Browsing by Subject "Intertextuality"

Now showing 1 - 10 of 10

The aesthetics of sppropriation : Ghalib's Persian Ghazal poetry and its critics
(2010-05) Bruce, Gregory Maxwell; Hyder, Syed Akbar; Selby, Martha A.
This thesis examines the Persian ghazal poetry of Mirza Ghalib. It does so in the light of the corpus of critical literature in Urdu, Persian, and English that concerns both the poetry of Ghalib as well as the poetry of the so-called “Indian Style” of Persian poetry. Poems by Ghalib and his literary forebears, including Fighani, Naziri, ‘Urfi, Zuhuri, Sa’ib, and Bedil are offered in translation; critical commentary follows each text. The thesis explicates the ways in which each of these authors engaged in an intertextual dialogue, here called javaab-go’ii, or appropriative response-writing, with his forebears, and argues that the dynamics of this intertextual dialogue contribute significantly to the poetry’s aesthetics. These “aesthetics of appropriation” are discussed, analyzed, and evaluated both in the light of Ghalib’s writings on literary influence and Persian poetics, as well as in the light of the aforementioned corpus of critical literature.
Crossing boundaries : transnationality, intertextuality, and intermediality in the work of Guillermo del Toro
(2019-05-08) Turnage, Emily Christian; Berg, Charles Ramírez, 1947-
This thesis explores the hybridity found in both the work and identity of Guillermo del Toro through the lens of his transnationality, intertextuality and fandom, genre hybridity, and intermediality. Using del Toro’s films as case studies, this thesis analyzes the ways in which del Toro expresses his hybridity through his films in addition to his self-expression through social media platforms like Twitter and his own personal artifact collection of fantasy and horror memorabilia. Particularly, this thesis explores the ways in which del Toro is able to cross boundaries, between nations, between texts, between genres, and between forms of media.
Disarticulation in poetry : intertextuality, gender, and the body in the Vergilian centos
(2022-05-03) Adams, Elizabeth Dorothy; Haimson Lushkov, Ayelet; Chaudhuri, Pramit; Gurd, Sean; McGill, Scott; Riggsby, Andrew
This dissertation argues that the Vergilian Latin centos have much more intertextual and literary value than is imparted by their Vergilian hypotexts. In Chapter 1, I argue that the most common intertextual approach to reading centos, which prioritizes Vergilian readings, is insufficient. I suggest through a reading of the Iudicium Paridis that we should consider how centos change the meaning of Vergil’s texts, not just how Vergil changes the meaning of centos. I show through my analysis of the cento Hercules et Antaeus that we can see centos engaging with non-Vergilian texts in ways beyond allusion. In Chapter 2, I consider Ovid’s reputation as a proto-centonist. In his Metamorphoses, Ovid’s wordplay is deeply bound up in his depictions of violence, but this has so far gone underacknowledged in studies of the centos. I argue that we can read the centos Progne et Philomela, Narcissus, and Hippodamia as feminist texts that give voice to women silenced in mythology. In Chapter 3, I give a close reading of the cento Hippodamia. I suggest that its tragic elements, which have so far been overlooked, encourage reading it in terms of Senecan tragedy, which like Ovid also represents the physical violence of the narrative in the text. I argue that the cento Hippodamia subtly erases violence from the protagonist’s experience by embodying it within the construction of the text. In Chapter 4, I turn to the Christian centos. I argue that they, too, represent the text as a body, and use the form of the cento to emphasize the promise of resurrection. Throughout, I show that the Latin centos do not rely on Vergil to generate meaning or depth: the Latin centos take an active role in reshaping the myths they represent.
Eva and the Angel of Death : a Holocaust remembrance opera : the compositional staging of ritual as memory
(2020-06-30) Yee, Thomas B.; Grantham, Donald, 1947-; Hatten, Robert S.; Sharlat, Yevgeniy, 1977-; Wiley, Darlene C.; Bos, Pascale R.
As the world grows removed in time from the Holocaust, it becomes increasingly important to preserve and share the stories of those who survived its horrors. The contemporary Holocaust remembrance opera Eva and the Angel of Death presents the powerful story of Holocaust survivor Eva Mozes Kor, who, along with her twin sister Miriam, was subjected to sadistic medical experiments by Dr. Josef Mengele in Auschwitz. At the fifty-year anniversary of her liberation from the camp, Kor returned to Auschwitz and, to the surprise of many, announced to the world that she personally forgave the Nazis for what had been done to her. In the context of Holocaust remembrance, an opera like Eva and the Angel of Death contributes a unique ensemble of benefits, constituting an immersive memorial ritual that binds audiences together in a communal and aesthetic act of Holocaust remembrance. Eva Mozes Kor’s story is then summarized and its public reception explored, including the controversy surrounding her decision to forgive. Then, the Eva opera is analyzed in music-theoretic detail at a variety of levels—including a quasi-Schenkerian tonal plan and in-depth analyses of two of the opera’s pivotal arias. Of special note is an array of six semiotic strategies employed throughout the opera to establish meaningful relationships in musical material across wide temporal spans and to encode in music nuanced psychological experiences of trauma and memory. The selected strategies covered include leitmotif, associative textural fields, textural stratification and collage, intertextuality, musical topics, and virtual agency, which connect this modern opera to time-honored techniques of musical semiotics. Logistical plans for the opera’s premiere performances, surrounding programming, and organizational partnerships are presented— though the original performance schedule of an April 18-19 premiere was disrupted by the global outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, the investigation concludes with a philosophical reflection on the theme of forgiveness as espoused by Eva Mozes Kor, suggesting that forgiveness may constitute a productive orientation for future Holocaust remembrance efforts as the historical events transition into cultural memory. As Eva did decades after her trauma, the next generation must discern a path forward to carry their memorial task into the future.
Intertextual journeys : Xenophon’s Anabasis and Apollonius’ Argonautica on the Black Sea littoral
(2014-05) Clark, Margaret Kathleen; Beck, Deborah
This paper addresses intertextual similarities of ethnographical and geographical details in Xenophon’s Anabasis and Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica and argues that these intertextualities establish a narrative timeline of Greek civilization on the Black Sea littoral. In both these works, a band of Greek travellers proceeds along the southern coast of the Black Sea, but in different directions and at vastly different narrative times. I argue that Apollonius’ text, written later than Xenophon’s, takes full advantage of these intertextualities in such a way as to retroject evidence about the landscape of the Black Sea littoral. This geographical and ethnographical information prefigures the arrival of Xenophon’s Ten Thousand in the region. By manipulating the differences in narrative time and time of composition, Apollonius sets his Argonauts up as precursors to the Ten Thousand as travellers in the Black Sea and spreaders of Greek civilization there. In Xenophon’s text, the whole Black Sea littoral becomes a liminal space of transition between non-Greek and Greek. As the Ten Thousand travel westward and get closer and closer to home and Greek civilization, they encounter pockets of Greek culture throughout the Black Sea, nestled in between swaths of land inhabited by native tribes of varying and unpredictable levels of civilization. On the other hand, in the Argonautica, Apollonius sets the Argonautic voyage along the southern coast of the Black Sea coast as a direct, linear progression from Greek to non-Greek. As the Argonauts move eastward, the peoples and places they encounter become stranger and less recognizably civilized. This progression of strangeness and foreignness works to build suspense and anticipation of the Argonauts’ arrival at Aietes’ kingdom in Colchis. However, some places have already been visited before by another Greek traveller, Heracles, who appears in both the Argonautica and the Anabasis to mark the primordial progression of Greek civilization in the Black Sea region. The landscape and the peoples who inhabit it have changed in the intervening millennium of narrative time between first Heracles’, then the Argonauts’, and finally the Ten Thousand’s journey, and they show the impact of the visits of all three.
Large language models are post-structuralist intertexts
(2023-04-22) Sui, Peiqi; Baker, Samuel, 1968-
There is currently a robust body of literature that brings computational methods together with the concept of intertextuality from literary studies. However, these existing approaches’ attempts to quantify intertextuality often reduce the concept to the much more limited task of allusion detection. In doing so, they operationalize a characteristically structuralist understanding of intertextuality, and thereby undercut much of what was actually intertextuality’s literary-theoretical innovations and value. Instead of narrowly construing intertextuality as equivalent to a simple sub-task of natural language processing, I argue that the term’s poststructuralist legacy enables a knowledge contribution in the other direction: theories of intertextuality could help us gain a more robust understanding of large language models (LLMs) and their hermeneutic processes. This report represents some initial steps toward such a contribution. It necessarily begins by disentangling the complex theoretical affordances of Julia Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality, explicating how her concept embodies a more general shift from a structuralist to a poststructuralist modality. Drawing on the abundant conceptual parallels between Kristevan intertextuality and LLM’s transformer architecture, I demonstrate how recent developments in NLP overcome past quantitative methods’ structuralist limitations, breaking free of constraints in computational models and gaining the scope proper to literary theory frameworks. To these ends, the first section of this essay explicates Kristeva’s definition of intertextuality, the second surveys existing methods in quantitative intertextuality, the third demonstrates how such approaches operationalize a structuralist understanding of intertextuality, and the fourth will attempt to sketch a case for the intertextual hermeneutics of LLMs
Medtner’s Sonata-ballade : interpreting its dramatic trajectory through virtual subjectivities
(2016-12) Emerson, Bradley James; Hatten, Robert S.; Nel, Anton; Antokoletz, Elliott; Renner, David A; Gilmson, Sophia; O'Hare, Thomas J
As one of his more programmatic works, Nikolai Medtner’s Sonata-Ballade, Op. 27 exemplifies the composer’s structural mastery of form in framing an expressive narrative. In accounts given by Medtner’s students, the sonata was partly conceived in connection to a religious poem by Fet detailing Christ’s temptation in the desert. His pupils additionally recall an underpinning theme of inner conflict between light and darkness in the human soul. Medtner’s program is indeed a sort of two-tiered narrative, incorporating Fet’s biblical drama within a larger narrative of personal struggle and redemption. In the music, this manifests itself in the form of a variable subjectivity that alternates between a virtual, human protagonist and a scriptural drama. My analysis of the Sonata-Ballade uncovers implicit meanings in Medtner’s use of musical gestures, intertexts, topics, and his employment of genre. In addition, I survey the composer’s symbolic conception of his ‘muse’ to better contextualize the use of an associated leitmotif in the sonata. In these discussions, I support the ongoing reassessment of Medtner as a composer—from once being dismissed as a mere structuralist, to attaining greater recognition for the symbolic and narrative elements incorporated within his formal designs.
Of course, what did you expect, my child?
(2017-05) Houle, Bruno-Pierre; Isackes, Richard M.
Visual representations of fairy tales are not limited to children’s books. References to these stories appear in nearly every aspect of our cultural landscape and offer a variety of interpretations to these narratives. These affect our response to the tales and reshape our collective imagination. This range in fairy tale illustrations plays a significant role in the intertextual conversations that happen between retellings and critical writings. I explore this by creating my own version of The Little Red Riding Hood through a series of eleven tableaux, where each presents a different moment of the plot through a specific medium. I investigate how familiar elements can be communicated in a new context to alter anticipated patterns. This paper follows my process as I examine the role I play as a visual author in the creation of narrative.
Pindar and the enigmatic tradition
(2018-06-19) Sanders, Kyle Austin; Hubbard, Thomas K.; Katz, Joshua T; Beck, Deborah; Haimson Lushkov, Ayelet; Dean-Jones, Lesley
As an object of study, Pindar and riddles may seem a natural union of text and subject matter, since Pindar’s poetry is often judged by modern critics to be obscure. However, the notion of Pindar’s obscurity, a late critical development, says more about our own poetic tastes than the about cultural systems which produced epinician poetry. Contra Aristotle, speaking enigmatically in the ancient world did not constitute a lack or excess of signification but rather a specific and often successful mode of communication that was performed and enjoyed by many different kinds of Greek speakers. Therefore, by describing the Pindaric text in relation to the tradition of speaking enigmatically, my aim is not to “solve” the text. Rather, this study aims to further the valuable work of describing two kinds of associative networks in epinician poetry: logical structure and social meaning. As regards the first, I argue that enigmatic speech in Pindar is marked speech, which means that the text actively engages in signaling to the performance audience that it is enigmatic by devices such as narrative framing, signpost words, tropes such as the “cognitive road,” and the construction of an enigmatic speaker. On the second, I follow recent approaches to Pindar’s poetry which take seriously the social embeddedness of choral lyric. Thus I argue that the performance of enigmatic speech stages a series of dialogues: literary (Ch. 1), elite (Ch. 2), and communal (Ch. 3). Overall, the study advances a view of enigmatic speech, not as obscurity or window dressing, but as an expressive mode of speech that put diverse texts, individuals, and communities in conversation with one another.
Science and intertext : methodological change and continuity in Hellenistic science
(2011-08) Berrey, Marquis S., 1981; Dean-Jones, Lesley; Netz, Reviel; Riggsby, Andrew; White, Steve; Hankinson, Robert J.
This dissertation investigates the appropriation of material from one scientific field into another in the early Hellenistic period, 300-150 BCE. Appropriation from one science into another led to the emergence of new concepts in a community of scientists. Herophilus of Chalcedon’s appropriation of musical rhythms led to the emergence of the pulse as a materio-semiotic object for Rationalist physicians. Archimedes of Syracuse’s appropriation of mechanical concepts of weighing led to the emergence of the mechanical method as a scientific way of seeing for practicing mathematicians. But objects and concepts emerging from cross-scientific appropriation had ideological consequences for scientific methodology within individual scientific communities. Archimedes prioritized a formal Euclidean proof over that offered by the mechanical method because of the standards of proof demanded by the community of practicing mathematicians. The sect of Empiricist physicians rejected Rationalist medicine and promoted the individual doctor’s role and authority as a medical caregiver. The dissertation’s sum tells a story of increasing but limited strategies of naturalization within the sciences of the early Hellenistic period.