


• when an existing literary text can give another writer the possibility to use this text for building his own
creation (he might just take some formal pattern to be re-used) - eg: Homer - Joyce, The Bible – Milton
• the creation of a text within another text, of a mosaic-like text which presents a multitude of references and
quotations which might generate other texts within the primal one. The reading of such a text requires the

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reader’s cultural background because the primal text is given as a continuous narration while all the others are
just included in a fragmentary way – e. g: Salman Rushdie
• when some ideological, philosophical problems (reflected in previous works) are re-used and given new
dimensions.
Accordingly, different classifications have been established taking into account a variety of criteria; if
the criterion of the classification is based on the relations established between texts, critics have distinguished
between:
• general intertextuality – when the text is related to its architext that is when it contains the characteristic
features of its genre and is thus related to other texts belonging to the same literary genre
• specific intertextuality – when relations are established between hypo- and hypertexts belonging to
different literary genres
All these issues could lead to the problems of imitation and plagiarism but J. L. Borges was the one
who solved the problem by insisting on the fact that each writer creates his own precursors, that in creating his
work he is entitled to re-shape the past, the tradition as well as the future. His work will look back towards the
past so that it should give rise to a different reading and interpretation.
Other examples may be given from our contemporary reality possessing a more complex, coherent and
unitary system of significance, symbols and communication. According to Maria Corti (Pentru o enciclopedie
a comunicarii literare) there can be:
• a synchronic intertextuality - which presents a spatial extension; that means that the final text uses as its
primal sources other texts belonging to the same historical period, or reflect the same historical reality but
within different cultures (W. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and L. Tolstoy’s War and Peace based on the same
event - the battle of Waterloo)
• a diachronic intertextuality - presenting a temporal extension; the final text uses texts belonging to other
historical periods which it adopts and filters through the contemporary way of thinking. The “old” texts are
either reinterpreted from a modern perspective (the French story of Barbe Bleu and Angela Carter’s The
Bloody Chamber) or distorted by parody or imitation (J. Joyce’s Ulysses and Homer’s The Odyssey). This type
of intertextuality establishes certain relationships projected on a temporal line realising a connection between
literature and other different cultural elements of society.
In this case the phenomenon of intertextuality is rendered even more complex since different periods,
sometimes separated by centuries, present various ideologies, different points of view, different perspectives
and offer multiple readings of reality. The temporal distance between the final text and its source enlarges the
area of interpretation. Intertextuality can thus be viewed as a sort of recreation of history according to a new
system of thought which reinterprets a recorded moment in time and re-evaluates it from new perspectives; it
has a regressive character when it offers new rewritings of texts already produced. Parody plays here an
important part; it tries to exaggerate certain characteristic features of a text, to recontextualize them so as to
emphasise its particularity; its rough form acquires a burlesque form but it does not imply the destruction or
ridiculisation of the first text. On the contrary, sometimes it may appear in an indirect, subtle manner which
makes it almost imperceptible (A. Pope’s The Rape of the Lock - a mock-heroic poem, parody of the epic
works). Imitation and paraphrase may also lead to interesting intertextual productions; it operates
transformations on the fundamental issues and types of discourses which also imply alterations of the reality
represented by the primal text.

An intertextual analysis would have to start from the idea that the meaning of a text can never be
stabilised and from the necessity to be open to a multitude of possible readings. The plurality of elements
existing within or outside the text with which it establishes various relations transforms the reader willing to
proceed to this type of analysis into a bricoleur, a person able to generate new perspectives by recombining and
defamiliarising old ones. The first step is to detect the literary genre to which the text belongs and to establish
the codes and principles according to which the text can be related to its genre and interpreted; the places
where the text goes beyond its genre and borrows elements from others, more or less related to its own are to
be discovered. Direct allusions and implicit references, borrowings and imitations have to be spotted as they
problematise the issues of boundary, originality, authorship and uniqueness.
Different levels of intertextuality can be detected when taking into account the nature of the relations
established either among the internal elements of a text (intratextuality) or between this particular text and

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different others. These relations can be of alteration (taking sources and altering them according to certain
patterns in order to increase the suggestiveness of a resulting text), explicitness (as the text may make its
intertextual relations explicit through direct quotations, instances of deliberate plagiarism), reflexivity (the text
comes back to and emphasises its own intertextuality) and implicitness (the reader has to play with readings
and interpretations and discover instances of intertextuality hidden within the structure of the text). Laurent
Jenny speaks about intertextuality as a “condition of literary readability”, as a process of assimilation and
transformation with critical intentions and devoid of “innocence” when either the text or the reader is implied
or as based on operations of realisation and transgression of archetypal models.
Brian McHale imagines the fictional universe as a multi-layered world which also contains an
intertextual space among so many other ontological strata which give it its homotopian character. The first of
these layers is the physical space represented by the material side of the book or of the page; the second layer is
represented by the conceptual space alluding to the “spatialized language, introducing an internal space within
the sign”. Besides the materiality of a text, often played with when dealing with modernist and postmodernist
narratives, and its linguistic side, there is also an intertextual space where texts, styles and characters are
borrowed, re-written and parodied. The ontological boundaries are in this way violated and broken so that the
“result is a kind of between-worlds space – a zone” and intertextuality is seen as a phenomenon creating a link
between parallel or conflicting worlds and existences and related to an “ontology of the possible. In defining
intertextuality and its various aspects, McHale’s passage from one ontological system to another reminds of
Kristeva’s transition from one system of signs to another. Related again to textual boundaries theorists speak
about weak or strong intertextuality depending on the degree of limits transcendence and integration within the
final text.
Starting from Kristeva’s delimitation of homointertextuality (referring to relations between similar
texts) and heterointertextuality (relations between different codes), the intertextual relations have been
theorised according to the degree of total or partial assimilation and neutralisation of an intertext within the
hypertext or on the contrary, its non-integration in the final text resulting in the production of an intertextual
space between the hypo-and hypertexts.
Laurent Jenny devises one of the most pertinent studies of intertextuality starting from the theory of the
text, of different approaches of the field, of its elements, internal relations and of its figures. In his opinion
intertextuality introduces a new type of reading which breaks the text’s linearity by introducing intertextual
references that create “spaces of alternatives” within the text or new “texts of bifurcation” corresponding to
Borges’s “forking paths”. The intertext is defined as “a text absorbing a multiplicity of texts remaining unified
by a single meaning”, the “quoted text” is devoid of its transitivity and capacity of denoting being instead
assigned the power of connoting while intertextuality itself is seen in the endeavour of keeping together several
texts within a single one without their mutual destruction or annihilation.
Intertextuality is nowadays emphasised by the extended use of the web where the possibility to go
beyond the boundary of a text, playing with its structural elements and establishing connections among
different layers of the text becomes obvious. The computer transforms an abstract concept (intertextuality) into
a practical play with and within the text.

Except for the relations based on inclusion (text-within-text type of intertextuality), adaptation (text modified
by other text), rewriting (pastiche/parody), extension (digressive elements, parodic hyperboles) or reductions,
many other possibilities of playing with texts have been recorded. Susan Stewart suggests in her study
Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality in Folklore and Literature, a way of analysing “text contamination” by
taking into account the play within and outside the boundary of a text and the entailing effects and resulting
hypertexts. She assigns a particular importance to nonsense and its means of realisation. For Susan Stewart
nonsense becomes the intertextual play between two or several texts where one of them is totally obscured so
that the reconstruction of the general context and the recognition of the integer texts necessary for the
understanding of the final one are somehow annihilated. Among the relations established within the
microstructure of the close boundaries of a text she places:
• misdirection – where from two texts which are supposed to intertwine one remains “opaque”, unsaid,
suggesting a clash between visible and invisible texts/intertexts; this is the case where the text reinvents its
own boundaries

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• surplus of signification – when the text goes beyond its predictable meaning being transformed into an
enigma offered to the reader to solve; it implies the presence of puns, linguistic or graphic effects and
anagrams.
• deficiency of significance – when the initial text presents gaps and “silences” which deny the fixed
boundaries and literary genres or categories, transcend them and head toward other discourses.
• manifested implicitness – when other non-literary categories are assigned significance and footnotes and
other types of paratexts are introduced within the main text. (see Stewart, Nonsense: Aspects of Intertextuality
in Literature and Folklore)
When analysing the possibilities displayed by a text engaged in intertextual relations with other texts
to transcend its boundaries and “play with infinity”, Stewart speaks about an ontological play implying
intertwined world, realities and discourses. In this way other devices are mentioned and observed:
• nesting – what is usually called text-within-text, based on inclusion relations meant to display layers of
intertextuality. This comes as a recognition of the fact that every text contains within its substance numerous
if not an infinity of other texts which in their turn display the same potential richness. The device of the
Chinese boxes, Russian dolls has been largely used for it allows the manipulation of discourses within
discourses and fictional worlds within other fictional worlds. (Boccaccio and the entire tradition he initiated)
• circularity – while nesting, as defined by Stewart, is a play on infinite close frames this device implies a
play with synchronicity and simultaneity. By making use of digressions and side stories the narration
advances in a circle only to come back in the end to the starting point after having engulfed a multitude of
other texts and discourses. Lawrence Sterne’s novel, Tristram Shandy, can be considered an example as well
as Salman Rushdie’s novels where, for instance in Midnight’s Children, Sternean hypotexts can be
discovered. The Nouveau Roman can be also taken into account for its digressive tendency, its lack of what
could be called traditional plot which increases the number of possible associations and intertextual
approaches.
• serialisation – implying a play with open frames based on infinite extensions by prolonging the causal
chain and the diversifying consequences. The text thus becomes an endless game of variations, “a form
holding a world of possibilities”. Postmodern poems and children’s rhymes display this feature.
• infinite causality – plays with concatenation by making infinite connections with other texts and
generating new discourses leading to a “crisis of closure”, “to infinite connectability of all things and the
arbitrariness of these connections”. Once again, Rushdie’s texts playing with devices of inclusiveness and
synchronicity within an apparently never ending, self-generating narration, following the narrative structure
of One Thousand and One Nights)

A large range of intertextuality devices are established when taking into account the narrative frames
of a text and the “aggressions” they undergo. These aggressions might be operated on the ontological
boundaries of the text and in this way a plurality of words is brought within the same narrative frame giving
rise to different types of discourses, techniques and perspectives. An example here is provided by Eco’s The
Name of the Rose where the mediaeval discourse used by the protagonists is permanently combined and
undermined by a postmodern discourse insinuating at the core of mediaeval thinking ideas linked to the
philosophy of language (Wittgenstein), to Barthesean and Derridean theories, everything disguised under the
appearance of a detective story bringing forth its own typical discourse. Hypotexts, allusions, indirect
references or intertexts abound in the text, working through character displacement, absorption and
transformations of intertexts, hybridisation of disparate world and texts.
In the novel – considered a “polyglot text”, intertextuality is emphasised by the “heteroglossic”
character of the discourse which in fact combines Latin fragments usually left untranslated and italicised,
Greek, Arabic not actually present but typographically marked, and English. The multilinguism of the novel
corresponds to the profusion of voices and discourses within the text ranging from late-mediaeval to
contemporary postmodern, philosophical, semiotic and linguistic discourses. This juxtaposition of languages,
voices, visions and worlds are taken to be metaphorically represented in the novel by the figure of Salvatore,
the tramp and “one-man carnival” as McHale calls him.
A second type of boundary aggression can be of a narrative type when the limits of a basic narrative
cell are transgressed by means of digressions, parodies, pastiches and hyperbolic exaggerations analysed on

4
the model of the “anagram” seen as the basic type of “textual rearrangement”. Digressions function as a
narrative generator diverting the narration toward new directions sometimes providing intertextual
associations. Another narrative transgression may be given by footnotes, explanations, notes and indexes or
even by titles and subtitles. All these introduce a new dimension by both prolonging by giving additional
information, multiplying the levels of the text and sometimes undermining and destroying the fictional world.
Sterne’s impressive digressions in The Adventures and Opinions of Tristram Shandy open interesting
perspectives on a text which, even historically belonging to the eighteenth century, anticipates many of the
postmodern narrative techniques. His style was characterised as digressive-progressive allowing him to move
freely back and forth along the chronological line, to indefinitely postpone foretold events and to incorporate
a large number of references, allusions and borrowings from other previous works which finally puzzles the
reader leading him into a labyrinth of facts and incongruities.
Susan Stewart suggests in order to provide a clear delimitation of the possibilities of “arrangement
and rearrangement” of texts within a major narrative, the disposition of intertextual relations in two groups:
texts with fixed boundaries associated to a variable content and texts with variable boundaries associated to
variable content. This type of classification facilitates the analysis of the way in which intertextuality works
and reverberates creating new textual dimensions, multiplying the narrative levels and pushing texts and
genres beyond their logical boundaries. Simon Dentith proposes another classification of the intertextual
elements starting from the conscious/unconscious level of intertextuality which he describes as “the
interrelatedness of writing, the fact that all written utterances – texts – situate themselves in relation to texts
that precede them and are in turn alluded to or repudiated by texts that follow”: he places quotations,
imitation, pastiches, straight references at the conscious level (denoting the direct interconnectedness of
different texts) while indirect allusions, puns, catch phrases and clichés are placed at a more profound level of
intertextuality.
When trying to define intertextuality and its major transformational relationships, theorists have
devised an entire web of classifications, relations, devices and recurrent patterns, resuming old categories and
definitions introducing new perspectives of envisaging them or suggesting new approaches and techniques
borrowed from other fields. For this purpose, Laurent Jenny goes back to tropology establishing a number of
rhetorical figures helpful in the analysis of different types of modifications undergone by the text during the
intertextual processes. Some of these figures will be analysed in the following sections.
• paronomasis - defined here as the transfer of a text in a new context, preserving the theme but assigning it
a new signification. Giraudoux’s play La guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu borrows uses the Homeric epic
hypotext and recontextualises it sometimes with humorous effects which only disguise the seriousness of the
issues under discussion. The war ceases to be seen as a historic necessity but as a fatality of human destiny
motivated not by its actual cause (Helena’s kidnapping) but by an incomprehensible set of universal laws that
crash the human being leaving it no alternative but an illusory freedom of choice.
• ellipse - exemplifying the usage of an incomplete text or architext; it is characterised by the use of a
recognisable fragmented hypotext placed at the core of a new text: pieces of myths, legends, fragments of
classic texts emerge within the narrative boundaries of a certain text deepening its signification and
multiplying its levels of interpretation.
• amplification - already hinted at when speaking about digressions and side stories as means of
transforming the original text into a new one by developing its signifying potential.
• hyperbole - referring to the transformation of a text through amplification of some of its features, themes,
devices etc.
• inversion - meant to designate the parodic type of intertextuality to which Jenny assigns an antiphrastic
value. It refers to such processes as inversions of enunciative situations (changes of perspectives, of narrative
voice and point of view), inversions of qualification (preserving characters and situations but reversing their
values), of dramatic situations, of the symbolic values (symbols are reversed and thus given a new
significance within a new text).
• change of the level of meaning - designating the ironic re-writing mainly characterising postmodern
literature (preserving the general narrative framework but introducing new significances and new ideological
issues).

5
Types of intertextual transfer

A. Verbal - verbal transfer

Intertextuality as a relationship established between two or several verbal texts plays upon a diversity
of elements and forms of transfer of meanings, symbols, formal devices, motifs etc. Theories upon
intertextuality have taken into consideration the infinite possibilities of reading and interpretation which
shape the actual understanding of a text and never totally close it. Different theorists have suggested different
classifications of intertextual relations based either on types of connections and combinations between texts
or on degrees of explicitness of the borrowed elements. When taking into account the relations established by
a text with other literary texts the reader can refer to centripetal directions orienting the analysis toward the
text itself and the way in which it assimilated, transformed and appropriated elements originating in different
other texts (quotations, parodic elements, pastiches, borrowed motifs etc); the centrifugal direction guides the
reader toward exterior texts that might turn out helpful in the understanding of the initial text (allusions,
architexts, references, paratexts etc).
Most of the times intertextuality is restricted to the field of literary texts or, at most, to image – text
relations leaving aside all the other possible transformational possibilities relating the verbal and non-verbal
fields in different ways. Rob Pope resumes in English Cultural Studies Jenny’s classification but does not
offer enough insight into the other types of non-verbal intertextuality. He speaks about degrees of explicitness
when approaching texts and the relations established between them.

• explicit intertextuality – comprises all those texts which are directly referred to and all the specific
sources that a particular text has assimilated. This type of intertextuality is easily detected by the reader who
is guided in his/her intertextual analysis by paratexts (whether peritexts or epitexts). Coming back to Jenny’s
terms, this category can also be interpreted as the strong type of intertextuality.
• implied intertextuality – refers to all those passing allusions to other texts (including texts in the same
genre) and all the effects produced on a structural level: irony and satire. These devices seem to have been
deliberately contrived by the writer so as to challenge the reader and make him discover all the possible
analogies and references. This type of intertextuality is generally more subtle and indirect than the explicit
intertextuality.
• implicit intertextuality – refers to all those texts which actual readers use in order to help their
understanding of the text to be analysed. These helping texts may not necessarily have existed in the author’s
mind or even existed at the time the text was produced. The fact that they provide a better understanding is to
be taken into account. In this way, Eliot’s The Waste Land may be compared due to its fragmentary
characteristic, with Cubist or Surrealist art contemporary with it; we may also draw comparisons or contrasts
between postmodernist techniques sometimes visible in TV advertising or pop videos. This type of
intertextuality may provide a better comprehension of a text by offering a diversity of critical readings for the
same text (structuralist, post-structuralist, feminist, post-colonial etc.). The important thing is that we can
make sense of a text by comparing or contrasting it with any other on condition that the respective
comparison and contrast should be pertinent and significant.

Intertextual aggression within fixed lexical boundaries

• anagrams

The first type of rearrangement within strict textual and even word boundaries is the anagram thought
to engender new meanings and increase the arbitrariness and ambiguity of reading. Anagrams allow the
possibility of simultaneous experiences, references and interpretations all linked together by the same number
of letters rearranged in a different order. The distortion operated upon reality which can be altered, multiplied
and allegorised, can also apply upon words increasing the symbolism and the intertextual connections of a
text.

6
• pun/portmanteau/ macaronic

As in the case of anagrams, puns offer the reader the occasion to put his/her wits to practice, to play
upon simultaneity of meaning and discover the “multivocality of the sign”. The meaning is considered in this
case to be dissolved among multiple, simultaneous texts/words. Lewis Carroll offered the best examples of
puns in his novels Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass as well as in his
nonsensical poem The Hunting of the Snark. The origin of his vivid associations of words, blendings and the
distorted idiomatic expressions is traced back to Shakespeare, later on to Smollett whose mis-spellings reveal
interesting combinations of words and meanings (“the grease of God”, “mattermoney”, “dissent terms of
civility”, etc), and to Dickens.

Narrative aggression within fixed textual boundaries

This type of intertextuality multiplies the discourses involved in the construction of a text placing
them within the boundaries of the initial text thus preventing it from an excessive development according to
the forms and intentions of the borrowed text. It highlights the homogeneity of a text by playing with its
internal diversity; coherence and cohesion are preserved by subsuming all the hypotexts to the initial one.

• parody

One of the most important intertextual elements used in order to create new relations and diversify
the content of a strictly limited text is parody. It has received a great attention ever since classic Greek and
Latin literature as it offers the possibility of doubling the discourse of a text by using its mimicked version
and by undermining its purpose most of the time, obtaining comic effects. First mentioned in Aristotle’s
Poetics, it came to acquire different values and interpretations being by turns represented as a form of
mocking elevated cultural works with comic effects, of quoting and hinting to other texts, of extended
allusions to other writers’ texts or styles.
• Pastiche

Invariably ranged along with parody as a means of text transformation, pastiche most often
designating an imitative writing preserving the style of a hypotext. Genette speaks about pastiche as a sort of
“distorted quotation” which works upon the formal side of a text. Initially applied to music and painting it
referred either to a musical pot-pourri or to a painting made up of different fragments and pieces. The present
significance of the term is considered to have derived from painting and suggests the imitation of a certain
style lacking however the critical distance suggested by parody. Whereas parody works through
transformation, pastiche has imitation as working principle. Both imply a double reading and a reader
endowed with “stereoscopic vision”, able to decode hypo- and hypertexts and the operations assisting their
transformation. Jameson sees pastiche in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, as “blank
parody” emphasising the lack of critical distance.

• Collage

Another example of verbal-verbal transfer, the collage is defined as a collection of diverse


heterogeneous elements gathered through such operations as decoupage, choice, selection, insertion which
orient them toward a new meaning. It was first used by the surrealists who then influenced other artists
coming from different fields: painters, photographers, musicians, etc. Collages are realised either by insertion
(when contrasting elements are just included within the main text interrupting the linear flow and creating
particular effects, or by juxtaposition - fusion of conflicting elements and integration in the body of the text.

• Quotation

7
The problems of how to quote, what to quote and where precisely to include quotation have
preoccupied both theorists and writers interested in intertextuality; citing and paraphrasing, alluding and
borrowing send back to the issues of authenticity and originality which intertextuality has always been
tackling. Just how much was allowed to borrow in order to avoid plagiarism was a matter of constant
concern. Quotation has been in turn seen as explicit borrowing, authoritative support, weakness, device of
fragmentation and coherence, metaphor or fraud. Starting with Cicero and Quintilian the building of a
discourse also implied the use of intertextual devices focused mainly upon allusion, paraphrase, imitation and
quotation. Quintilian equates the process of reading with that of ingestion/indigestion by which quotations
and generally, an entire tradition is either assimilated or rejected by the organism of the text.
For a long time quotation was treated as an imitative act, a depersonalised reliance upon precursors which
can only guarantee the authority of the opinion but not the text’s originality. Modern views represent
quotation as a “micro-text” establishing new criteria of significance and challenging the traditional problems
of uniqueness and originality, demonstrating the dual movement of inscribing oneself within tradition and
simultaneously ironically parodying it in order to emphasise new contextual relations. James Joyce, T.S.
Eliot, Borges, Michel Tournier, A. S. Byatt are just a few of the numerous writers using this device as a
manner of highlighting the intertextual relations of a particular text; Derrida makes iterability implying the
possibility of repetition and citationality, a basic condition of readability.

• Allusion

Allusion is another means of implicitly or explicitly alluding to another text in order either to establish a
connection between the text and tradition or a specific genre; the reader’s recognition of an allusion depends
on his/her literary or cultural background which will provide him with enough points of reference.

Narrative aggression within variable textual frames


• transworld identity

It is a termed coined by Brian McHale in order to account for the frequent passages, especially in the
postmodern literary productions, from one fictional universe to another one, from one ontological level to a
different one. McHale’s example is Eco’s The Name of the Rose where the medieval world of the novel is
populated by fictional heroes belonging to well-known novels such as William of Baskerville – a direct
allusion to Conan Doyle and his character Sherlock Holmes whose part coincides with Baskerville’s detective
endeavour, Adso, who can easily be taken for Watson, helping the reader follow Holme’s deductive
reasoning; by disguised real persons such as Jorge of Burgos, overtly alluding to Jorge Borges and his
universe conceived as an immense library and by historic figures as Bernard Gui or Michael of Cesena who
insure the authenticity of the account. The transfer of characters is not the only means of ontological violation
but it offers a clear example of intertwining of fictional worlds and of an intertextual strategy. The same thing
can be achieved by the use of different discourses, registers, concepts and languages which each can create a
new world within the main text and orient it towards new directions.

• re-writing

B. Verbal - nonverbal transfer

Since borrowings and transfers from one system of signs to another are no longer a novelty, a special stress
has been laid upon instances of combination between written and figural signs. Acquiring an increasing important
place in contemporary art and media, image has come to dominate all domains of life sometimes even surpassing
the written text; in a society overtaken by media-shaped values and icons, by ready-made images and products, the
image corresponds to a compression of meaning and significance into abbreviated versions of reality gradually
banning the written word to the periphery of “representation”. Combinations of texts and images, texts and sounds,
of brief, explanatory ideograms meet the needs of a society in an ever-increasing hurry to consume and digest.
Examples of such a transfer are numerous both in literary and non-literary fields.

8
• Text Illustrations

Along with footnotes, annotations and appendices, text illustrations offer a different type of sign transfer but
achieve the same goal of completing the text and going beyond it by creating supplementary levels of significance.
Starting with vignettes and illustrations given to historic chronicles, to the Bible and to other religious or profane
writings, text illustration has been largely developed and spread, especially after the printing press was invented,
acquiring new, unexpected forms. From Blake’s illustrations for his volumes of poetry, which sometimes obscure
rather than reveal the meaning of the poems, to the graphical and typographical audacities of the modern and
postmodern literary achievements, text illustrations have come a long and sinuous way.
A special case of oscillation between verbal and non-verbal codes, of transposition from one system of signs
to another is provided during Victorianism by the Pre-Raphaelite paintings. Somewhere between text illustration,
ekphrasis and autonomous work of art, the paintings of this artistic brotherhood give an excellent example of
pictorial transposition of literary works of art. Multi-intertextual products are playing with pictorial or literary
narrative devices, symbols, motifs, texts and intertexts coming from different periods and genres. Ileana Marin’s
work on the narrative Pre-Raphaelite painting (Pictura prerafaelita sub semnul narativului) starts from Genette’s
definition of transtextuality and Kristeva’s distinction between intertextuality and transposition and applies them on
paintings and literary productions belonging to the Victorian period. Her analyses stress the processes of translation
of one system of signs (verbal) into another (visual) or vice-versa and of de-contextualise elements pertaining to one
of them and their re-contextualisation into the other, leading to interesting extensions of meaning and exploitations
of intertexts.

• Ekphrasis
The typical example of verbal – non-verbal transfer in literary works is the verbalisation of a work of
art, real or imaginary, which finds its description within the text. The code of signs (visual, audible or tactile)
of the artistic work is translated into verbal/graphic signs and inserted within the major text; the resulting effect
is that of deepening and multiplying the textual layers which acquire new significances, of stressing the
relations that the text establishes with an extra textual world. Sometimes the ekphrastic descriptions reiterate
certain aspects of the narrative.

• Media intertextuality

The permanent interrelation between culture, communication and media has always been emphasised
especially during modernism and postmodernism that annihilated the definite boundaries between genres and
between what is generally termed as high and low culture. Media playing in Baudrillard’s opinion upon
simulations and simulacra specialised in creating a “hyperreal” spectacle oscillates between the ephemeral
representation of the on going event or the proliferation of the same stereotypical images infinitely reproduced
and multiplied. Media intertextuality reworks upon the meanings of both communication and culture, covering
various domains, transgressing all boundaries and transferring techniques, recurrent features, symbols and
images from photo-journalism, advertisements, commercial spots, TV News, etc.

C. Nonverbal - nonverbal transfer

Instances of transfer between different non-verbal systems of signs based on intertextual relations
have been detected within the most various and unexpected domains and largely analysed. Influences have
been spotted and hypotexts have been identified inside a labyrinth of intertextual connections which come to
shape and reshape any postmodern production by emphasising a traditional heritage while simultaneously
undermining and subverting it. As the frontier between high and low cultural codes has been gradually
blurred until complete annihilation, intertextuality acquired an increasing part within artistic productions. At a
certain point it even lost part of its suggestiveness and associative capacity by being abused and overused by
contemporary pseudo-artistic works. Kitsch and fake values threatened art with a polluting would-be
intertextuality.

9
“For the writer of artistic prose the object reveals first of all precisely the socially heteroglot multiplicity of its names,
definitions and value judgements. Instead of the virginal fullness and inexhaustibility of the object itself, the prose writer
confronts a multitude of routes, roads and paths that have been laid down in the object by social consciousness. Along
with the internal contradictions inside the object itself, the prose writer witnesses as well the unfolding of social
heteroglossia surrounding the object, the Tower-of-Babel mixing of languages that goes on around any object; the
dialectics of the object are interwoven with the social dialogue surrounding it.” (Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination)

“[The text is] woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages (what language is not?) antecedent or
contemporary, which cut across it through and through its vast stereophony. The intertextual in which every text is held,
it itself being the text-between of another text, is not to be confused with some origin of the text: to try to find the
‘sources’, the ‘influences’ of a work, is to fall in with the myth of filiation; the citations which go to make up a text are
anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas.” (Barthes, Image - Music -
Text,)

“A text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody,
contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused, and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto
said, the author. The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of
them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be
personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single
field all the traces by which the written text is constituted […] the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of
the Author.” (Barthes, Image - Music - Text,)

“We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-
God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writing, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a
tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. […]The writer’s only power is to mix writings, to
counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them […]. Life never does more than
imitate the book itself, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, indefinitely deferred.”
(Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author)

“Intertextuality is “meant to designate a kind of language which, because of its embodiment of otherness is against,
beyond and resistant to (mono)logic”. (Allen, Intertextuality)

“Intertextuality represents “the passage from one sign system to another, [the possibility] to exchange and permutate
them;[...] transposition plays an essential role here inasmuch as it implies the abandonment of a former sigh system, the
passage to a second via an instinctual intermediary common to the two systems, and the articulation of the new system
with its new representability.” (Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language)

“There are thirty ways into a text. Reading together in this way we bring the text into play. We take a page and everyone
comes individually towards it. The text begins to radiate from these approaches. Slowly we penetrate together to its
heart. […]Sometimes I look at the design, the geography of the text, as if it were a map, embodying the world. […]We
listen to a text with numerous ears. We hear each other talking with foreign accents and we listen to the foreign accents
in the text. Every text has its foreign accents, its strangeness and these act like signals, attracting our attention. These
strangenesses are our cues.” (Hélène Cixous, Conversations)

“All texts are potentially plural, reversible, open to the reader’s own presuppositions, lacking in clear and definite
boundaries, and always involved in the expression or repression of the dialogic ‘voices’ which exist within society. A
term which continually refers to the impossibility of singularity, unity, and thus of unquestionable authority,
intertextuality remains a potent tool within any reader’s theoretical vocabulary. By the same logic, however, it also
remains a tool which cannot be employed by readers wishing to produce stability and order, or wishing to claim authority
over the text or other critics. This is perhaps the reason, since cultural debate never ceases, that intertextuality promises
to be as vital and productive a concept in the future as it has been in the recent past.” (Graham Allen, Intertextuality)

10
Course 3

3. Parody

One of the most important intertextual elements used in order to create new relations and diversify the
content of a strictly limited text is parody. It has received a great attention ever since classic Greek and
Latin literature as it offers the possibility of doubling the discourse of a text by using its mimicked
version and by undermining its purpose most of the time, obtaining comic effects. First mentioned in
Aristotle’s Poetics, it came to acquire different values and interpretations being by turns represented as
a form of mocking elevated cultural works with comic effects, of quoting and hinting to other texts, of
extended allusions to other writers’ texts or styles. Simon Dentith offers a history of parody and an
attempt to define the term according to the forms it acquired in different cultures and periods starting
with the manipeean satire (serf-parody of previous texts in a more or less comic manner), continuing
with the parody of sacred texts (parodia sacra), with the parodic coming back to previous classic
sources in the modern novel and ending with the postmodern supremacy of parody. Sometimes
associated to imitation and pastiche parody has come to be seen as “a perfect postmodern form, in
some sense, for it paradoxically both incorporates and challenges that which it parodies.”1
It is defined as “a form of literary mimicry that holds up a glass in which writers may see their
worst potentialities and take heed”2. Both structure and style can be parodied with various effects
offering a re-reading of the primary text. It is a device applying in all arts besides literature due to its
capacity to both continue and subvert the text’s intentions bringing in a critical dimension sometimes
attenuated, some other times accentuated by its ironic side.
Starting from an attempt of etymologically approaching the term3, Linda Hutcheon speaks
about parody as providing a “vision of interconnectedness” within a specific text representing “a
repetition with critical distance that allows ironic signalling of difference at the very heart of
similarity”4. For Hutcheon parody becomes a means of achieving the “double-coding” of a text, a
dialogic relation between its basic discourse and the parodic counter-discourse by taking into account
its integer elements: ambiguity and irony. Treated by Genette as a hypertextual element, by Hutcheon
as the essential element of postmodernism, by McHale as “a form of self-reflection and self-critique, a
genre’s way of thinking critically about itself”5, parody ascertains its capacity of questioning and
challenging traditional elements such as textual closure, originality and uniqueness.

“Above all, hypertextuality as a category of works, is in itself a generic or, more precisely,
transgeneric architext: I mean a category of texts which wholly encompasses certain canonical (though
minor) genres such as pastiche, parody, travesty and which also touches upon other genres – probably
all genres.”6

Parody is seen as a means of opening the text, of diversifying the possibilities of reading and
interpreting it and of multiplying the ways of representation. Highly theorised and analysed, parody is
distinguished from travesty or pastiche due to its playful rather than satiric rewriting of a text and its
direct effect upon it. Bakhtin includes it within his “carnivalesque” principle and ascribes it the
function of a cultural element combining different sources, undermining authority and fixity,
celebrating plurality and mimicry and undermining the serious and the sacred.
Gerard Genette offers in his study Palimpsestes a thorough analysis of parody in terms of
hypo- and hypertexts. He distinguishes between pastiche seen as an imitative rewriting of a text and
1
Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 11
2
Ousby, Companion to Literature in English, p. 708. Due to its comic mimicry it is associated on the one hand with the
burlesque, when it emphasises caricatural features and, on the other, with satire when moral criticism is its main purpose.
3
coming from the Greek (parôdia) para meaning “counter, against” or “near/beside” and ode meaning “song” emphasising
the ability of using the text while undermining it by the use of satire or irony. In Greek and Latin it designates a specific type
of mock poetry using the diction of high forms for trivial topics
4
Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 26
5
McHale, Postmodern Fiction, p. 145
6
Genette in Allen, p. 108

1
parody as transformation of the hypotext either preserving or altering the literary genre. Genette speaks
about parodic texts as “second degree” writings or as “palimpsestic” texts best fitted to illustrate
dialogism and inherent intertextual relations. His work is highly praised for the strict classifications
and characterisations of intertextual elements among which parody that is assigned a special part but is
generally criticised for the little attention paid to the social and historical conditions of the interaction
occurring among different texts. Genette envisages several operations functioning within parody,
analysed by Annick Bouillaguet in L’écriture imitative:
– transmodalisation (the passage from one literary genre to another)
– transdiegetisation (the transcendence of time and space )
– transvalorisation functioning through transthematisation (altering the characters’ “thematic part”)
and transmotivation (altering the intentionality of the text)
Bouillaget speaks about “autonomous parody” functioning as an individual text and “included
parody” appearing within a text provoking either a break in point of style and structural organisation or
providing an inherent cohesion and being based on a unique or on multiple hypotexts. Often associated
with the ironic quotation or the “imitative writing” (Bouillaget), parody is sometimes contrasted with
the burlesque7 defined as a form of parodic theatre originating in the seventeenth century and focusing
upon comic effects, immediate humour and heroic hyperboles.
Hutcheon leaves aside the polemical aspect of parody and returns to its imitative side when she
makes it a central element of intertextuality which emphasised a text’s metafictional self-reflexivity.8
She stands against Jameson’s treatment of parody as a ridiculing imitation seeing it as belonging to the
politics of representation functioning through a double process of instauration and ironisation based on
a critical recuperation and revaluation of the past. Hutcheon offers a long series of examples focused
upon the parodic revisitation of the past in several postmodern historiographic metafictions where
history ceases to be treated as “the transparent record of any sure ‘truth’”9: Salman Rushdie’s
Midnight’s Children and Shame, Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum, Graham Swift’s Waterland, etc.
Parody as a means of “rewriting the past” is inscribed within the field of postmodern intertextuality as
a ”formal manifestation of both a desire to close the gap between past and present of the reader and a
desire to rewrite the past in a new context.[…] It uses and abuses those intertextual echoes, inscribing
their powerful allusions and then subverting that power through irony.”10
One of the most studied examples in terms of parody is Cervantes’s Don Quixote – a
collection of parodies at different levels of the text. The novel parodies the style and incidents used by
the chivalric and pastoral romances with the polemical aim of satirising old literary practices and
conventions and showing the necessity of other forms more fitted for a realistic presentation of life.
Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock, a mock-epic published in 1712 when there were a definite
style and strict conventions for the epic form (grand style, specific structure, strange topic, flexibility
and intensity of the use of language, etc.) is another typical example. Pope preserves the conventional
epic topics of war and love, the traditional structure requiring an invocation to the muse and a
dedication to the person commissioning the poem but the seriousness of the epic is undermined by the
triviality of the events presented, by irony and humour, by combinations of epic elements and
burlesque or frivolous details, by accumulations of religious, sacred terms and their human and petty
referents. The core of the poem is represented by a trivial quarrel described in epic terms.

“What dire offence from amorous causes springs,


What mighty contests rise from trivial things,
I sing. Thois verse to Caryll, Muse, is due,
This even Belinda may vouchsafe to view;
Slight is the subject, but not so the praise,
If she inspire and he approve my lays.
Say what strange motive, goddess, could compel
A well-bred lord t’assault a gentle bell?”

7
coming from the Italian word “burla” meaning ridicule, mockery
8
see Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms
9
Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism, p. 129
10
id., p. 118

2
The ambivalence of the treatment received by the topic in Pope’s poem comes from a
ridiculous transformation of the epic, from its imitation and adaptation to contemporary, trivial
matters. The grand events are replaced by insignificant happenings (quarrel over a lock, battle between
sexes, games and courtship) while the characters preserve their grandeur even if they are involved in
petty disputes; the gods usually interfering in humans’ lives and triggering their tragic fate become
now elves, spirits and sylphs diminished in size but equally important in people’s “affairs”. The
poem’s beginning respects the epic formula but the discrepancy between the heroism of the foretold
events, of the tragic conflicts and the triviality of frivolous love affairs is even more stressed by the
allusions to Virgil and Homer.
The episode of Belinda’s preparation for the beginning of a new day presenting her with
unexpected domestic or court events parallels those of the Baron, ready to start his conquest and all
these small details are parodic rewritings of epic, heroic preparations of war. Belinda’s appearance
seems to be purposefully devised to lure, catch and torture.

“And now unveiled the toilet stands displayed,


Each silver vase in mystic order laid.
First, robed in white the nymph intent adores
With head uncovered the cosmetic powders. […]
Unnumbered treasures ope at once, and here
The various offerings of the world appear;
From each she nicely culls with curious toil,
And decks the goddess with the glittering spoil.
The casket India’s glowing gems unlocks,
And all Arabia breathes from yonder box.
The tortoise here and the elephant unite,
Transformed to combs, the speckeled and the white.
Here files of pins extend their shining rows,
Puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, billet-doux.
Now awful beauty puts on all its arms.”

The petty rituals characterising the “religion” of female beauty are minutely described with a
mixture of humour and witty indulgence parodying the arming of an epic hero where “puffs, powders,
patches...” become disguised weapons to be used in a disguised battle; the vocabulary drawn from
religious rituals and heroic arming increases the ironic dimension.
Joyce’s Ulysses is another well-known example of parodic treatment of a well-known
hypotext; the “mythical method” gives Joyce a mythological frame of events which insures the
structural coherence of the novel, filled with demystified happenings occurring on one single day –
16th June. The chapter entitled Oxen of the Sun, structurally corresponding to the twelfth part in the
Odyssey, offers a series of parodies and pastiches occasioned by Bloom’s visit to the hospital and his
encounter with a group of medical students; their discussion parodies the medieval Latin, the early
modern English, the different styles of the seventeenth (Bunyan), eighteenth (Sterne, Swift),
nineteenth century novel (Dickens, Carlyle) following the formation of human personality from
conception after sexual intercourse up to full development and decay. There are other episodes as well
where Joyce introduces fragments of academic, journalistic, religious, nationalistic or political
discourses easily recognisable under their parodic disguise.
The chapter Nausicaa parallels the same episode in Homer – when Ulysses is shipwreck on the
shores of Phaecia and found by Nausicaa, the king’s daughter – but with Joyce it becomes a parody of
sentimental, mawkish literature verging pornography. The clichés, the common-places and pompous
style of cheap romances abound emphasising the devaluation of love in an unheroic modern world.
Gerty, Joyce’s correspondent of Nausicaa is a young girl stuffed with sentimental novels which take
their toll in the way in which she is presented as a little “angel in the house”, as an idealised prototype
of femininity dealing with trivial things hyperbolically enhanced to the rank of vital issues.

3
“A sterling good daughter was Gerty, just like a second mother in the house, a ministering angel too
with a little heart worth its weight in gold. And when her mother had those raging splitting headaches
who was it rubbed on the menthol cone on her forehead but Gerty though she didn’t like her mother
taking pinches of snuff and that was the only single thing they ever had words about, taking snuff.
Everyone thought the world of her for her gentle ways. It was Gerty who turned off the gas at the main
every night and it was Gerty who tacked up on the wall of that place where she never forgot every
fortnight the chlorate of lime Mr. Tunney the grocer’s christmas almanac the picture of halcyon days
where a young gentleman in the costume they used to wear then with a three-cornered hat was offering
a bunch of flowers to his ladylove with old time chilvalry through her lattice window.”11

Dentith sees Ulysses as a good example of intertextual work, as a parodic rewriting of Homer’s
hypotext; he treats Joyce’s novel as both “an inclusive celebration of a modern everyman whose
odyssey encompasses the multifarious details of contemporary urban life” and as a parodic work
where “some bathos can indeed be read into the comparison, a sense of the littleness of this life
introduced by the allusion.”12 Closely following the development of Ulysses’s adventures in The
Odyssey, Joyce transposes the Homeric epic into a modernist writing preserving the structure and
thematic of the cantos; Ulysses’s heroic wanderings back to his native land become in Joyce’s novel a
demythologised, totally unheroic odyssey of a common person, dealing with common experiences in
common situations (attending funerals, reading the newspaper, meeting people, visits to the hospital,
etc.). The mythic framework parodies the Homeric epic at the same time emphasising the distance
between a coherent, valuable past and a meaningless present and the comic mock-heroic projection of
a well-known hypotext.
David Lodge provides a more recent example of parody in Changes Places, the first part of his
campus trilogy. Here the parodic treatment of romances, sentimental dramas and facile detective
stories seems to serve a fictional transposition of a soap-opera occurring within an academic setting,
tackling high academic interests and satirising fake academic values and ambitions; while making use
of strange, unbelievable coincidences, revealing twins and lost parentages, combining humour with
mawkish sentimentalism, Changing Places offers parodies of Dickens’s sentimental pathos, Fielding’s
picaresque adventures, even if the picaro is now a university professor and his voyages do not take him
along the roads but from one conference to another.
Postmodern theorists such as Hutcheon or McHale apply parody to all other arts speaking
about the way it functions and subverts different types of hypotexts in architecture, cinema,
photography, music and media. It has been discussed in relation to visual arts, to political or historical,
feminist or postcolonial contexts. Trying to enumerate at least part of the postmodern writers or works
based on parody would prove to be an overwhelming task since parody lies at the core of
postmodernity as a means of creating an entire network of significations between past and present
texts, between genres and styles, modes of representations and forms of art. Among the writers using
parody as a favourite device names such as John Barth, A.S. Byatt, Peter Carey, Alasdair Gray, David
Lodge, Malcom Bradbury, Umberto Eco, may be included.

Examples:

1. Robert Southey's, "The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them",

"You are old, father William," the young man cried,


"The few locks which are left you are grey;
You are hale, father William, a hearty old man;
Now tell me the reason, I pray."

"In the days of my youth," father William replied,


"I remember'd that youth would fly fast,
And abus'd not my health and my vigour at first,

11
Joyce, Ulysses - Nausicaa, p. 280 in The Oxford Anthology of English Literature
12
Dentith, Parody, p. 91

4
That I never might need them at last."

"You are old, father William," the young man cried,


"And pleasures with youth pass away.
And yet you lament not the days that are gone;
Now tell me the reason, I pray."

"In the days of my youth," father William replied,


"I rememberd that youth could not last;
I thought of the future, whatever I did,
That I never might grieve for the past."

"You are old, father William," the young man cried,


"And life must be hast'ning away;
You are cheerful and love to converse upon death;
Now tell me the reason, I pray."

"I am cheerful, young man," father William replied,


"Let the cause thy attention engage;
In the days of my youth I remember'd my God!
And He hath not forgotten my age."

2. Lewis Carroll, You Are Old, Father William

You are old, Father William," the young man said,


"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head—
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

"In my youth," Father William replied to his son,


"I feared it might injure the brain;
But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."

"You are old," said the youth, "As I mentioned before,


And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault in at the door—
Pray, what is the reason of that?"

"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,


"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment—one shilling the box—
Allow me to sell you a couple?"

"You are old," said the youth, "And your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak—
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"

"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,


And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strength which it gave to my jaw,
Has lasted the rest of my life."

"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose—
What made you so awfully clever?"

5
"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father; "don't give yourself airs!
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down stairs!"

Isaac Watts, Against Idleness And Mischief"


How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!
How skilfully she builds her cell!
How neat she spreads the wax!
And labours hard to store it well
With the sweet food she makes.
In works of labour or of skill,
I would be busy too;
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.
In books, or work, or healthful play,
Let my first years be passed,
That I may give for every day
Some good account at last.

3. Lewis Carroll, How doth the little crocodile

How doth the little crocodile


Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!


How I wonder where you're at!
Up above the world you fly,
Like a teatray in the sky.
Twinkle, twinkle little bat!
How I wonder where you're at!

4. Lewis Carroll, Haddocks' Eyes/ The Aged Aged Man/ Ways and Means/ A-sitting On a Gate

I'll tell thee everything I can:


There's little to relate.
I saw an aged aged man,
A-sitting on a gate. He said "I look for butterflies
"Who are you, aged man?" I said,
That sleep among the wheat:
"And how is it you live?"
I make them into mutton-pies,
And his answer trickled through my head, And sell them in the street.
Like water through a sieve. I sell them unto men," he said,

6
"Who sail on stormy seas; I thanked him much for telling me
And that's the way I get my bread -- The way he got his wealth,
A trifle, if you please." But chiefly for his wish that he
Might drink my noble health.
But I was thinking of a plan
To dye one's whiskers green,
And always use so large a fan
That they could not be seen. And now, if e'er by chance I put
So, having no reply to give
My fingers into glue,
To what the old man said,
Or madly squeeze a right-hand foot
I cried "Come, tell me how you live!" Into a left-hand shoe,
And thumped him on the head.

Or if I drop upon my toe


His accents mild took up the tale:
A very heavy weight,
He said "I go my ways, I weep, for it reminds me so
And when I find a mountain-rill, Of that old man I used to know--
I set it in a blaze;
Whose look was mild, whose speech was slow
And thence they make a stuff they call Whose hair was whiter than the snow,
Rowlands' Macassar-Oil -- Whose face was very like a crow,
Yet twopence-halfpenny is all With eyes, like cinders, all aglow,
They give me for my toil."
Who seemed distracted with his woe,
Who rocked his body to and fro,
And muttered mumblingly and low,
As if his mouth were full of dough,
But I was thinking of a way Who snorted like a buffalo--
To feed oneself on batter, That summer evening long ago,
And so go on from day to day A-sitting on a gate.
Getting a little fatter.
I shook him well from side to side,
Until his face was blue:
"Come, tell me how you live," I cried, 5. J. Swift’s A Modest Proposal (see
"And what it is you do!"
attachment)
He said "I hunt for haddocks' eyes
Among the heather bright,
And work them into waistcoat-buttons
In the silent night.
And these I do not sell for gold
Or coin of silvery shine,
But for a copper halfpenny,
And that will purchase nine.

"I sometimes dig for buttered rolls,


Or set limed twigs for crabs:
I sometimes search the grassy knolls
For wheels of Hansom-cabs.
And that's the way" (he gave a wink)
"By which I get my wealth--
And very gladly will I drink
Your Honour's noble health."

I heard him then, for I had just


Completed my design
To keep the Menai bridge from rust
By boiling it in wine.

7
8
4. Postmodern Re-writings

Postmodernism consecrates the technique of re-writing texts of the literary canon by


changing perspective and style and by re-orienting their intentionality. It is again an attempt to
challenge and undermine the concepts of “originality”, “uniqueness” and “authorship”; by
operating within the narrative framework of a given text, characters might be guided towards
different endings, actions might by totally de- and re-contextualised, ideological standpoints
might be altered and adjusted to different social and political realities. The illusion of a certain
temporal distance interposed between one canonical text and its altered postmodern version is
sometime created with particular effects: it either underlines the parodic and ludic perspective of
writing in an era of disturbed certainties or stresses the virulent attacks on ready-made truths by
the ironic appeal to canonical authorities. Playing with intertextual perspectives and references,
these texts find their origin in well-known hypotexts and are built by accumulating intertextual
elements which re-orient the reader back towards easily identifiable literary sources and their
original meanings and forward to new significances.
Examples of postmodern re-writings abound highlighting the reversal of hierarchies, the
foregrounding of the marginalised and peripheral, the revelation of the unsaid along with the
break of restrictions and taboos. For Tamara Caraus, postmodern re-writing is meant to do justice
to the Other, whether this might be the lunatic, the woman or the colonial subject. What all the
three have in common is the exclusion from the canon, the biased perspective which
encapsulated them within patriarchal prejudices, stereotypical representations and marginal
references. Her theoretical approach of re-writing seen from the perspective of intertextuality is
sustained by examples mainly focused upon such authors as J. M. Coetzee, Jean Rhys and Jose
Saramago; these writers offer re-contextualisations of classic novels either by transforming a
former peripheral perspective into a central one (Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea retold from Mr
Rochester’s mad wife’s point of view) or by re-inscribing alterity within the main text (Coetzee’s
Foe is a re-writing of Robinson Crusoe who now becomes a woman).
Angela Carter’s re-writings of fairy-tales bringing a magic realist, psychoanalytic and
sometimes feminist touch, Salman Rushdie’s or Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s re-writings of history
from an ambiguous, relativistic perspective which denies it its traditional claims of absolute
authenticity and objectivity are suggestive illustrations of the postmodern preference for the
“already written” in its attempt to debunk centres and traditions.

Rewriting has always been considered in relationship with intertextuality for the resulting
double coded text which is produced. The “zero degree” of re-writing has been defined as the
first stage in re-working upon a hypotext, by copying it identically without altering anything in
its structure; in this way significance is altered without any textual interference. The best
example in this case is Jorge Luis Borges’ Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote written in the
emergence experimental tradition of “quotation and appropriation”. This text features the real
writer Pierre Menard (unfortunately dead at the time when the text was produced) whose
fictional work is eulogised. Among his literary achievement the narrator includes and highly
praises his re-writing (in an absolutely identical form) of a good part of Cervantes’ Don Quixote.
Menard had “the admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided-word
for word and line for line with those of Miguel de Cervantes” (91) thus achieving a critical work
where he "has (perhaps unwittingly) enriched the slow and rudimentary art of reading by means
of a new technique the technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution" (95).

1
Perhaps the first, minimal degree of re-writing is the one involving textual intervention
without modifying significance. The changes operated on the hypotext can imply alterations of
the perspective – feminist, psychoanalytical, postcolonial, historicist, Marxist etc – which may
engender new readings and new interpretations. The resulting text may play with the levels of
intertextuality and may combine palimpsestic features.

Possibilities of extension (according to Gerard Genette in his Palimpsests: Literature in the


Second Degree):
• Proleptic continuation (narrating events that happen after the ending of the
hypotext)
• Analeptic continuation (events happening before the beginning of the occurrences
related in the hypotext)
• Elliptical continuation (meant to fill informational gaps left in the original text)
• Paraleptical continuation (developing side stories and secondary events)

These continuations and re-workings upon hypotext can be realized through narrative
exclusion, meant to correct an account and working through intra-narrative exclusion (choosing
and developing particular event) and inter-narrative exclusion (focusing instead upon contextual
aspect). Other changes that can be operated on the initial text include: changes of the point of
view, expanding a particular character or changing the focus/ideological perspective of the story
(transfocalisation). Apart transfocalisation, which operates a shift of focus, changes through
transvalorisation introduce an axiological alteration (Sue Rose’s Estella: Her Expectations,
Emma Tennant’s Tess). Rewriting can also embrace revisionary aspects when the hypertext and
the changes operated on the initial text introduce critical dimensions or contest canonical works
and mainstream perspectives (Emma Tennant’s Two Women of London: The Strange Case of
Mrs. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde).
Generally speaking a rewritten text tries to critically undermine authority, to destroy the
concept of “originality”, to decentralise and reverse conventional dialectics central vs. marginal,
centric vs. ex-centric, master vs. subaltern, conqueror vs. conquered.

• Discussion of John Done and Adrienne Rich

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning A last attempt: the language is a dialect called


Adrienne Rich... metaphor.
These images go unglossed: hair, glacier,
My swirling wants. Your frozen lips. flashlight.
The grammar turned and attacked me. When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a
Themes, written under duress. time.
Emptiness of the notations. When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
They gave me a drug that slowed the healing of but further than that I could not say.
wounds.
To do something very common, in my own way.
I want you to see this before I leave:
the experience of repetition as death
the failure of criticism to locate the pain
the poster in the bus that said:
my bleeding is under control

A red plant in a cemetary of plastic wreaths.

2
But we by a love so much refined,
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.
BY JO HN DO NN E
As virtuous men pass mildly away, Our two souls therefore, which are one,
And whisper to their souls to go, Though I must go, endure not yet
Whilst some of their sad friends do say A breach, but an expansion,
The breath goes now, and some say, No: Like gold to airy thinness beat.

So let us melt, and make no noise, If they be two, they are two so
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move; As stiff twin compasses are two;
'Twere profanation of our joys Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To tell the laity our love. To move, but doth, if the other do.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears, And though it in the center sit,
Men reckon what it did, and meant; Yet when the other far doth roam,
But trepidation of the spheres, It leans and hearkens after it,
Though greater far, is innocent. And grows erect, as that comes home.

Dull sublunary lovers' love Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Absence, because it doth remove Thy firmness makes my circle just,
Those things which elemented it. And makes me end where I begun.

3
Course 5

5. Postcolonial Literature

The postcolonial text has been considered intertextual in that it represents the interplay of two types of
discourses: colonial and post-colonial. Postcolonialism rises against the Eurocentric culture, offering
redefinitions of both East and West and dealing with such issues as otherness, de-centralisation,
ex/centric, centre/periphery, national identity, vocabularies of power etc.
Theories of postcolonialism focus on a re-evaluation of both native discourse and that of the
metropolis; most of the time reality –whether that of the centre or of the periphery – is retranslated into
a new cultural code which disturbs, challenges and undermines conventionally accepted interpretations
and questions world-views. Textual boundaries are reinforced by provoking the collapse of the
traditional barriers between high and low culture, by combining political, historical, social, religious
and cultural issues into fragmented, unreliable, kaleidoscopic narrations as those appearing in the
works of the Latin American writers, Indian (Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Barathi Mukerjee, Hanif
Kureishi), Africa (Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka). Language undergoes the same process of
hybridisation by violating grammar and topic, by revitalising vocabulary, by mixing English and
native dialects, by combining idioms and words with surprisingly new effects. The pidgin language
undermines the metropolitan authority offering a hybrid product resulted from the combination of
English and foreign idioms. The metaphorical displacement operated on meaning is fictionally and
linguistically translated through syntactic and verbal dislocations as well as by means of relativising
and questioning social or cultural certainties.
Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin in their consecrated work The Empire Writes
Back analyse the experience of colonisation as reflected in literary texts which challenge notions of
Eurocentrism, undermine the political assumptions of the centre and emphasise the interconnectedness
of themes and discourses. They follow the development of post-colonial studies from the imperial
period when the colonised lands are more or less “fictionally” represented in travel accounts,
documents and diaries, fictional, photographic and cinematic appropriation, to the natives’ literature
written under the “imperial licence”1 and finally to the so-called “post-colonial” writing, intertextual
by virtue of its references to a cultural, hegemonic discourse which it undermines and subverts, its
sometimes parodic interpretation of the imperial discourse, its ludic preferences regarding narrative
techniques and linguistic acrobatics. Postcolonial syncretism, eclecticism and inclusiveness have also
been considered intertextual features playing upon re-inscription of history, redefinition of identity and
re-evaluation of colonial space and time.
Edward Said continues Foucault in asserting that no discourse is stable, absolutely true and
autonomous; the way in which Western writings construct the image of the Orient is analysed in the
stereotypes it produces. Well aware that discourse can shape or distort the image of the Other, he deals
with the process of representation as an “imagining process” which finally becomes a tool of power.
His work Orientalism represents a warning against false representations, against cultural prejudices
and stereotypes exemplifying his theory with false Western representations of the Orient, focusing
upon the non-European, former Western colonies. The East is generally equated to laziness, dirt,
irrationality and violence while the West is endowed with all the qualities that the East is considered to
lack. Said offers a model of politicised “contrapuntal” reading aware of the duality of the postcolonial
discourse and its hybrid result. He considers that “without significant exception the universalizing
discourses of modern Europe and the United States assume the silence, willing or otherwise, of non-
European world. There is incorporation; there is inclusion; there is direct rule; there is coercion. But
there is only infrequently an acknowledgement that the colonized people should be heard from, their
own ideas.”2

1
Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back, p. 5
2
Said, Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories, in Newton, p. 287

1
Following the same directions, Homi Bhabha declares himself in favour of a “reconstruction
of the subject” beyond misrepresentations and stereotypes that he minutely analyses by critically
taking into account an entire “apparatus of power”. In his critical analysis problems of stereotypical
representations are combined with the awareness of the inherent ambivalence of the postcolonial
discourse.

“An important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of ‘fixity’ in the
ideological construction of otherness. Fixity, as the sign of cultural/historical/racial difference in the
discourse of colonialism, is a paradoxical mode of representation; it connotes rigidity and an
unchanging order as well as disorder, degeneracy and daemonic repetition. Likewise the stereotype,
which is its major discursive strategy, is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates
between what is always ‘in place’, already known and something that must be anxiously repeated. “3

Bhabha treats the duality of the postcolonial discourse in terms of mimicry regarded as the
“sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, what
‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power.”4 In representing difference, authority is challenged
and subversed; the signifiers of colonialism are permanently formed and reformed and stereotypes are
equally built and destroyed by means of ironic parodies or pastiches of imperial discourse. This is a
cultural production of meaning functioning according to some metonymic and metaphoric relations.
Bhabha analyses the process of “colonial discourse splitting” where a mimetic representation of reality
is counterbalanced by a parodic one that denies reality and mimes it.
Hybridity comes to play an important part within the postcolonial discourse; it plays with
metaphorical and metonymical processes of similarity, contiguity or transfer, between two sets of
cultural values; most of the time this transfer between two cultures is represented by the immigrant
personality, caught in the area of “in-betweennes” and oscillating between them in an attempt of
redefining his national identity. Homi Bhabha in his analysis of nation as a narrative discourse, Nation
and Narration suggests such novels as Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Marquez’s One Hundred Years
of Solitude, Melville’s Moby Dick, Tolstoy’s War and Peace as metaphors of the nation. Such novels
constructed by means of metaphorical movements use a certain type of “doubleness in writing”,
consisting in combining a horizontal movement in space and a vertical displacement in time so that the
result should be a “temporality of representation that moves between cultural formations and social
processes without a “‘centred’ causal logic”5. This character of doubleness comes from conflicting
demands for definite identity and historical reform within the colonial discourse and for historical
recuperation and redefinition of identity within the post-colonial discourse; it also comes from the
duality established by the permanent oscillation between vocabularies of imperial power and
domination (even if sometimes mimed and parodied) and subversion and resistance.
Different theorists of postcolonial took into account different aspects of the colonised’s and
coloniser’s discourses meant to emphasise divergent realities, cultures, languages and political views
Bhabha’s works are focused upon the critique of the imperial discourse; JanMohamed, another theorist
of postcolonialism, bases his theories upon the diversity of the colonised’s dicourse and the coloniser’s
ambiguous attitude towards acceptance or rejection of “difference”, whether historical or cultural.
Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose speak about the part played by language in the process of
“conceptualisation and inscription” leading to the governmentalisation of culture6. Pierre Bourdieu is
interested in strategies of discourse construction stressing the social and cultural cleavage between
coloniser and colonised. Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Abdul JanMohamed make a pertinent
analysis of colonial and post-colonial discourses, observing failures and inconsistencies leading to
proliferation of fake dichotomies and inappropriate identities.
Bhabha speaks about a metaphorisation of post-colonialism visible in many of the works
coming from non-English speaking countries. The general tendency is to create new organic

3
Bhabha, The Other Question: The Stereotype and the Colonial Discourse, in Newton, p. 293
4
Bhabha, Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of the Colonial Discourse, in Rice, p. 235
5
Bhabha, Nation and Narration, p. 293
6
see Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture - Anthropology, Travel and Government

2
metaphors of identity7 out of the gap installed by baffling the western reader by means of reversed
cultural elements, rewritten myths and legends, by fully using the effects of fragmentation and
dislocation. Redefinitions of nation as a narrative construct are achieved through “textual strategies,
metaphoric displacements, sub-texts and figurative stratagems”8 which offer ambivalent perspectives
upon the conventional dichotomy East - West, while envisaging the permanent transfer of values
between East and West.

“Colonial discourse is an apparatus that turns on the recognition and disavowal of racial, cultural,
historical differences. Its predominant strategic function is the creation of a space for ‘subject people’
through the production of knowledges in terms of which surveillance is exercised and a complex form
of pleasure/unpleasure is incited. It seeks authorisation for its strategies by the production of
knowledges of colonizer and colonized which are stereotypical but antithetically evaluated. The
objective of the colonial discourse is to construe the colonised as a population of degenerate types on
the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest and to establish systems of administration and
instruction.” (Homi Bhabha in Nicholas Thomas’s Colonialism’s Culture - Anthropology, Travel and
Government)

“There is in all nationally defined cultures, an aspiration to sovereignty, to sway and to dominance. In
this, French and British, Indian and Japanese cultures conquer. At the same time, paradoxically, we
have never been as aware as we now are of how oddly hybrid historical and cultural experiences are,
of how they partake of many often contradictory experiences and domains, cross national boundaries,
defy the police action of simple dogma and loud patriotism. Far from being unitary or monolithic or
autonomous things, cultures actually assume more ‘foreign’ elements, alterities, differences, than they
consciously exclude.” (Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism)

“Splitting constitutes an intricate strategy of defence and differentiation in the colonial discourse. Two
contradictory and independent attitudes inhabit the same place, one takes account of reality, the other
is under the influence of instincts which detach the ego from reality. This results in the production of
multiple and contradictory beliefs. The enunciatory moment of multiple belief is both a defence
against the anxiety of difference and itself productive of differentiations. Splitting is then a form of
enunciatory, intellectual uncertainty and anxiety that stems from the fact that disavowal is not merely a
principle of negation or elision; it is a strategy for articulating contradictory and coeval statements of
belief.” (Homi Bhabha, Locations of Culture)

“... The identification of Hybridity with carnivalisation and creolisation as a means towards a critical
contestation of a dominant culture suggest that the threat of degeneration and decay incipient upon a
‘raceless chaos’ has been not yet fully redeployed and reinflected. Hybridisation as creolisation
involves fusion, the creation of a new form, which can then be set against the old form, of which it is
partly made up. Hybridisation as ‘raceless chaos’ by contrast, produces no stable new form but rather
something closer to Bhabha’s restless, uneasy, interstitial hybridity: a radical heterogeneity,
discontinuity, the permanent revolution of forms.” (Robert Young, Colonial Desire - Hybridity in
Theory, Culture and Race)

1. Definition:
The field of Postcolonial Studies has been gaining prominence since the 1970s. Its date is approximately
established by Western academy in 1978, the moment when Orientalism, Edward Said's influential critique of
Western constructions of the Orient, was published. The growing currency within the academy of the term
"postcolonial" (sometimes hyphenated) was consolidated by the appearance in 1989 of The Empire Writes Back:
Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Since then,
the use of cognate terms "Commonwealth" and "Third World" that were used to describe the literature of
Europe's former colonies has become rarer. Although there is considerable debate over the precise parameters of

7
Young, Colonial Desire: hybridity in theory, culture and race, p. 4
8
Bhabha, op.cit., p. 2

3
the field and the definition of the term "postcolonial," in a very general sense, it is the study of the interactions
between European nations and the societies they colonized in the modern period. The European empire is said to
have held sway over more than 85% of the rest of the globe by the time of the First World War, having
consolidated its control over several centuries. The sheer extent and duration of the European empire and its
disintegration after the Second World War have led to widespread interest in postcolonial literature and criticism
in our own times.

2. Major Questions:
How did the experience of colonization affect the colonized and the colonizers?
How were colonial powers able to gain control over so large a portion of the non-Western world?
What traces have been left by colonial education, science and technology in postcolonial societies?
How do these traces affect decisions about development and modernization in postcolonies?
What were the forms of resistance against colonial control?
How did colonial education and language influence the culture and identity of the colonized?
What are the emergent forms of postcolonial identity after the departure of the colonizers?
To what extent has decolonization (a reconstruction free from colonial influence) been possible?
Are Western formulations of postcolonialism overemphasizing hybridity at the expense of material realities?
Should decolonization proceed through an aggressive return to the pre-colonial past?
How do gender, race, and class function in colonial and postcolonial discourse?
Are new forms of imperialism replacing colonization and how?
Should the writer use a colonial language to reach a wider audience or return to a native language more relevant
to groups in the postcolony?
Which writers should be included in the postcolonial canon?
How can texts in translation from non-colonial languages enrich our understanding of postcolonial issues?

3. Major Theoretical Figures:


Franz Fanon
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)
The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

He mainly deals with the issue of colonization by language with a considerable impact upon one's
consciousness: "To speak . . . means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization"
(BSWM 17-18). Speaking French means that one accepts, or is coerced into accepting, the collective
consciousness of the French, which identifies blackness with evil and sin. In an attempt to escape the association
of blackness with evil, the black man dons a white mask, or thinks of himself as a universal subject equally
participating in a society that advocates an equality supposedly abstracted from personal appearance. Cultural
values are internalized, or "epidermalized" into consciousness, creating a fundamental disjuncture between the
black man's consciousness and his body. Under these conditions, the black man is necessarily alienated from
himself.
Fanon insists, however, that the category "white" depends for its stability on its negation, "black." Neither exists
without the other, and both come into being at the moment of imperial conquest. Thus, Fanon locates the
historical point at which certain psychological formations became possible, and he provides an important
analysis of how historically-bound cultural systems, such as the Orientalist discourse Edward Said describes, can
perpetuate themselves as psychology. The work of feminists in postcolonial studies undercuts Fanon's simplistic
and unsympathetic portrait of the black woman's complicity in colonization.

Edward Said
Said argues that Orientalism lies in current Western depictions of "Arab" cultures. The depictions of "the Arab"
as irrational, menacing, untrustworthy, anti-Western, dishonest, and--perhaps most importantly--prototypical, are
ideas into which Orientalist scholarship has evolved. Said writes: "The hold these instruments have on the mind
is increased by the institutions built around them. For every Orientalist, quite literally, there is a support system
of staggering power, considering the ephemerality of the myths that Orientalism propagates. The system now
culminates into the very institutions of the state. To write about the Arab Oriental world, therefore, is to write
with the authority of a nation, and not with the affirmation of a strident ideology but with the unquestioning
certainty of absolute truth backed by absolute force." He continues, "One would find this kind of procedure less
objectionable as political propaganda--which is what it is, of course--were it not accompanied by sermons on the
objectivity, the fairness, the impartiality of a real historian, the implication always being that Muslims and Arabs
cannot be objective but that Orientalists. . .writing about Muslims are, by definition, by training, by the mere fact
of their Westernness. This is the culmination of Orientalism as a dogma that not only degrades its subject matter
but also blinds its practitioners."

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Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
According to Spivak, postcolonial studies must encourage that "postcolonial intellectuals learn that their
privilege is their loss". In "Can the Subaltern Speak?", Spivak encourages but also criticizes the efforts of the
subaltern studies group, a project led by Ranajit Guha that has reappropriated Gramsci's term "subaltern" (the
economically dispossesed) in order to locate and re-establish a "voice" or collective locus of agency in
postcolonial India. Although Spivak acknowledges the "epistemic violence" done upon Indian subalterns, she
suggests that any attempt from the outside to ameliorate their condition by granting them collective speech
invariably will encounter the following problems:
1) a logocentric assumption of cultural solidarity among a heterogeneous people
2) a dependence upon western intellectuals to "speak for" the subaltern condition rather than allowing them to
speak for themselves
As Spivak argues, by speaking out and reclaiming a collective cultural identity, subalterns will in fact re-inscribe
their subordinate position in society. The academic assumption of a subaltern collectivity becomes akin to an
ethnocentric extension of Western logos--a totalizing, essentialist "mythology" as Derrida might describe it--that
doesn't account for the heterogeneity of the colonized body politic.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, a Kenyan writer of Gikuyu descent, began a very successful career writing in English before
turning to work almost entirely in his native Gikuyu. In his 1986 Decolonising the Mind, his "farewell to
English," Ngugi describes language as a way people have not only of describing the world, but of understanding
themselves. For him, English in Africa is a "cultural bomb" that continues a process of erasing memories of pre-
colonial cultures and history and as a way of installing the dominance of new, more insidious forms of
colonialism. Writing in Gikuyu, then, is Ngugi's way not only of harkening back to Gikuyu traditions, but also of
acknowledging and communicating their present. Ngugi is not concerned primarily with universality, though
models of struggle can always move out and be translated for other cultures, but with preserving the specificity
of his individual groups. In a general statement, Ngugi points out that language and culture are inseparable, and
that therefore the loss of the former results in the loss of the latter:
[A] specific culture is not transmitted through language in its universality, but in its particularity as the language
of a specific community with a specific history. Written literature and orature are the main means by which a
particular language transmits the images of the world contained in the culture it carries.
Language as communication and as culture are then products of each other. . . . Language carries culture, and
culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we perceive
ourselves and our place in the world. . . . Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human
beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world. (15-16)

Homi Bhabha
Along with Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha has helped create the field of Post-Colonial theory.
His seminal works, "Nation and Narration" (1990) and "The Location of Culture" (1994), bring Deconstruction
and Psychoanalysis into a politically and culturally charged arena. The result is a discipline that addresses the
nature of hybrids and that is itself a hybrid. Tackling the history of nations and colonies from the perspective of
the "liminal spaces" between dominators and dominated, Homi Bhabha insists that all cultural identity is
essentially and originally hybrid. By "liminal space,” Bhabha means the site of conflict, interaction, and mutual
assimilation that every encounter between cultures involves. Cultures and nations, for Bhabha, do not construct
themselves out of their own essence; they do so through interactions with other cultures. Thus cultural identity is
always and already a conglomeration of differences; traces and traits of the Other make up the identity of the
self; and no cultural meaning is separable from its originally multi-cultural production.

4. Key concepts
The Orient signifies a system of representations framed by political forces that brought the Orient into Western
learning, Western consciousness, and Western empire. The Orient exists for the West, and is constructed by and
in relation to the West. It is a mirror image of what is inferior and alien ("Other") to the West.

Orientalism is "a manner of regularized (or Orientalized) writing, vision, and study, dominated by imperatives,
perspectives, and ideological biases ostensibly suited to the Orient." It is the image of the 'Orient' expressed as an
entire system of thought and scholarship.

The Oriental is the person represented by such thinking. The man is depicted as feminine, weak, yet strangely
dangerous because poses a threat to white, Western women. The woman is both eager to be dominated and

5
strikingly exotic. The Oriental is a single image, a sweeping generalization, a stereotype that crosses countless
cultural and national boundaries.

Latent Orientalism is the unconscious, untouchable certainty about what the Orient is. Its basic content is static
and unanimous. The Orient is seen as separate, eccentric, backward, silently different, sensual, and passive. It
has a tendency towards despotism and away from progress. It displays feminine penetrability and supine
malleability. Its progress and value are judged in terms of, and in comparison to, the West, so it is always the
Other, the conquerable, and the inferior.

Manifest Orientalism is what is spoken and acted upon. It includes information and changes in knowledge
about the Orient as well as policy decisions founded in Orientalist thinking. It is the expression in words and
actions of Latent Orientalism.

Margins/Outside
Spivak's work explores "the margins at which disciplinary discourses break down and enter the world of political
agency" (SR). She interrogates the politics of culture from a marginal perspective ("outside") while maintaining
the prerogatives of a professional position within the hegemony. Through deconstruction she turns hegemonic
narratives inside out, and as a third world woman in a position of privilege in the American academy, she brings
the outside in. (Hence Outside in the Teaching Machine [1993]). These contradictory positions have led her to
develop the notion that the center is also a margin, more like the center line on a road than the center of town.
"This is the classic deconstructive position, in the middle, but not on either side" (de Kock interview). This
reconfiguring of the "center" (or re-centering, perhaps) also changes the position and status of the margins: no
longer outside looking in, but an integral, if minor, language.

Subaltern
Spivak achieved a certain degree of misplaced notoriety for her 1985 article "Can the Subaltern Speak?:
Speculations on Widow Sacrifice" (Wedge 7/8 [Winter/Spring 1985]: 120-130). In it, she describes the
circumstances surrounding the suicide of a young Bengali woman that indicates a failed attempt at self-
representation. Because her attempt at "speaking" outside normal patriarchal channels was not understood or
supported, Spivak concluded that "the subaltern cannot speak." Her extremely nuanced argument, admittedly
confounded by her sometimes opaque style, led some incautious readers to accuse her of phallocentric
complicity, of not recognizing or even not letting the subaltern speak. Some critics, missing the point, buttressed
their arguments with anecdotal evidence of messages cried out by burning widows. Her point was not that the
subaltern does not cry out in various ways, but that speaking is "a transaction between speaker and listener"
(Landry and MacLean interview). Subaltern talk, in other words, does not achieve the dialogic level of utterance.

Ethnicity
Exile & diaspora
Hegemony
Centre vs. Periphery
Colonialism & Imperialism
For postcolonialism, "colonialism" revolves around a number of strategic reinterpretations. First, colonialism
goes beyond the simple process of creating colonies. It is more effectively appreciated through the way it leads
to the movement of peoples across the world, the ensuing sense of dispossession and displacement by large
numbers of them, and the continuing legacy manifested in the way "sovereign" political communities emerged at
the end of the second world war. While European colonialism first took place in the form of settlement colonies,
this was enough to constitute the starting point of postcolonialism Settlement meant a number of things:
• the displacement of native populations and the inculcation of a European worldview on them;
• the exile of white settlers such as through the transportation of convicts;
• the transplantation of other non-native peoples through slavery and indentured labour.
These forms of diaspora hinged around cascading levels of marginality and perceptions of the relations between
centre and periphery. For instance, while white settlers felt rejected and inferior to their kin in the motherland,
they retained alternative hierarchical structures in their colonies based on racial, gender, and class divisions.
Hence for the people affected by colonialism, the type of postcolonial culture they produced varied markedly.
While it is important to think of colonialism as part of the experience of creating real or physical colonies, the
effects of colonization have had much more profound legacies that do not go away even when the a given colony
has moved on to a different form. On the one hand colonialism cannot "officially" end because there can be no
reversion to pre-colonial societies. In effect what passes -- in a rudimentary way -- as the end of colonialism has

6
often been recognized as sovereignty or the gaining of independence. But the communities that result are already
grossly distorted, forged through the transmigration into its borders as consequence of colonialism. On the other
hand colonialism has also become more manichean, reappearing in one form as neo-colonialism, while also
persisting in the discourse used in these societies. For example, critics who stress on the latter point see
imagination, language, culture, and even the mind as still colonized by the West. These are important assertions
to make because they raise the issue of how far a subject can truly distance himself or herself from the totalizing
embrace of colonial discourse.

AFRICA Derek Walcott (St Lucia)


Chinua Achebe (Nigeria)
Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria)
Nadine Gordimer (South Africa)
Doris Lessing (South Africa)
Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Kenya)
Ben Okri (Nigeria)
Wole Soyinka (Nigeria)

SOUTH ASIA
Anita Desai (India. USA, UK)
Kiran Desai (India)
Salman Rushdie (India, Pakistan, UK, USA)
Rohinton Mistry (India)
Amitav Ghosh (India)
Arundhati Roy (India)
Sara Suleri (Pakistan, USA)
Kamila Shamsie (Pakistan)
Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka)

AUSTRALIA
Peter Carey
David Malouf

CARIBBEAN
Wilson Harris (Guyana)
George Lamming (Barbados)
V. S. Naipaul (Trinidad)
Jean Rhys (Dominica)

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Course 6

Photography

In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and
what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally
the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole
world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. (Susan
Sontag, On Photography)

1. Brief history of photography


The process of getting images reflected on the wall of a dark room by means of concentrating the
light through a small hole was known ever since Antiquity. The discovery of the photographic camera
was based on the principles of the camera obscura; the problem was not how to get the image but how
to fix it on a material.
• 1820s – Nicéphore Nièpce made the first discoveries in the field leading to the discovery of the
daguerreotype
• 1839 – generally accepted as birth of photography but this simple statement hides a more
complex series of facts and discoveries. Both Fox Talbot in England and Daguerre in France
announced their simultaneous discovery of a process which could fix a photo-graphic image but
they were not the only ones getting to this result
• 1854 – the first stereoscopic views
• 1888 – George Eastman’s introduction of the Kodak (“You press the button, we do the rest”)
• 1884 – Eastman’s sensitized paper
• 1947 – the introduction of the Polaroid
• 1988 – the appearance of the “Kodak” hand-held camera

2. The status of photography


Ever since its discovery photography has been ambiguously placed somewhere between science or
technology, and art. It took almost half a century till it acknowledged it position among the other arts.
There were artists who considered painting and photography as two complementary arts whereas others
made a clear distinction between art and photography, associating the latter with printing and shorthand.
Perhaps out of these two conflicting views photographs were at first categorized as pictorial photographs
1
(treated as prolongations of paintings and drawing, especially in the domain of the portrait and susceptible
to obey the rules of painting) and straight photo (deemed to rely on a mechanical reproduction of reality
rather than on its creative representation).
Photography was first and foremost treated as a means of visual communication, as a document in
charge with representational tasks or as an active participant in social history. The 19th century focused
upon the separation between a photography as art and photography as technology; it also promoted a form
of visual anthropology combined with a strategy of legitimation (for colonial expansion and for building
and perpetuating colonial, racial, ethnical stereotypes). Victorianism imposed two opposite trends in
photography: one belonging to the public realm (travel photos of exotic places, of remote colonies, of
foreign types of people etc) meant to legitimize and popularize certain social practices and another
belonging to the private realms, represented by family portraits.
In the long process of acquiring the status of art photography had to wait for the permission to enter
the official system of museums, art galleries and exhibitions which were the institutions meant to make its
status official. The 1851 Great Exhibition of London held in the Crystal Palace sheltered the first
photographic exhibition and one year later, The Royal Society of Arts included photography in its show.
In France the first the first photographs were included in the 1855 Exhibition in Paris where
photographers as Durieu, Nadar and Bayard were described as “immigrants to the fine arts”. In France
and Britain during the 19th century trained artists’ involvement in photography was warmly encouraged
and exchanges of techniques, angles of perceptions and aesthetic principles between the two arts were
obvious. A particular emphasis was placed upon the concern for form, composition and light. The use of
photographs for book/texts illustrations was also encouraged. In America photography was envisaged in
its two aspects: as artistic and what they called, vernacular photography.
Other important moments in the history of photography and in the acknowledgement of its long
debated status as art are the dates when photo clubs around the world started their activity, promoting,
developing and popularizing photographic images: between the 1870s and 1880s the Photographic
Society of Great Britain tended to highlight the science of photography as technology, overlooking its
artistic side; as a consequence, in 1992 Henry Peach Robinson broke with the Photographic Society of
Great Britain and, joined by other photographers, founded the Linked Ring Brotherhood; in 1894 the
Photo Club of Paris organized their first exhibition; in 1902 Alfred Stieglitz founded the Photo-Secession
in New York which tried to foreground the expressive potential of photographs. He also founded and
edited Camerawork (1903-1917), the publication considered to be “undoubtedly one of the most
influential journals ever published to be concerned equally with art and photography” (Scharf 1974: 204).
Legitimation was everywhere looked for inside museums and art galleries but not everybody trusted
official art institutions accused of having biased perceptions and imposing certain aesthetic principles.
2
Russian photographers, for example, showed a general mistrust towards these institutions and in a
rebellious act, they took their photos in the streets, organizing out door exhibitions.
Modernism brings along a larger openness as well as an elitist position and autonomy. The emphasis
was once more paced upon formalism and the mutual influences between photography and painting are
even more frequent and obvious in this period of innovative experiments and searches for new forms of
expression. There were photographers obviously influenced by Cubism (Florence Henri – France, Paul
Strand – USA), Abstract Expressionism (Edward Weston – American Formalism), Surrealism and
Constructivism. No matter how much emphasis was laid upon formal experiments the common
conclusion was that creativity resides in the Artist and not in Technology. Another important moment was
the creation of f/64 Group, in 1932, that gathered photographers such as Weston, Ansel Adams and
Imogen Cunningham, focused mainly upon sharpness of image called to transmit meanings and emotions
through a continuous search of the perfect abstract form.
During modernism the entire debate about photography’s status of art became irrelevant. Arguments
for legitimacy were no longer sought in a period when photography had already imposed its indispensable
presence within society and in people’s lives in its multiple forms: as document, decorative object,
informational device etc. Photographers now claimed that they were not producing art works but through
their photographic productions they were only exploring, recording and analysing themselves and
generally, the human mind and soul. Modernism induces an ambivalent position of photography in
relation to art.
Photography is the most successful vehicle of modernist taste in its pop version, with its zeal for debunking
the high culture of the past (focusing on shards, junk, odd stuff; excluding nothing); its conscientious courting
of vulgarity; its affection for kitsch; its skill in reconciling avant-garde ambitions with the rewards of
commercialism; its pseudo-radical patronizing of art as reactionary, elitist, snobbish, insincere, artificial, out
of touch with the broad truths of everyday life; its transformation of art into cultural document. At the same
time, photography has gradually acquired all the anxieties and the self-consciousness of a classic modernist
art. (Sontag 1990: 131)
Whereas Modernism focused upon the documentary dimension of photography, encouraging the
social projects, the debates upon the accuracy of social observation and political implication, at the same
time the interest in formal audacities, Postmodernism tends to emphasize playful, ironic projects,
questioning the concepts of reality, originality, authenticity, identity and truth. It is generally concerned
about the proliferation of images and their circulation. It pays a particular attention to the creation of
meaning and the understanding of photographs encouraging the foundation of new specialized journals
and magazines: Creative Camera in London, Portfolia in Edinburgh, Aperture and Afterimage in USA.

3
The Post-photographic era is equated with the introduction and proliferation of digital images. A new
era was said to have begun in photography once with the replacement of the analogue techniques and the
introduction of new means of representation that totally reverse the notions of authenticity and truth. It
completely blurs the genres and dissolves the boundaries between photography, typographic, graphic
design and painting.

3. Interpreting photographs
Everybody considers that the first step in photograph interpretation is description. One cannot exist
without the other and description has to take into account the following elements:
- Form: referring to how the subject matter is presented (composed, arranged and visually
constructed). It may be related to dots, lines, angles, shape, light, texture, volume and
space. But other elements might be as well analysed: tonal range, contrast, film format,
point of view, frame and edge, depth of field, sharpness, focus.
- Medium: referring to what an art object is made of (type of film, paper, characteristics
of the camera, aperture etc). The discussion of all these things has to be relevant to the
overall impression and effect they have upon the final image.
- Style: a characteristic, recognizable manner of disposing formal and aesthetic elements.
This is the most interpretative part in the analysis of a photograph and it has to relate to
the arrangement of formal units, to the use of medium and to the choice and treatment
of the subject.
A common practice in interpreting images is their comparison and contrasting to other images
belonging to a specific field. In appreciating photographs, one can refer to both internal sources of
information (pertaining to the image itself) and to external sources, referring to interviews, comments,
other critical opinion etc. Each photograph bring a new manner of envisaging things and each viewer of
that photograph engender new means of interpreting it as everybody tends to look at a photo through their
own knowledge, beliefs and experience. Photographs are usually interpreted as visual metaphors as they
continuously refer to a transfer operated between a real referent and its representation in the image.
Types of interpretations:
- comparative – trying to introduce a specific image into a larger context and find particular features and
representative characteristics that might help in its interpretation
- archetypal – in trying to discover impersonal, universal and archetypal symbols and elements within the
photo

4
- feminist – analysing the photograph in terms of feminine identity and discovering the way in which this
identity is treated as a social, political, sexual construct, and the manner in which patriarchal
discourses tend to restrict and suppress femininity
- psychoanalytical – looking for Freudian and Jungian elements within the image that might help in
discovering the underlying psychic elements embedded in the visual symbolism of the photo
- formalist – focusing exclusively upon formal elements and discussing their effect upon the
understanding of the image
- semiotic – consecrated by Roland Barthes and attempting a reading of the signs in the image and an
interpretation based upon two signifying practices: denotative and connotative (see the Panzani
text)
- Marxist (socio-historical, political and ideological) – placing the image into a larger social context and
analysing the conflicting social relations alluded to by that specific image
- Biographical – taking into account the entire work of a specific photographer and the place of a
particular image within this continuum, the moment when it was created, the circumstances of its
creation and the possible implications of all these factors upon the understanding of that image

4. Reading photographs
In reading and interpreting photographs a very important part is played by semiotics and its meaning-
producing processes. Umberto Eco was the one that suggested the codification of the photograph as a text
(Critique of the Image) claiming that in spite of the resemblance between an image and its referent, the
iconic sign is arbitrary, conventional and non-motivated but relying upon conventions of perception and
codes of cultural understanding. Roland Barthes offered semiological analyses of photographs in his
Mythologies, in terms of language (visual or verbal) communication and associated cultural myths. His
major work in photography, Camera Lucida, Barthes tries to understand the essence of photography and
its subjective meanings. He places the focus upon the act of looking, attempting an analysis of how we
look and how we decode the meaning of a photo and its target. His conclusion is that the essence of
photography lies in its reference (the referent must absolutely be present, unlike painting) and
communication. Any photo arrest a viewer’s attention through a duality of elements which form a puzzle
of the image: stadium (a general enthusiasm for images) and puncture (a prick, a sting or a wound
inflicted by the photo). The idea that photograph thinks (the author, the portraitee and the spectator) due
to its pensive features was particularly influent.
Photographic interpretation was in fact placed at the intersection of its usage and understanding, of
different levels of theoretical understanding related to its production, publication and consumption.
Photos are taken to stand for signifying systems endowed with the capacity of creating, articulating and
5
sustaining meaning. An important step in the understanding of photography is the analysis of the process
of gazin which is never neuter; it implies relations of power and an ideological tendency in its modes of
representation. Critics usually speak about three types of possible photo reading:
• dominant (preferred reading) relying upon the intended meaning
• negotiated reading partly confirming to the intended meaning
• oppositional reading, in total conflict with the intended meaning
[The true total photograph] accomplishes the unheard-of identification of reality (“that-has-been”) with truth
(“there-she-is!”); it becomes at once evidential and exclamative; it bears the effigy to that crazy point where
affect (love, compassion, grief, enthusiasm, desire) is a guarantee of Being…
…The image, says phenomenology, is an object-as-nothing. Now, in the Photograph, what I posit is not only
the absence of the object; it is also, by one and the same movement, on equal terms, the fact that this object
has indeed existed and that it has been there where I see it. Here is where the madness is, for until this day no
representation could assure me of the past of a thing except by intermediaries; but with the Photograph, my
certainty is immediate: no one in the world can undeceive me. The Photograph then becomes a bizarre
medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal
hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination (on the one hand, “it is not there”, on the other “but
it has indeed been”): a mad image, chafed by reality. (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida)

Types of photographs:
Black and White/ Colour, Analogue/Digital
Travel photo – Burton Holmes
Documentary – Jacob Riis
War photography – Robert Capa, Douglas Duncan
Urban – Thomas Alan, Roger Mayne, Henri Cartier Bresson
Photo journalism – Arthur Joseph Munby, Dorothea Lange, Rusell Lee, Walker Evans
Fashion – Helmut Newton, Guy Bourdin, Deborah Tuberville, Andre BArre, Irving Penn, Erwin
Blumfield
Nude – Jo Spence, Annette Messager
Portrait – Cindy Sherman
Photographic essay
Social – Barbara Kruger

6
Course 7

Cinematographic intertextuality

Pre-History of Cinematography
- Inventory of techniques: 1780 – Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg – Eidophusikon
- Borrowing vocabulary from railways; borrowing means of expression from other arts (vampirism)
- Daguerre (daguerotype) > diorama > panorama
- 28 Dec. 1895 – the date of the public presentation of Lumière’s cinema at Grand Café in Paris
History of cinematography = history of cinematographic techniques, schools, directors, national cinemas,
producers.

1. Primitive film (1900 – 1915)


- lack of homogeneity – accumulation of frames separated by narrative ellipses explained by the
intertitles.
- lack of consistency in the actors’ play (documentary vs. theatrical acting)
- lack of finality: films were sold not rented and they could be accordingly modified and re-edited.
- lack of linearity – temporal jumps.

2. Cinematographic story: D. W. Griffith


- Homogeneity of the visual text – coherent correspondence between visual and narrative elements,
actors’ play and script visual and sonorous elements.
- Linearity between plans, scenes and sequences (particular emphasis upon scene transitions)
- Alternated montage (alternating two or several simultaneous events)
- “insert technique”: introducing significant details into the general visual narration of the story.

D. W. Griffith adopts a classic representation of space, being considered the inventor of the suspense
produced by montage (parallel montage, flash-back, image-action). He introduced a new way of narrating
based upon the image-action.
• The Birth of a Nation (1915)
• Intolerance (1916)

3. Classic Film Narration


- Inspired by Dickens’ novels = clarity, linearity, homogeneity, cohesion, coherence.
- It introduced a change in the point of view
- A new organization on scenes and sequences (combinations of plans corresponding to narrative
units; they can be separated by black screens, fade screens, etc or united)
- Transparency – logic development
• Orson Wells: Citizen Kane (1941) multiple points of view
• Joseph Mankievicz: The Barefoot Contessa (1954)

• Otto Preminger: Laura (1944)


• Billy Wilder: Sunset boulevard (1950) ambiguous narrator

Hollywood Classicism (1925 – 1955)


1
- Characterized by psychological realism, narrative logic, linearity of the story
- Clear genre distinctions
- “Transparent cinema” – (the illusion of a continuous and homogeneous reality), characterized by
narrativity, actors’ coherent play, cause-effect relation and the spectator’s identification with the heroes of
the film.
- Academism – creating the illusion of reality
• George Cukor: Gone with the Wind (1939), My Fair Lady (1964)
• Victor Fleming: The Wizard of Oz (1939), Gone with the Wind (1939)
• Fritz Lang: Metropolis (1927), Dr. Mabuse (1922)

4. European Cinematography
a) Russian Cinema of the ‘20s
- 1919: nationalization of the Russian cinema – refusal of the Hollywood model (glamour, stardom,
individualism) and focus upon the documentary feature.
- emphasis upon the historic significance of events and upon revolutionary forces at work
- pathetic function – amplifying events and conflicts (sur-decoupage, accelerated montage, relenti,
foregrounding, sharp angles of perception)
- argumentative function – expressing ideas and principles (parallel montage, visual comparison,
intertitles, visual metaphors)
• Dziga Vertov: Man with a Movie Camera (1929) (kino-pravda)
• Pudovkin: Mother (1926), Ivan the Terrible (1944)
•Serghei Eisenstein: Battleship Potemkin (1925), October: Ten Days that Shook the World (1927),
Ivan the Terrible (1944- 1946)

b) French Impressionism (20s)


- rejection of story telling – “pure cinematography”
- “visual and rhythmic symphonies” – accelerated montage, blurred images, preference for black and
white images
- rendering the impression of movement and of the passage of time
• Abel Gance: J’accuse (1919)
• Jean Epstein: The Fall of the House of Usher (1928)
• Jean Renoir: Nana (1926)

c) Dadaism and Surrealism


- visual compositions centred on abstract forms, rhythms, shoking images
• Bunuel and Dali: Un chien andalou (1929)

d) German Expressionism
- combination of arts: includes painting, literature, performance, architecture, etc.
- powerful oppositions between light and shadow, unusual creatures
- creation of an artificial universe which will become a source of inspiration for future productions

5. Modern cinema
- engendered by Italian neo-realism (social description and analysis, documentary)
- imposing authorship and characterized by: lax narrations, less dramatic including temporal and
informational gaps, ambiguous endings, less definitely described characters in moments of crisis
- different visual or sonorous effects, reflexive tendency
- direct or indirect quotations
Mannerism – use of double meaning, experiments and breaking the rules

2
- technical innovations: distance perception (btw characters, btw characters and the camera, btw
camera and viewers), hors-champs (playing with the margins of the frame)
• Robert Montgomery: Lady of the Lake (1947)
• Alfred Hitchcock: The Rope (1948)
• Vincente Minnelli: Meet me in Saint Louis (1944)
• Stanly Donen: Singing in the Rain (1952)

- appearance of TV movies
- creation of an international cinematographic language

On Adaptation and Film Analysis

The fact that films, just like any type of literary work, painting, photograph etc can be considered text and
accordingly analysed, has long been established. Unlike text analysis, film analysis in its written form can
only transpose in a different code a visual text. A complete film analysis should include references to all
the elements involved in film production and script, according to their degree of relevance.

- visual elements: description of objects, characters, actions, relationships; colours, lights, setting,
movement
- film narration: montage, editing
- sound: noises, music, quality of the sound, accents/tones… of voice

Seeing a film is a neuter activity which does not involve the viewer’s analytic assessment whereas
watching and re-watching a film means analysing it. The analysis is conditioned by frequently replaying
the film, stopping it, analysing shots, scenes and sequences, playing forward. The common trap of film
analysis is the superficial approach due to only seeing the film once and the danger of not paying attention
to significant detail, to fugitive scenes. The opposite trap might be too detailed an analysis which ignores
or overlooks a general significant due to a microscopic attention to details.

- Cinema analysis – increases the pleasure of understanding the film


- goes beyond its function of entertainment
- renders the film alive by activating its potential significances]

Film analysis:

1. recording the first impressions, intuitions related to the film – launching hypotheses
2. deconstructing the film into smaller units: separation, comparison, contrasting
3. establishing and analysing the relationships among these isolated smaller units (importance of
transitions, juxtapositions etc.)
4. documentary research: informative texts upon film production, film reception, authorship, actors,
critical reviews etc.
5. analysis of the script: plot, characters, themes, story, diegesis (the story and its fictional universe),
narration (content and expression)
6. placing it in a context (film genres)

focalization – mental point of view – visual point of hearing


visual - narrative
aural - ideologic

3
• briefly narrating a film and describing it are the first steps of interpretation
• semantic/ critical analysis – studies the means of organizing structural elements, making sense
of visual elements;
production of significances,
establishing connections btw what is expressed and how it is expressed
• socio-historical analysis – analyses the way in which the film constructs an ideal world that
established complex relationships with the real world
presents a specific point of view upon society
focus upon: social roles and relations, types of fights and confrontations, means of representing
social organizations, hierarchies, relationships
means of conceiving time (individual, social, historical)
what is required from the viewer: identification, sympathy, empathy
• symbolic analysis – deciphers symbolic elements that sometimes acquire a particular cultural
significance
Focus upon: metaphors and metaphoric sequences – repetition and insistence, amplification,
condensation

Film Analysis
Step 1 = duration of the film; parts/subparts –criteria of analysis – visual / narrative/ sound/ dramatic
transitions

Step 2 = description of the film – placing it in a context, spotting genre features

Step 3 = Segmenting the film into smaller units according to space/ time/ points of transitions / narrative
coherence

Step 4 = Establishing the point of view, the type of focalization; importance of space

Adaptation Analysis
- pre-analysing each text (both literary and cinematographic)

- analysing the degree of similitude btw titles, characters, contexts


- choosing a type of analysis

- analysing the relationship btw the number of pages and the duration of the film
- analysing the choice of suppressed scenes or condensed/emphasized scenes
- comparing the general structures of the two
- character analysis: suppressions, additions
- dramatisation of events – differences in tones, atmospheres
- visualizing characters’ feelings
- contrasting themes, structures, details in case of free adaptations

Film Theory

Film theory debates the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for understanding
film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large. Like traditional

4
literature, critical theories also apply to films. Here are some theories specifically built around film, and
discussions of traditional ones as they relate to film. (http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Film_theory)

Apparatus theory
Apparatus theory, derived in part from Marxist film theory, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, was a
dominant theory within cinema studies during the 1970s. It maintains that cinema is by nature
ideological because its mechanics of representation are ideological. Its mechanics of representation
include the camera and editing. The central position of the spectator within the perspective of the
composition is also ideological.

Apparatus theory also argues that cinema maintains the dominant ideology of the culture within the
viewer. Ideology is not imposed on cinema, but is part of its nature.

Auteur theory
In film criticism, the 1950s-era auteur theory holds that a director's films reflects that director's
personal creative vision, as if he or she were the primary "auteur" (the French word for 'author'). In
some cases, film producers are considered to have a similar "auteur" role for films that they have
produced.

Auteur theory has had a major impact on film criticism ever since it was advocated by film director
and film critic François Truffaut in 1954. "Auteurism" is the method of analyzing films based on
this theory or, alternately, the characteristics of a director's work that makes her or him an auteur.
Both the auteur theory and the auteurism method of film analysis are frequently associated with the
French New Wave and the film critics who wrote for the influential French film review periodical
Cahiers du cinéma.

Feminist film theory


(Also extended to gender theory which looks at either or both genders and their function, or
portrayal in film.)
Feminist film theory is theoretical work within film criticism which is derived from feminist
politics and feminist theory. Feminists have taken many different approaches to the analysis of
cinema. These include discussions of the function of women characters in particular film narratives
or in particular genres, such as film noir, where a woman character can often be seen to embody a
subversive sexuality that is dangerous to men and is ultimately punished with death.

In considering the way that films are put together, many feminist film critics have pointed to the
"male gaze" that predominates in classical Hollywood filmmaking. Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" gave one of the most widely influential versions of this argument.
This argument holds that through the use of various film techniques, such as the point of view shot,
a typical film's viewer becomes aligned with the point of view of its male protagonist. Notably,
women function as objects of this gaze far more often than as proxies for the spectator.

Formalist Film theory


Formalism, at its most general, considers the synthesis (or lack of synthesis) of the multiple
elements of film production, and the effects, emotional and intellectual, of that synthesis and of the
individual elements. For example, let's take the single element of editing. A formalist might study
how standard Hollywood "continuity editing" creates a more comforting effect and non-continuity
or jump-cut editing might become more disconcerting or volatile.

5
Or one might consider the synthesis of several elements, such as editing, shot composition, and
music. The shoot-out that ends Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western "Dollars" trilogy is a valid
example of how these elements work together to produce an effect: The shot selection goes from
very wide to very close and tense; the length of shots decreases as the sequence progresses towards
its end; the music builds. All of these elements, in combination rather than individually, create
tension.

Formalism is unique in that it embraces both ideological and auteurist branches of criticism. In
both these cases, the common denominator for Formalist criticism is style.

Psychoanalytical film theory


The concepts of psychoanalysis have been applied to films in various ways. However, the 1970s
and 1980s saw the development of theory that took concepts developed by the French
psychoanalyst and writer Jacques Lacan and applied them to the experience of watching a film.
The film viewer is seen as the subject of a "gaze" that is largely "constructed" by the film itself,
where what is on screen becomes the object of that subject's desire.

The viewing subject may be offered particular identifications (usually with a leading male
character) from which to watch. The theory stresses the subject's longing for a completeness which
the film may appear to offer through identification with an image; in fact, according to Lacanian
theory, identification with the image is never anything but an illusion and the subject is always
split simply by virtue of coming into existence.

Screen theory
Screen theory is a Marxist film theory associated with the British journal Screen in the 1970s. The
theoreticians of this approach -- Colin MacCabe, Stephen Heath or Laura Mulvey -- describe the
"cinematic apparatus" as a version of Althusser's Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). According to
screen theory, it is the spectacle that creates the spectator and not the other way round. The fact
that the subject is created and subjected at the same time by the narrative on screen is masked by
the apparent realism of the communicated content.

Socialist realism
For other meanings of the term realism, see realism (disambiguation).
Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style of realistic art which has as its purpose the
furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism. Although related, it should not be confused
with social realism, a type of art that realistically depicts subjects of social concern.

Structuralist film theory


The structuralist film theory emphasizes how films convey meaning through the use of codes and
conventions not dissimilar to the way languages are used to construct meaning in communication.

An example of this is understanding how the simple combination of shots can create an additional
idea: the blank expression on a man's face, a piece of cake, and then back to the man's face. While
nothing in this sequence literally expresses hunger—or desire—the juxtaposition of the images
convey that meaning to the audience.

Unraveling this additional meaning can become quite complex. Lighting, angle, shot duration,
juxtaposition, cultural context, and a wide array of other elements can actively reinforce or
undermine a sequence's meaning.

6
Film Theory

Film theory debates the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for understanding
film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large. Like traditional
literature, critical theories also apply to films. Here are some theories specifically built around film, and
discussions of traditional ones as they relate to film. All information here is from:
<http://www.reference.com/browse/wiki/Film_theory>. Please feel free to investigate on your own.

Apparatus theory
Apparatus theory, derived in part from Marxist film theory, semiotics, and psychoanalysis, was a
dominant theory within cinema studies during the 1970s. It maintains that cinema is by nature
ideological because its mechanics of representation are ideological. Its mechanics of representation
include the camera and editing. The central position of the spectator within the perspective of the
composition is also ideological.

Apparatus theory also argues that cinema maintains the dominant ideology of the culture within the
viewer. Ideology is not imposed on cinema, but is part of its nature.

Auteur theory
In film criticism, the 1950s-era auteur theory holds that a director's films reflects that director's
personal creative vision, as if he or she were the primary "auteur" (the French word for 'author'). In
some cases, film producers are considered to have a similar "auteur" role for films that they have
produced.

Auteur theory has had a major impact on film criticism ever since it was advocated by film director
and film critic François Truffaut in 1954. "Auteurism" is the method of analyzing films based on
this theory or, alternately, the characteristics of a director's work that makes her or him an auteur.
Both the auteur theory and the auteurism method of film analysis are frequently associated with the
French New Wave and the film critics who wrote for the influential French film review periodical
Cahiers du cinéma.

Feminist film theory


(Also extended to gender theory which looks at either or both genders and their function, or
portrayal in film.)
Feminist film theory is theoretical work within film criticism which is derived from feminist
politics and feminist theory. Feminists have taken many different approaches to the analysis of
cinema. These include discussions of the function of women characters in particular film narratives
or in particular genres, such as film noir, where a woman character can often be seen to embody a
subversive sexuality that is dangerous to men and is ultimately punished with death.

In considering the way that films are put together, many feminist film critics have pointed to the
"male gaze" that predominates in classical Hollywood filmmaking. Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" gave one of the most widely influential versions of this argument.
This argument holds that through the use of various film techniques, such as the point of view shot,
a typical film's viewer becomes aligned with the point of view of its male protagonist. Notably,
women function as objects of this gaze far more often than as proxies for the spectator.

Formalist Film theory

7
Formalism, at its most general, considers the synthesis (or lack of synthesis) of the multiple
elements of film production, and the effects, emotional and intellectual, of that synthesis and of the
individual elements. For example, let's take the single element of editing. A formalist might study
how standard Hollywood "continuity editing" creates a more comforting effect and non-continuity
or jump-cut editing might become more disconcerting or volatile.

Or one might consider the synthesis of several elements, such as editing, shot composition, and
music. The shoot-out that ends Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western "Dollars" trilogy is a valid
example of how these elements work together to produce an effect: The shot selection goes from
very wide to very close and tense; the length of shots decreases as the sequence progresses towards
its end; the music builds. All of these elements, in combination rather than individually, create
tension.

Formalism is unique in that it embraces both ideological and auteurist branches of criticism. In
both these cases, the common denominator for Formalist criticism is style.

Psychoanalytical film theory


The concepts of psychoanalysis have been applied to films in various ways. However, the 1970s
and 1980s saw the development of theory that took concepts developed by the French
psychoanalyst and writer Jacques Lacan and applied them to the experience of watching a film.
The film viewer is seen as the subject of a "gaze" that is largely "constructed" by the film itself,
where what is on screen becomes the object of that subject's desire.

The viewing subject may be offered particular identifications (usually with a leading male
character) from which to watch. The theory stresses the subject's longing for a completeness which
the film may appear to offer through identification with an image; in fact, according to Lacanian
theory, identification with the image is never anything but an illusion and the subject is always
split simply by virtue of coming into existence.

Screen theory
Screen theory is a Marxist film theory associated with the British journal Screen in the 1970s. The
theoreticians of this approach -- Colin MacCabe, Stephen Heath or Laura Mulvey -- describe the
"cinematic apparatus" as a version of Althusser's Ideological State Apparatus (ISA). According to
screen theory, it is the spectacle that creates the spectator and not the other way round. The fact
that the subject is created and subjected at the same time by the narrative on screen is masked by
the apparent realism of the communicated content.

Socialist realism
For other meanings of the term realism, see realism (disambiguation).
Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style of realistic art which has as its purpose the
furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism. Although related, it should not be confused
with social realism, a type of art that realistically depicts subjects of social concern.

Structuralist film theory


The structuralist film theory emphasizes how films convey meaning through the use of codes and
conventions not dissimilar to the way languages are used to construct meaning in communication.

An example of this is understanding how the simple combination of shots can create an additional
idea: the blank expression on a man's face, a piece of cake, and then back to the man's face. While

8
nothing in this sequence literally expresses hunger—or desire—the juxtaposition of the images
convey that meaning to the audience.

Unraveling this additional meaning can become quite complex. Lighting, angle, shot duration,
juxtaposition, cultural context, and a wide array of other elements can actively reinforce or
undermine a sequence's meaning.

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