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almost surreptitiously, concepts of external significance, such as moral coherence and aesthetic vision. The allied followers of Leavis and Winters certainly looked for a relationship to life, even specific "life-enhancing" qualities immanent in their favoured texts, even though this was not be confused with the more traditional search for a moral message.22 |
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Even more extreme was the Deconstructionist slogan: "Nothing outside the text!" For the Deconstructionist, the text was no more (and no less) than the interplay of signs, whose stability and reference, as far as extrinsic meaning went, was shifting and dubious, because of the nature of language in general and literary language in particular. A text might yield a plurality of meanings, and the establishment of the validity of any one meaning was, to use an over-used term, highly "problematic." Jouissance, as advocated by Roland Barthes, the Philodemus of modern critics, rather than mundane reference or truth, would be the recommended guide for the reader in this inevitable polysemy. |
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This sceptical, indeed negative, view must be contrasted with the critical innovations fostered by Structuralism proper in the formal analysis of the text, particularly in such areas as poetics, genre, and narrative. These were found to be of considerable value for the understanding and criticism of classical literature. Obvious examples are Narratology and Intertextuality as developed by G.B. Conte.23 It has not been to their disadvantage that connections with ancient critical theory and the terminology of classical rhetoric, and even with Humanist scholarship, were easily made. |
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Intertextuality, for instance, offered itself as a more dynamic form of Quellenforschung, the traditional search by philological commentators for models, parallels, allusions, echoes, borrowings, and even plagiarism in ancient authors.24 At the same time it connects with such ancient concepts as imitatio and aemulatio.25 Allusions and references are not a display of doctrina or, worse, gratuitous padding or evidence of a lack of inspiration or originality, but a positive trope, constituting a rhetoric of its own and the assertion of the new work's place in literary history. |
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It has to be admitted that Intertextuality, a word coined by Julia Kristeva, can be broadened until it becomes, as described by Worton and Still (1990:xi) "a promiscuous inter-discipline, or even a trans-discipline." By |
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22 Some representative texts are reprinted in Selden (1988) 494. |
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23 Some of these studies have developed an extensive theoretical vocabulary of their own; see e.g. de Jong (1987), Winkler (1985), and Prince (1987) for Narratology (Todorov's term). As Conte remarks in discussing Interextuality and the concept of "functional opposition," il linguaggio imita gli strumenti del metodo. |
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24 In the broader modern sense of the word. As it is first used (by Martial, for instance), it simply means claiming the authorship of another's work with or without one's own additions. |
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25 Bloom (1973) postulates an almost Oedipal "anxiety of influence" in authors which induces them to overthrow or deface their important models. For the anticipation of Intertextuality in ancient Imitation theory, see Hooley (1990). |
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