Intertextuality and the Semantic Web Sarah Bartlett and Bill Hughes Serials – 24(2), July 2011 Intertextuality and the Semantic Web: Jane Eyre as a test case for modelling literary relationships with Linked Data The literary world is replete with examples of relationships between works such as Homer’s Odyssey and James Joyce’s Ulysses.A Linked Data approach offers the opportunity to categorize these relationships then make them openly available and easily discoverable. The most suitable framework for categorizing these relationships (which can be applied across all cultural output) is provided by Gérard Genette, who proposes five types of relationship. In this paper, we examine Genette’s framework, then apply it to Jane Eyre and relationships around SARAH BARTLETT BILL HUGHES that novel. By so doing, we have produced some Senior Analyst Independent researcher RDF to model these relationships following Talis Systems Ltd Linked Data principles.This case study demon- strates the broader benefits of adopting Linked Data in this area of literary criticism – namely that scholars will be able to share discoveries and insights, laypeople will discover additional cultural artefacts of interest, and a clear and granular picture of cultural history will be openly available to everyone. As curiosity grows around the potential of the next throws up new examples which need to be made wave of technology – Linked Data – and early more easily discoverable. There is scarcely a cult exemplars emerge exploiting its capabilities, the television programme these days without its information world finally has the opportunity to obligatory, knowing references to popular culture exploit fully the richness of relationships between and other texts, as viewers of The Simpsons will be cultural artefacts. This has considerable potential aware. And observe the vast popularity, in all for academics and students seeking to discover media, of the glamourous vampire: Edward Cullen the precise nature of the complex relationship of Twilight and his brethren emerge from complex between, say, Homer’s Odyssey and James Joyce’s transformations of the original, monstrous Dracula Ulysses. However, the ramifications extend beyond of Bram Stoker’s seminal novel. academia – a network that seamlessly directs the In the pre-web era, there was only one type of interested layperson from their current interest information resource for discovering relationships to works that are related in a defined way has between texts – the citation index. But these indexes transformative potential for cultural life. covered only those texts with formal integral To date, there is no openly available or references, and even then, the precise relationship commercialized resource anywhere which surfaces between the citing and the cited texts occasionally such relationships. Yet cultural life constantly remained unclear. The advent of the web and 160 Serials – 24(2), July 2011 Sarah Bartlett and Bill Hughes Intertextuality and the Semantic Web global search technologies, although undoubtedly approach, whilst remaining theoretically neutral transformative, still required searchers to know and making available the possibility of representing what they were looking for – there was no mech- Kristeva’s types of discursive transpositions at a anism for starting at one text and serendipitously future date. In Palimpsests, Genette commences a exploring all related cultural outputs. detailed study of transtextuality (his preferred The second generation of web technology – the term for relationships between texts) and develops social web – and particularly Amazon’s recommen- a thorough taxonomy that would be most useful; dation engine – established myriad relationships he proposes five kinds of relationship: architextuality, between cultural artefacts based on consumer intertextuality, paratextuality, metatextuality and behaviour. However, the fundamental nature of hypertextuality.2 These he subsumes under the the links remains undefined. common term, ‘transtextuality’. It was Julia Kristeva who coined the term Architextuality links the text to a grouping such ‘intertextuality’ in 1966 to denote the kind of as ‘types of discourse, modes of enunciation, relationships under discussion here. J A Cuddon literary genres’.3 This, then, is a relationship not summarizes her claims with another text, but with something more abstract. The relationship is one of ‘inclusion’.4 that a literary text is not an isolated phenomenon but Texts are included in genres, which can in turn be is made up of a mosaic of quotations, and that any nested within others. The representation of archi- text is the ‘absorption and transformation’ of another. textuality as Linked Data would require an ontology [… ] But this is not connected with the study of of genres and modes that can be hierarchical and sources. [… ] Kristeva is not merely pointing to the overlapping. The novel itself is a mosaic of way texts echo each other but the way that discourses incorporated genres, other discourses, and other or sign systems are transposed into one another – so speech genres (the latter being, according to that meanings in one kind of discourse are overlaid Bakhtin, a component part of all literature).5 with meanings from another kind of discourse.1 Existing theory would be carefully consulted in Julia Kristeva thus employs the term to describe an the formulation of such a taxonomy, taking into inescapable property of all texts, and all signifying account the instability and contentiousness of systems. Kristeva postulated a literary system genre (Google Books committed the error of basing which acts like a collective mind that writers genres entirely on US retailer categories). unconsciously draw on. Any literary text will be Intertextuality: ‘a relationship of copresence related to any other, not merely through direct between two texts or among several texts: […] quotation or indirect allusion, but inescapably as a typically as the actual presence of one text within subliminal presence that is part of the very notion another. In its most explicit and literal form, it is of literature. The term is encountered often these the traditional practice of quoting […] In another days in literary discussions. However, it has come less explicit and canonical form, it is the practice of to be applied to a whole range of notions from plagiarism […] Again, […] it is the practice of sources, influences and deliberate allusion, to chance allusion’.6 Allusions may be conscious or uncon- resemblance. scious; or, better, attestable or not. Quotation may Whatever one thinks of Kristeva’s version, note be implicit or explicit; intentional or incidental; that as she does not differentiate between the marked or unmarked.7 conscious kinds of reference, allusion etc., and her Paratextuality: the ‘generically less explicit and own universal intertextuality – she ignores the more distant relationship that binds the text […] to former and, indeed, cannot account for it (authorial what can be called its paratext: a title, subtitle, agency being ruled out). The nebulousness of intertitles; prefaces, postfaces, notices, forewords, Kristeva’s concept would not lend itself easily to etc.; marginal, infrapaginal, terminal notes; the Semantic Web. epigraphs; illustrations; blurbs, book covers, dust jackets, and many other kinds of secondary signals, whether allographic or autographic’.8 Gérard Genette’s transtextuality Allography (written by someone other than the author) and autography (by the author) can make It may be more productive to confine the scope significant differences; for example, a paratext, initially to Gérard Genette’s more methodical when allographic, may become a metatext, with a 161 Intertextuality and the Semantic Web Sarah Bartlett and Bill Hughes Serials – 24(2), July 2011 critical relationship to the original text (see below). transtextuality. In the novel, woven-in quotes from Because of this, it may not be clear when, say, Milton and the Bible and countless others are a an introduction becomes a metatext, but Genette deliberate and significant feature.15 stresses authorial intentions here, as paratexts: The fairy tale is one architext that lies behind ‘ensure for the text a destiny consistent with the Jane Eyre; the specific fairy tales, ‘Cinderella’ and author’s purpose’.9 ‘Bluebeard’ form possible hypotexts, but are also Genette breaks these features of paratextual specific intertextual allusions. But there are plentiful messages down further into categories such as examples of all five of Genette’s categories; our peritext/epitext; prior/original/delayed; post- diagram (Figure 1 on p. 163) illustrates a simplified humous/anthumous. Again, it is these fine distinc- illustration of some of these. tions which offer the potential user a rich set of Paratextuality: For Genette, such components of pathways through literary connections.10 a text as titles count as paratexts. Jane Eyre is Metatextuality: ‘the relationship most often labelled subtitled, ‘An Autobiography’; this has effects “commentary”. It unites a given text to another, of upon the reader such as imparting the sense of which it speaks without necessarily citing it’.11 This psychological realism that is so characteristic of is thus the realm of literary criticism. Metatextuality the work. Another paratextual feature is the has not yet been analyzed in enough detail to apparently allographic Preface by ‘Currer Bell’. implement in more than a sketchy fashion (though The ideological processes