Intertext
as Social and Cultural Text
February 26, 2013
Kate Waller, TA for CLIT 2001
Paris Je T’aime (2006)
“14e Arrondissement”
• Clip
• How can intertextuality help us to interpret
this short film?
• What are the different texts at play?
What is Intertextuality?
• What is a Text? What is Textuality?
• inter-pref.
1. Between; among: international.
2. In the midst of; within: intertropical.
3. Mutual; mutually: interrelate.
4. Reciprocal; reciprocally: intermingle.
Connections to Linear Time
• Zerubavel’s quote from Twain: “history
doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes” (25)
• Kristeva: “intertextuality is mostly a way of
making history go down in us…two texts, two
destinies, two psyches…” (8)
An Intertextual Reading: What do you see when
you look at these texts in interaction with each other?
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
By Mark Twain
1884 (USA)
Catcher in the Rye
By J.D. Salinger
1951 (USA)
YOU don't know about me without you have read a book by the
name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.
That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth,
mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the
truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or
another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary.
Aunt Polly -- Tom's Aunt Polly, she is -- and Mary, and the Widow
Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book,
with some stretchers, as I said before.
IF YOU REALLY WANT TO HEAR about it, the first thing you'll
probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy
childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all
before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but
I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the
first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents
would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty
personal about them. They're quite touchy about anything like that,
especially my father. They're nice and all-I'm not saying that-but
they're also touchy as hell. Besides, I'm not going to tell you my
whole goddam autobiography or anything. I'll just tell you about
this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just
before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it
easy. I mean that's all I told D.B. about, and he's my brother and all.
He's in Hollywood. That isn't too far from this crumby place, and he
comes over and visits me practically every week end. He's going to
drive me home when I go home next month maybe. He just got a
Jaguar. One of those little English jobs that can do around two
hundred miles an hour. It cost him damn near four thousand bucks.
He's got a lot of dough, now. He didn't use to. He used to be just a
regular writer, when he was home. He wrote this terrific book of
short stories, The Secret Goldfish, in case you never heard of him.
The best one in it was "The Secret Goldfish." It was about this little
kid that wouldn't let anybody look at his goldfish because he'd
bought it with his own money. It killed me. Now he's out in
Hollywood, D.B., being a prostitute. If there's one thing I hate, it's
the movies. Don't even mention them to me.
Now the way that the book winds up is this: Tom and me found the
money that the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich. We got
six thousand dollars apiece -- all gold. It was an awful sight of
money when it was piled up. Well, Judge Thatcher he took it and
put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece all the
year round -- more than a body could tell what to do with. The
Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would
sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time,
considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her
ways; and so when I couldn't stand it no longer I lit out. I got into
my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and
satisfied. But Tom Sawyer he hunted me up and said he was going
to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would go back to the
widow and be respectable. So I went back.
Frow’s 10 Theses keywords (45-6)
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Read the thesis
Look up any words you don’t know
Re-read the thesis
Paraphrase the point
Link the point to our intertextual reading of
Catcher in the Rye and Huckleberry Finn
• Choose someone to report to the class
Frow’s 10 Theses keywords (45-6)
1. “differential and historical”
2. “tracings of otherness”
3. “absent textual structures”
4. “form of representation”
5. “genre”
6. “rules of the discursive formation”
7. “metonymic reduction” & “literary norms”
8. “act of interpretation”
9. “discursive structure” & “cultural codes”
10. “stress on interpretation” & “rejection of unilinear
causality”
“tracings”
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, La
Grande Odalisque [The Concubine], 1814
Martial Raysse, Made in Japan –
La Grande Odalisque, 1964
Farewell My Concubine (1993)
Ba wang bie ji (original title)
“form of representation”
Eiffel Tower
Tokyo Tower (東京タワー Tōkyō tawā?)
How do these interpretations change
the way we see the original?
Jacques Derrida’s The Truth in Painting
[La Verité en Peinture]
• Parergonal frame
– A hybrid of outside and inside, not a mixture
– A ‘threshold’
– A space of play
– Truth is at the space of framing
• How does a painting change when it is
framed? (…and put on a wall in a museum?)
What’s the difference between these
Mona Lisa’s?
The Apartment Ellipsis
New York City
Immigrant Apartment
Julia Kristeva’s “Nous Deux” or A
(His)story of Intertextuality”
• Immigrant in the host country (US v. France)
– “America seems to be a territory that welcomes
and even encourages grafts” (8).
– Intertextuality = “…a crossed threshold between
languages and cultures…” (9).
Desire for what’s missing/ABSENCE =
“doughnut” (Kristeva 12)
• “…that American pastry which
has a hole in the middle
(corresponding here to the
loss of meaning) and thus he
envisions interpretation as a
craving for the small cake, a
craving satisfied only when
consuming what is around the
empty hole, the ‘naught’”
(Kristeva paraphrases from
Rifaterre’s Semiotics of Poetry
1978).
The un-said/Absence
• In Catcher in the Rye:
– The narrator is writing
from a mental institution.
– The McCarthy era
• In Huckleberry Finn:
– The slave who is escaping
has already been freed.
– Post- “Emancipation
Proclamation”
What does cultural intertext look like?
• Julie Delpy’s Two Days in New York
• Wayne Wang’s Chinese Box
What is Hong Kong culture?
• Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the
Politics of Disappearance (1997)
• Absence: “…the cultural self-invention of the
Hong Kong subject in a cultural space that I
will be calling a space of disappearance” (1)
Parergonal Framing
• The city is not so much a place as a space of
transit. It has always been, and will perhaps
always be, a port in the most literal sense—a
doorway, a point in between—even though
the nature of the port has changed. A port
city that used to be located at the
intersections of different spaces, Hong Kong
will increasingly be at the intersections of
different times or speeds. (Abbas 4)
Cultural Dissonance
When have you experienced frustration when
encountering another culture (through travel, an
individual, an institution, or a text)?
When have you experienced enlightenment or
awe during a similar encounter?
Paris Je T’aime (2006)
“14e Arrondissement”
• Clip
• What are the texts at play?
• What is the frame?
• What is the ‘doughnut hole’ or the absence?
Where do you see evidence of this in the film?
• What can we learn from the intertext?
“Lust, Caution”
By Eileen Chang
(First published 1950)
Eileen Chang (1920-95): Background
Notes on “Lust, Caution”
– Writing history: first draft done in 1950, published three times in 1977 and
1978.
•
– The theme of treason and loyalty: the allegedly true story of the woman spy
Zheng Pingru鄭頻如 (1918-40) and her attempted assassination of Ding Mucun丁
默邨(1903-47) who collaborated with Wang Jingwei 汪精衛for the latter peace
movement (1939-1945) in Japanese occupied areas.
•
– Chang’s marriage with Hu Lancheng胡蘭成(1905-81) from 1943-1947 with the latter
being regarded as a traitor; Hu’s collaboration with the Japanese during World
War II, serving briefly in the puppet government in China headed by Wang
Jingwei in 1939-40.
•
– In Wangranji 《惘然記》, Chang acknowledges the impact of the story on her
after a duration of 30 years (see excepts in the appendix)
• (http://www.books.com.tw/exep/prod/booksfile.php?item=0010022312)
Setting
• World War II
• Japanese Occupied
Shanghai
• Flashbacks to Hong
Kong (life as student,
echoes Chang)
Costume as Frame
• “If you cannot choose your political leaders,
you can at least choose your own clothes”
(Abbas 5).
• Where do you see cultural framing in the
mention of the attire of Chang’s characters?
• How does our dress shape our daily cultural
reference points?
Other Cultural References
• What specific references in addition to
costumes do you see in the text? (i.e. food,
names)
• How do these cultural references add a
framework to the text that creates an
intertext? What is an example of a truth that
emerges in this space?
Mapping as Tracing
• What examples of Shanghai and Hong Kong
topography do you see in the story?
• How does a mapping of city space provide a
cultural framework that adds to our
intertextual reading of the text?
Absence
• Diamond as doughnut hole – a translucent
object of desire
• “I love you” (absent)
• The plan, unspoken
• The execution: “dead, she was his ghost” (46)
Other Aspects to Consider
• Nationalism
• Materialism
• Chang’s biographical intertext
Concluding remarks (Frow 54)
• The need to break down the limits between
the textual and the external and the nontextual (contextual)
• Rethink textuality; value discourse
• The possibility to be hospitable: not to resist
other and disparate domains of discourse (re:
Kristeva)
Your Field Work
• Be aware of yourself as
a ‘text’, of culture as a
‘text’
• Engage in discourse
about your
observations
• What truths do you
learn in this framing?