Re-pick up

Update: My article for the Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopaedia is shaping up nicely, although I haven't yet written much about manga, which is supposed to be the main thing. I still have 1000-1500 words available for the manga bit, which should suffice. The other two are in various states of unfinishitude.

Now for the theory/method discussion that i left off a few posts ago, promising there'd be more. Now there is, only slightly delayed.

Configuration and Intertextuality
In many respects there is an overlap between the way these terms may be applied. In my definition of configuration, however, it is descriptive not of how works appear within one another, but how they become juxtaposed as the new work, the "configuration" appears in the world. This is a clear, formal, skeleton of semiotics, meant to function within a culture-historical frame, which gives it valency and makes it useful. In this way, configuration differs from Julia Kristeva's conception of intertextuality.
In Semiotikè, Kristeva outlines her concept of intertextuality as a response to, or an extension of, Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism. Her intertextuality is not instantly recognisable as the intertextuality that many of us have come to think of as the norm, which is usually some web of deferral, where everything is interrelating text. Kristeva’s definition harks back, via Bakhtin, to Russian formalism and the idea of ostranenje, alienation or strangeness. In this conception, there “can be no authoritative fixity for interactive, permutational (inter)text. Hence, ‘intertextuality’ as static, all-encompassing network, with no outside the text, is not Kristevan,” says Maggie Orr.

Doubleness is innate in how Kristeva construes language; it makes itself strange by constant permutation. “Kristeva’s intertextuality is therefore not a mosaic, or a limitless web of deferred meanings, but a logical relationship of ‘X and/or not X’, an ‘an(d)other’” says Orr. The text is an oscillation between itself and not-itself, a notion which incorporates both other texts (plays, novels, poems, instructions for how to assemble a garden chair) and language itself in the text’s unstable (but not deferred) duality.

In this way, intertextuality may serve as a companion to configuration, in order to tease out a trait which has not been evident in my definition of the latter concept.

Kristeva's intertextuality is, for me, a lot more fruitful and useful than Roland Barthes' version of the same concept. For him it is all play and no work, and it certainly has nothing to do with references, allusions or "adaptation," which for him mean "to fall in with the myth of filiation". Only the reader produces meaning, a viewpoint that Orr labels "narcissistic" - and I tend to agree with her.

What does configuration do, then, that intertextuality does not? It does investigate how texts both are themselves and some other text, so that is to an extent similar, but there are other goals as well. For one, configuration is an investigation into how texts come into being in cultural and socio-historical terms. It addresses text-in-text not just as language, but as socially constituted codes of selection. It posits a reader as well as an author, but it is a methodological stance which aims to investigate beyond associations, play and accretion of text, into why a text is present within a text – not, mind, why the author put it there, but why someone did.

Configuration may concern itself with structures, but structures are bound up with their contexts, thus configuration studies share a common ground with cultural materialist and new historicist outlooks (and "source studies"), because configuration addresses relations between works directly. By adopting a lateral understanding of the interrelation between texts, I hope to avoid the myth of filiation (if indeed it is a myth). Moreover, configuration studies are not just about culture, they are also investigations into literature, seeking not just to establish why something connects with something else, but how this happens in a literary frame.

Next time I will try to present some of the answers I have found.

Time Off

I've just returned from a ten-day vacation in France. Enough, I should think, said.

Must get back in saddle ASAP.