3.2. The Theory of Intertextuality:
The concept of intertextuality is borrowed from the
post-stucturalist critic Julia Kristeva who coined the term in 1966. It refers
to the interrelationship between a particular work and other texts at the level
of creation and interpretation. Marko Juvan defines the concept of
intertextuality in his History and Poetics of Intertextuality
(2008) as the fact that "a literary work's structure and text for both
author and reader take shape in relation to other signifying practices entered
into those methods as did the assumption that by acquiring and reshaping other
texts, a work takes its place in a tradition and socio-cultural context" (112).
Thus, the text presents the starting point as well as the finish line in an
open and dialogic
1 It is the title of the second chapter of
Greenblatt's book Practicing New Historicism
2 It is the title of the last chapter of Greenblatt's
book Renaissance Self-Fashioning
Layouni 17
relation. New historicism transcends the textual essence of the
theory of intertextuality in an attempt to highlight the relationship
between text and other historicized cultural materials. New historicism widens
the scope of intertextuality by discovering the social, cultural and
historical dimension of the concept. Greenblatt uses the theory of
intertextuality in his analysis of William Shakespeare's The
Tempest and notably the relationship between Prospero (the colonizer) and
Caliban (the colonized native). He studies in his essay "Learning to Curse:
Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century" the parallelism
between the relationship of Prospero and Caliban, on one hand, and the general
attitudes of the European explorers of the New World, using Christopher
Columbus's journals on the other hand (Pieters 74).
Following Greenblatt, the study of taphephobia as a historical
and a social phenomenon in Edgar Allan Poe's tales can be traced in relation to
other iconic literary texts, notably Ann Radcliffe's writings as well as to
Greek, Egyptian and Roman mythologies. The influence of the Bible is also
significant especially at the level of the religious dimension of the premature
burial. Moreover, Poe's detailed depiction of the horror lived by taphephobic
characters across the six tales can be traced back to the multiple articles
published by iconic newspapers like New York Times and Daily Telegraph, dealing
with real life stories of the horrific accidents of premature internment across
Europe and US. Actually, in his tale "The Premature Burial", Poe provides the
reader with examples of real accidents of premature interment (the example of
the Congressman's wife) within a fictional tale of an unknown narrator who
suffers from catalepsy and an obsession of being buried alive during a trance.
This particular instance of the inclusion of some instances of real accidents
to prove the credibility of the narrator leads us to deal with another key
concept of new historicism, which is "the historicity of the text and
textuality of the history".
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