This weekend members of our club participated in an international
student conference hosted
by The Geoffrey Chaucer Student Society in Łódź.
The 6th
GCSS Student Conference on the topic of intertextuality took place at the University of Łódź on
March 16-17, 2013. The phenomenon of intertextuality was discussed in various
contexts and in reference to diverse literary and non-literary texts. The conference sessions were devoted to
musical and visual intertexts; intertextuality in drama; mythical and chivalric
intertexts; independent life of literary characters; intertextuality in
relation to religion and ideology; intertextuality and the problem of textual
functions and myths, legends and pop-cultural recycling.
Here are two abstracts of the papers presented by UAM
representatives:
Intertextuality/Intervisuality:
Intertextual Encounters in Art Spiegelman’s Maus
Małgorzata Olsza, Adam
Mickiewicz University
malgorzata.olsza@gmail.com
The
aesthetic-rhetorical situation understood under the name of intertextuality cherishes
a very long literary history. With the emergence of the new hybrid genre of the
graphic novel, bringing together the word and the image, new perspectives for
the use and meaning of intertextuality open. Alongside intertextuality, the
phenomenon of “intervisuality” comes to light. Highly complex visual-verbal
narratives as they are, graphic novels require sophisticated reading strategies
and an understanding of both textual and visual references through which is it
possible to enter the text and uncover its multiple layers of meaning. This
paper will analyze the dazzling array of intertextual/intervisual references
that pervade both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. Maps,
diagrams, comic books, drawn and actual photographs, animal symbolism and a
convention of (auto)biography all intersect and intertwine in Spiegelman’s work
to create a truly postmodern mix of the high and the low, the real and the methaporized,
the representable and the unrepresentable.
Post-racial
America? The Re-experience of the Realities of Racism and Tribalism
in Bruce
Norris’ Play Clybourne Park
Sylwia Chlebowska, Adam Mickiewicz University
chlebowska.s@gmail.com
The main aim of
the paper is to explore intertextual relationships between two important
American plays devoted to the issues of racial discrimination, tribalism and
social injustice: Bruce Norris’ 2010 play Clybourne Park and Lorraine Hansberry’s
1959 landmark play A Raisin in the Sun. The analysis will focus on the process
of Norris’ argument against liberal idealism as he intricately weaves the plot
of his play around Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. The paper will
principally concern the disillusionment with Hansberry’s generation’s ambition
for a segregation-free America, as well as the question of territoriality as
symptomatic of racial discrimination. In my intertextual study, I shall argue
that Norris acutely counters Hansberry’s optimistic hopes and expectations
concerning a homogenous and color-blind America, arguing that, despite the most
recent political changes, which include the election of an African-American
president, racial injustice continues to be the enduring and critical subtext of
the contemporary American discourse. Apart from the dialogic confrontation of
the plays’ themes, the discussion shall also seek to account for the very structure
of Norris’ play, with a view of showing how, by directly relating to the
existing classic drama, it serves to present the ineptitude of the contemporary
American society.
