Version 7.0ish. Digital Humanities. Running. Pedagogy. Linux.

My oral presentation for Dr. Bluemel’s class on the Novel this spring looked at my favorite novel Mrs. Dalloway. As I note early in my notes for this presentation, Maureen Howard’s foreward to the version I owned inspired me to take a closer look at the intertextual inspirations Woolf was using while writing the novel. Further discussions with Dr. Bluemel would lead me to the focus of my final paper for the class: a comparison of how Arnold Bennett’s Anna Of The Towns and Mrs. Dalloway use geography and intertextuality to record the “real” history of women. (PDF)

Allen’s Intertextuality is a great overview of the field. Primarily he engages with Bakhtin, Kristeva, and Barthes. There are many useful quotes for my own work . Barthes’ definition of a text “A text…is a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.” (10) For Toni and I’s symposium presentation Simon Denith’s “Dictionaries are the graveyards of languages” will be useful (18). As will Bakhtin’s “language is always in a ceaseless flow of becoming.” (18)

Also useful is the discussion of Barthes’ theories about authorship and how they relate to capitalistic concerns. For my own uses, relating this to electronic literature is helpful. As Allen notes, the “name of an author allows (a) work to be an item of exchange value.” (71) Without a centered text, the reader of electronic literature becomes a writer of the text through their engagement with it. Electronic literature needs multiple rereading sessions from a variety of angles to “complete” the text (but do you even need to really?). The move away from a centralized text towards the decentralized, writerly, form which hypertext fiction offers is a threat to capitalism, which desires disposable, throwaway literature and thought. A book reread is one less sold.

Recently read: The Kristeva Reader (Edited by Toril Moi).

I had read a number of these essays before but reread them for a few projects I am working on at the moment. As always, Kristeva’s writing on the semiotic and intertextuality is engaging and very influential to my own thinking. What was disappointing in my reading this time was Kristeva’s essays on feminism and politics, which are well written and very interesting, but also contain a number of ideas I moderately to strongly disagree with or find a bit problematic.

Nevertheless, this is a great collection for those familiar with or new to Kristeva. Toril Moi offers thoughtful and informative introductions to each essay.

Recently read: Intertextuality by Graham Allen.

• NPR recently reviewed The Shakespeare Wars.

• The Modern Word reviews Rhys Hughes’ book A New Universal History Of Infamy.

• Ian Rankin’s piece on Pynchon for The Guardian is one of the coolest articles I have read all year. If you like Pynchon, or want to begin checking him out, this is a great article to check out.

• When I was working on my senior thesis on intertextuality a few years back Daniel Chandler’s Semiotics For Beginners was a very useful website.

• The latest issue of Bookslut includes an interesting article about children’s books whose subject is war.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down and revise my senior thesis, which was on Jorge Luis Borges and intertextuality. I’ve made some changes to the text while revising, which cut out about ten pages of text:

• Cleaned up a lot of overly wordy sentences. For some reason I used the word “thus” a lot in this paper (and another from the same semester I came across recently).

• Deleted a few pages worth of pointless commentary about the state of popular fiction.

• Also cut out some biographical information about Borges and Kristeva.

I am pretty happy with how it looks currently. I wish I knew more about intertextuality, semiotics, and Borges in general at the time. Using what I know now about Barthes, Kristeva, etc I am sure I would be able to write a much better, and significantly longer, paper.  Hopefully in graduate school I will be able to write a lot more about Borges.