Parody constitutes nor merely a postmodernist form of intertextuality, but also functions as a self-reflexive strategy that foregrounds the mode of representation itself. Postmodernist works simultaneously acknowledge their dependence on established forms of representation, what Barthes calls "doxa," and disturb or even subvert these forms, "paradoxa" (Allen 2000, 190). This radical questioning of the forms of representation and, consequently, modes of knowledge within a culture, through parody foregrounds, as Hutcheon states, "the politics of representation" (Allen 2000, 190). Thus, such parody, which implies a type of self-reflexivity, "points in two directions at once, towards the events being represented in the narrative and toward the act of narration itself (191). Thus postmodern fiction depends on intertextual practice, which has an intended destabilizing effect within such fiction, because it focuses attention on and manipulates the tension between fact and fiction, between the constructed and the rea l (193).
Genette's Taxonomy of Intartextuality and Interarts Relations
Of the major French theorists, only the structuralist Gerard Genette sketches out a detailed taxonomy of intertextuality in a trilogy of works (1992, 1997a, 1997b). (2) As Graham Allen observes, "the essential thrust of the structuralist project seems to be toward the intertextual, in that it denies the existence of unitary objects and emphasizes their systematic and relational nature, be they literary texts or other artworks" (2000, 96). In this trilogy, Genette produces a theory of "transtextuality," which Allen explains as "intertextuality from the viewpoint of structural poetics" (98). Perceiving literature as essentially "transtextual," or a second-degree construct created out of shards of other texts, Genette maps out ways in which relationships between texts can be systematically interpreted and subdivides transtextuality into five categories. (3) Significantly, he rejects the idea that all types of "transtextuality" must be implicit, deeply interwoven into a text's fabric.
Genette's first category, "intertextuality" which he defines as "a relationship of copresence between two texts or among several texts" and as "the actual presence of one text within another" is not the same concept employed by Kristeva (1997a, 1-2). Genette's redefining intertextuality into three subcategories--quotation, allusion (the most "implicit"), and plagiarism--offers a pragmatic and easily identifiable relationship between texts. "Metatextuality" such as literary criticism and poetics, indicates that one text serves as commentary on another.
, "hypertextuality," is defined by Genette as "any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the 'hypertext') to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the 'hypotext') upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary" (5). (The Oxford English Dictionary defines "palimpsest" as "a parchment, etc. which has been written upon twice, the original writing having been rubbed out.") Allen points out that "palimpsests suggest layers of writing and Genette's use of the term is to indicate literature's existence in 'the second degree,' its non-original rewriting of what has already been written" (2000, 108). Particularly in this category, Genette is concerned with intended and self-conscious relations between texts, especially in terms of specific genres, "I mean a category of texts which wholly encompass certain canonical (though minor) genres such as pastiche, parody, travesty, and which also touches upon other genres-probably all genres" (Allen 2000, 108). G enette devotes the bulk of his study on ways in which hypertextual transformations such as self expurgations, excisions, reductions, or amplifications are created out of particular hypotexts. As Morgan has observed, Genette's definition of hypertextuality resembles the traditional notions of influence and sources and does not advance the debate concerning the verification of sources and determination of intentionality (1985, 31). Despite such flaws, Genette's taxonomy offers useful terms in discussing and analyzing intertextual relationships.
Although Genette's taxonomy of transtextuality deals with literary texts, it can also be employed to analyze interarts relations. Towards the end of Palimpsests, he claims that his literary taxonomy can be applied to the practices of art in the second degree or "hyperesthetics." (Although Genette, like the eighteenth-century German playwright and drama theorist Lessing, claims that each type of art has its own rules.) As will be demonstrated, Genette's terminology enables one to characterize and systematize some of the relationships between the arts.
The Theories of Culls; and Genette: Applications
If Genette's terms enable one to classify the nature of inter-textual relations, Culler offers a broader scope: his schema of influence and intertextuality as opposite ends of a spectrum clearly provides one pragmatic and flexible framework for discussing these two opposing, but (apparently) not mutually exclusive views. Influence (and Genette's hyptertextuality) refers to a finite, dyadic intertextuality and suggests specific source(s) for a text and authorial intention. The anonymous, infinite intertextuality of Barthes and Kristeva, on the other hand, encompasses the cultural, historical, or political discourses, codes, or texts that an artist may deliberately employ or that implicitly exist within a work.
The two introductory essays on Plath's poems serve as prime examples of the two extreme ends of Culler's spectrum. In "Sylvia Plath's Transformations of Modernist Paintings," Sherry Lutz Zivley traces how particular paintings serve as sources for a dozen of Plath's poems, a clear case of influence/inspiration. The term intertextuality, however, seems more appropriate in Marsha Bryant's discussion of Plath's revisions of common concepts of fifties consumerism and advertising's ideal images of domestic life in "Plath, Domesticity and the Art of Advertising." The latter illustrates the intermingling of cultural codes with individual discourse. In particular, Plath weaves into the fabric of her poems the discourse of American consumer culture from mainstream images in popular women's magazines and in television advertising that depict secular myths regarding the housewife's role. Bryant states that the rhetoric, images, and mythologies of American advertising helped to shape Plath's own ambivalent construction of domesticity and female agency, which go beyond the stance of parody and satire. Her poems depict domestic woman's complex position in a consumer culture and both reinforce and question 1950s social codes regarding gender roles and power in relationships.
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