This third volume of ASNEL Papers covers a wide range of theoretical and thematic approaches to the subject of intertextuality. Intertextual relations between oral and written versions of literature, text and performance, as well as problems emerging from media transitions, regionally instructed forms of intertextuality, and the works of individual authors are equally dealt with. Intertextuality as both a creative and a critical practice frequently exposes the essential arbitrariness of literary and cultural manifestations that have become canonized. The transformation and transfer of meanings which accompanies any crossing between texts rests not least on the nature of the artistic corpus embodied in the general framework of historically and socially determined cultural traditions. Traditions, however, result from selective forms of perception; they are as much inventions as they are based on exclusion. Intertextuality leads to a constant reinforcement of tradition, while, at the same time, intertextual relations between the new literatures and other English-language literatures are all too obvious. Despite the inevitable impact of tradition, the new literatures tend to employ a dynamic reading of culture which fosters social process and transition, thus promoting transcultural rather than intercultural modes of communication. Writing and reading across borders becomes a dialogue which reveals both differences and similarities. More than a decolonizing form of deconstruction, intertextuality is a strategy for communicating meaning across cultural boundaries.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements.
Introduction.
ANGLES OF ENTRY.
Frank SCHULZE-ENGLER: Cross-Cultural Criticism and the Limits of Intertextuality.
Bernd SCHULTE: Unrest in the ‘Mediatope’. Symptoms of hypertrophy in intercultural studies and the New Literatures from the
perspective of media theory.
Augustine OKEREKE: The Performance and the Text. Parameters for understanding oral literary performance.
TRANSCULTURALISMS.
Cecile SANDTEN: India, America and Germany. Interhistorical and intertextual process in the poetry of Sujata Bhatt.
Josef PESCH: Cultural Clashes? East meets West in Michael Ondaatje’s novels.
Jörg HELBIG: “Get back to where you once belonged”. Hanif Kureishi’s use of the Beatles myth in The Buddha of Suburbia.
Gundula WILKE: Rewriting the Bible. Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.
THE AFRICAS.
Pamela Z. DUBE: Traditional Oral Texts in New Contexts. New directions in South African performance poetry?
Susan ARNDT: Continuation and Writing Back. Igbo women writers and Ifo.
Detlev GOHRBANDT: Fable Traditions in the Stories of Doris Lessing and Bessie Head.
Gisela FEURLE: “Welcome Robinson Crusoe, welcome!”. Female revoicing in Bessie Head’s Botswana Village Tales.
Mark STEIN: The Writing of a Bastard Heir. Intertextuality in Dambudzo Marechera’s early prose.
Borislava SASIC: Nuruddin Farah’s Sardines. The construction of a Somali novel on the intersection of transcultural intertextuality.
THE OTHER ARCHIPELAGO.
Martina GHOSH-SCHELLHORN: The White Creole Woman’s Place in Society. Ideological implications of intertextual strategies in
transcultural communication.
Tobias D?-RING: Chains of Memory. English-Caribbean cross-currents in Marina Warner’s Indigo and David Dabydeen’s Turner.
Albert-Reiner GLAAP: Speaking in Vastly Different Voices. Transcultural communication in Winsome Pinnock’s plays.
Gerhard FISCHER: Performing Multicultural and Post-Colonial Identities. Heiner Müller ‘aboriginalized’ by Mudrooroo (with a
postscript on Mudrooroo’s dilemmas).
Norbert SCHAFFELD: Clio’s Other Scroll. The re-writing of history in contemporary Australian drama.
Peter O. STUMMER: White Lies. Recent human-rights discourse and an Australian novel.
Christopher BALME: Staging Intertextuality. Alternative models of New Zealand culture in Bruce Mason’s Blood of the Lamb.
Janet WILSON: Intertextual Strategies. Reinventing the myths of Aotearoa in contemporary New Zealand fiction.
Yoni RYAN: Placing the Pacific on the Literary Map.