Well, my point was supposed to be that normal literary texts, and not just "pseudo-fanfiction" like WSS, require a text over and above "mere cultural literacy" (which strikes me as a problematic baseline) or linguistic fluency. (So Flaubert's Parrot might be actually type of example I was looking for, even though I'm not familiar with it?)
As for how much a poet like Eliot or Pound is playing with the reception of the texts to which they allude (ones that generally do not fall under mere cultural literacy or linguistic fluency) in addition to those texts themselves? I honestly do not know, and I think a powerful argument can be made either way, but I'm tempted to say "quite a bit." As for authors who go to not quite so esoteric levels, I can easily imagine a modern literary text which assumes the reader's familiarity not only with the works of Shakespeare but also with the common misquotings of those plays, which would fall under reception, no? Or would that constitute a more general cultural literacy, as Shakespeare falls into the established canon of dead white males? (And how do we draw this line?)
One always has to shape one's language, and thus the way one is being intertextual, based on one's shared understanding. If I reference "mad Mrs. Rochester in the attic" I'm alluding to not only Jane Eyre (which I've never read) but also to (and in most cases, primarily to) an entire discourse about epistemology and gender normativity which has since emerged in the feminist criticism. At college I pretty quickly learned that if I made such a comment to a professor in a relevant discipline, I probably would be understood; to a fellow student, probably not. And I don't think this is necessary confined only to the discourse of secondary-source academic nonfictional speech.
A science fiction story doesn't have to define ansible (although a novel might anyway), and other genres (I still can't get religious novels out of my head, although I haven't actually read any from which to provide examples) draw on generic conventions in the same way, so I'm not sure how great the difference in degree truly is, although any excuse to study intertextuality strikes me as a good one.
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Date: 2006-06-10 12:07 am (UTC)As for how much a poet like Eliot or Pound is playing with the reception of the texts to which they allude (ones that generally do not fall under mere cultural literacy or linguistic fluency) in addition to those texts themselves? I honestly do not know, and I think a powerful argument can be made either way, but I'm tempted to say "quite a bit." As for authors who go to not quite so esoteric levels, I can easily imagine a modern literary text which assumes the reader's familiarity not only with the works of Shakespeare but also with the common misquotings of those plays, which would fall under reception, no? Or would that constitute a more general cultural literacy, as Shakespeare falls into the established canon of dead white males? (And how do we draw this line?)
One always has to shape one's language, and thus the way one is being intertextual, based on one's shared understanding. If I reference "mad Mrs. Rochester in the attic" I'm alluding to not only Jane Eyre (which I've never read) but also to (and in most cases, primarily to) an entire discourse about epistemology and gender normativity which has since emerged in the feminist criticism. At college I pretty quickly learned that if I made such a comment to a professor in a relevant discipline, I probably would be understood; to a fellow student, probably not. And I don't think this is necessary confined only to the discourse of secondary-source academic nonfictional speech.
A science fiction story doesn't have to define ansible (although a novel might anyway), and other genres (I still can't get religious novels out of my head, although I haven't actually read any from which to provide examples) draw on generic conventions in the same way, so I'm not sure how great the difference in degree truly is, although any excuse to study intertextuality strikes me as a good one.