Week 2: Pygmalion, what is a

text?, intertextuality, music videos

and context
The Learner Portfolio, what is it?

 An individual collection of your work done throughout the two years of this course
 It is a place for your to reflect on literary and non-literary texts, and to establish connections among them and
with the AoEs & the central concepts
 As you collect your work, you can reflect on your responses to the works you have studied in the
corresponding Area of Exploration
 You may choose the format of this collection, it could be a wiki, a scrapbook, a blog, a padlet, a google drive
folder
 It is mandatory, but it is not graded

We will be setting this up in the weeks to come.

Pygmalion

By George Bernard Shaw

 When George Bernard Shaw wrote
”It is impossible for an Pygmalion at the turn of the century
there was, as there is now, a great
Englishman to open his variety of ways to speak English.

mouth without making some In the preface for the print version of
the play, Shaw laments the social
other Englishman hate or divisions that this diversity reinforces.
As we study this book, we will
despise him. consider the way it makes comment on
the concept of language as an identifier
of social class, and how altering one’s
George Bernard Shaw, in the preface to Pygmalion language might affect that identity.
Pygmalion the play as an allegory

 The name of the play is derived from an ancient

Greek story, related in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
 In Metamorphoses, the character Pygmalion removes
himself from society because he is disgusted by the
”shameful” lives of women in his era
 Alone and isolated, he ends up carving a beautiful
statue that he falls in love with and becomes a living
woman named Galatea
 Honestly a very problematic story!
Shaw’s translation of Metamorphoses into a
play for Victorian England

 Unlike Metamorphoses, no physical are carved.

 Pygmalion is swapped out for a language and diction
tutor named Higgins, Galatea for a young flower-seller
named Eliza.
 The myth is mirrored in Higgins tutelage of Eliza, as she
quests to transform from a “common flower-girl” into a
“lady”.
 Task: “How does the Take two minutes to
write a response, and I’ll
language you use affect call on you to share when
your identity?” we’re ready.
As we will see during our reading of Pygmalion, the
accent and dialect you speak heavily influences the
way in which others perceive you.

The effects of this can be felt throughout most aspects

of your life as an individual, and the ramifications of
that have broad implications for the societies we live
in.
 What is a text?

In groups of 3, discuss the question.

You have five minutes to decide on and write a brief explanation to share with the class.
A text could be a variety of things

 A speech  A photograph
 An opinion piece in a newspaper  A public service announcement
 A magazine article  A cartoon
 An interview transcript  An advertisement
 An essay  An artwork
 Intertextuality

There can be no such thing as a completely original text.

Post-structuralism: the origin of intertextuality

 Up until the 1960s, literary analysis focused heavily on the author’s intention when composing a work. This
method meant that most works were viewed as having only a singular meaning.
 Post-structuralism arose as a reaction to this. It divorces the work from the author, instead assuming that
there are a plethora of meanings within a work, and that a reader’s background and situation in fact direct
or elucidate those meanings.
 Essentially, this new theory argued that it is not only the thoughts of the writer that control the meaning of
the text, but also the thoughts of the reader.

The writer is not in sole control.

Julia Kristeva: “no text is self-born”

 In the 1960s, critics of structuralism such as Julia Kristeva published essays on their new approach to
interpreting meaning.
 Kristeva put forward that all texts borrow and quote from other texts whether the author knows it or not.
 She coined the word transtextuality as a way to describe how a text’s meaning is not contained within the
bounds of a text, and in fact when you read other related works, you realize new meanings in the primary
text.

All texts relate to one another.

Roland Barthes: “Death of the Author” (1965)

 Barthes’ essay The Death of The Author, published in 1965, argued that a reader’s own personal experiences
inform how they engage with a text.
 For example if you and a friend see the same movie, different scenes will make you cry, or laugh, or cheer,
because your personality informs how you interpret the movie.
 In the Death of the Author, Barthes also put forward that texts cannot be purely original, because every
author is influenced by the culture they are born into, which itself is influenced by the texts that exist within
it.

“A text is a tissue of citations, drawn from the innumerable references of culture.”

Gerard Genette: Palimpsests (1982)

 A palimpsest is an old term for a manuscript page which has been washed clean to be used for a new piece of
writing, from a time when paper was expensive to make.
 Genette expanded on the prior work of these other literary thinkers, outlining three main points that underpin
intertextuality:
 That there are multiple meanings in all texts
 Texts quote from & borrow from other texts
 The reader is the essential creator of meaning in the text

Meaning in texts is fluid rather than fixed.

Some simple pop culture examples of intertextuality;
both overt and covert, intentional and unintentional
To get you thinking

Here is a short text you have not seen before. Can  Even though you have never seen this particular piece
you read it? of writing before you probably had no difficulty
making sense of it. This is because the passage
It was nine thirty on a wet August morning. The rain contains much that is already familiar, and only a
settled like machine-gun fire on the tin roof of the little that is new. Make note of the following list of
warehouse next door, accompanied by the features and label them familiar (F) or unfamiliar (N)
monotonous plunk! Of water drops falling into a tin  The meanings of individual words in the passage
bucket from a leak in the office ceiling. I hadn’t had a
 The conventions of the “detective” genre
new case in three weeks. Work was the only thing that
had dried up that winter; seemed like even the  The concepts of character and plot
mobsters had gone into hibernation. I was about ready  The rules of narrative (storytelling)
to do the same when the phone rang.  Details about the narrator’s present situation
Try to imagine a completely original text – one that
contained nothing that was familiar to you.

Would you be able to read it?

Theory and practice

 Find the folder named ‘Literary Terms’ in the

General channel/ Files.  Use the below Google form to send me your
 Download the pdf named Intertextuality. responses to the Practice questions.
 Read through the Theory section, making notes on  https://forms.gle/R72gnrqAAGdoYoSa6
points you find interesting.
 Context

The “social background” of a text and its writer.

To get you thinking

1. Imagine you’re taking an exam in which you’re asked  Your culture’s perceptions of Shakespeare
to analyze a Shakespearean sonnet. The factors on the  Your training in critical analysis
right might shape the reading you produce. Some might
shape the reading in a very direct way, others might  Your ‘personal’ experiences and values
have an indirect influence. Number the items from 1  Shakespeare’s “personal” reasons for writing the
(most direct) to 10 (least direct/not available). sonnet
 The dominant values and beliefs of your society
2. Does this suggest the reading will be most powerfully  The politics and literary values of Elizabethan
shaped by “present day” factors, or by “historic”
England
factors?
 The ’original’ (17th century) meaning of the words
 The structure and workings of the modern
3. Is it possible for you to produce the same reading that
might have been produced by a reader in Elizabethan education system
England? Why/why not?  The exact wording of the exam question
 COMPOSER

T
CONTEX
HISTORICAL CONTEX
T
TEX CONTEX
T
SOCIAL

T
CONTEX
T
RESPONDER