Intertextualities
EN 1002 – Summer 2010 – Cheryl Crawford
Lecture 2 – Intertext – June 24
-
-
Literary:
o Written
o Novels/advertising
o Scripts, poetry.
o Prose.
Movies
Art, visual, music
o Sculpture
Bodies (ourselves as text)
Performance arts
Landmarks (i.e. buildings [i.e. cn tower in Toronto])
Religious symbols.
Three Useful Points
- Even so-called ‘foundational’ texts, such as the Bible or Shakespeare’s plays, are
intertextual.
- Definitions offer us strategies for identifying intertextual relationships.
- From the Latin, intertexto, meaning ‘to intermingle while weaving’.
Close Reading Strategies
- Read with a pencil in hand, and annotate the text.
- Look for patterns in the things you’ve noticed about the text – repetitions,
contradictions, similarities.
- Ask questions about the patterns you’ve noticed – especially how and why.
Think, Pair, Share
- Think – On your own, re-read Genesis 1:1-7. Highlight details that are surprising,
significant, or that raise questions.
- Pair – Compare you annotations to those of a neighbour.
- What is the text trying to do? How does it do it?
Genesis
- Binaries:
o Chaos and order [there is formlessness there and God creates order]
- This is a story that accounts for the order and chaos of the economy and that its
influence accounts for the fact that dichotomies are the elemental structure of
western society.
- How language affects our relationship to the world. This story is on two levels is
creating order out of this chaos. Our language is also predicated on those
dichotomies.
-
God is the single authorial genius. There is nothing higher than God, in terms of
related text.
Hierarchy of Text
- God -> men -> women -> animal ; with woman as the cause of the fall.
- ‘Your desire will be for your husband, and he shall rule over you’.
- Implications of regarding the Female’s act that places her on the bottom of the
hierarchy.
Thomas King
- Collaborate process; more than one character creating and narrating.
- Trying to make you question what you know about everything; he’s trying to
make you confused.
- Coyote; a trickster figure. It wants you to be confused; menace.
- Odd details that don’t seem to make sense; Billy Frank and the Dead River King
– what is it? Who is it? Intertext?
- Reference to Harley James; who is he? Someone who lives in the community,
there are a few clues that are left around, gets drunk and is a Whiteman. We
never find his significance to the story.
- Repetition – maybe; a story that brings indeterminacy.
- Begins telling her story; no time and space, in other times its very specific.
- No maybe’s in the bible, while in King’s story it’s full of maybes.
- Three whitemen that are telling the story of natives; making fun of.
- Told orally.
- The use of repetition signals the orality of the conversation.
- The dead river pig story gets differed. Perhaps in our encounter with King’s story,
what we don’t know and don’t understand is more important with what we do
know and do understand.