'Living So Far from Words': Intertextuality, Trauma and the Post
‘Living So Far from Words’: Intertextuality, Trauma and the Post-Shoah World in Medbh McGuckian’s Blaris Moor Shane Alcobia-Murphy In Unoriginal Genius, Marjorie Perloff argues that ‘citationality, with its dialectic of removal and graft, disjunction and conjunction, its interpenetration of origin and destruction, is central to twenty-first century poetics’.1 The ‘unoriginal genius’ is both the maker and unmaker of texts: while s/he participates in the active critique, revision, subversion and/or appropriation of past works, such a de-creative praxis is balanced and motivated by the desire to create new forms. Thus, the adoption of the quoting text as a model of cultural production is now not confined to a Dadaist abjuration of the representational possibilities of art, nor is it simply the attempted embodiment of the chaos of modernity within a non- signifying practice; rather, it is also an attempt to be original. But Perloff’s provocative title reminds us that, within poststructuralist thinking, it is acutely difficult to attribute ‘originality’ to any author since their cultural products are, by definition, intertextual: they are ‘woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages […] antecedent or contemporary, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony’.2 Roland Barthes argues, for instance, that all words accrue meanings and connotations, and that a text is merely ‘a fabrication of quotations, resulting from a thousand sources of culture’.3 Yet the ‘unoriginal genius’ is not cabined and confined to some inhibitive prison-house of language: intertextuality, for them, is not just the inherent condition of writing; rather, it is also a fully embraced practice.
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