
351 Pauline Rafferty - Department of Information Studies, Aberystwyth University, UK Genette, Intertextuality, and Knowledge Organization Abstract Recent approaches to KO have explored the notion of intertextuality and considered ways in which such abstract concepts derived from literary theory might form the foundation for the design of novel and rich information retrieval systems. In this paper, the notion of intertextuality is examined, and its use by knowledge organization researchers explored. Gerard Genette’s work in particular has been used with some success to map out the possibilities offered by applying the concept of intertextuality to the design of information retrieval systems. The paper will examine some KO systems which reveal the traces of intertextual poetics in their design, including the FRBR model which in its mapping of intertextuality, articulates some of Genette’s categories while stopping short of actualising the more subjective and interpretative categories. The paper concludes with speculation about whether and how these categories might be accommodated in a Web 2.0 interactive digital bibliosphere. Background For centuries, librarians have constructed catalogues, classification schemes and other search and discovery tools with a view to making texts accessible to readers. Underpinned by a philosophy that is optimistic about the emancipatory possibilities of knowledge, librarians seek to promote their collections. The concept of intertextuality is of some interest in theorizing the relationship between text and metadata models, both in and beyond library catalogues, and the influence of intertextual poetics can be seen in the design of models such as FRBR. Intertextuality Although term intertextuality was coined by Kristeva (1986), the concept has been explored in various ways, and using various terminologies, by many philosophers and literary theorists (Bakhtin, 1981, Kristeva, 1986, Barthes, 1981, Bloom, 1973). For Barthes, who wrote about intertextuality in idealist terms, the traditional notion of the individuality of the author is subverted through the concept of intertexts and the web of textuality. He argued that: ‘[a]ny text is a new tissue of past citations. Bits of code, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social languages, etc., pass into the text and are redistributed within it, for there is always language before and around the text.’ (Barthes, 1981, p. 39). This idealist approach to intertextuality is far removed from the interpretations of interrelationships between texts found in Harold Bloom’s thesis about ‘the anxiety of influence’ (1973), but an interest in the notion of what might be broadly called intertextuality permeates the writing of a range of literary critics of the 20th and early 21st century (Worton, M. J., & Still, J.,1991, p. 15). Humanist and materialist approaches to the interrelationships between texts see documentation as practice, so that material documents have relationships through human agency with other documents, anterior in historical time, and also contemporaneous. The idea of ‘influence’, however, has significance across a broad range of positions. While intertextuality as a concept came to the fore through the works of Kristeva and Barthes, it would be inappropriate at the very least to suggest that either theorist should be considered a point of origin. For Kristeva, the text is considered as ‘a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another’ (Kristeva, 1986, p. 37). Barthes, as mentioned earlier, makes a distinction between ‘work’ and ‘text’. 352 For him, ‘work’ is the ‘material book offering up the possibility of meaning, of closure, and thus of interpretation’ (Allen, 2011, p. 66). ‘Text’ is used to refer to the force of writing which although it is ‘potentially unleashed in some works, is in no sense the property of those works’ (p.66). For Barthes and Kristeva, it seems that only Modernist and Postmodernist literature really offer text, space for the reader to become fully active in the production of meaning (p. 68). Thus defined, there would seem to be little space for intertextuality in librarianship and bibliographic description, however there is another approach to intertextuality, through the works of structuralist literary theorist, Gerard Genette, that has proved to be quite productive. In Palimpsests: literature in the second degree (1982), Genette outlines five types of transtextual relationships (Genette uses the term transtextuality to denote what others generally mean by intertextuality). These relationships are: • Intertextuality: which he defines in a more restricted way than Kristeva to mean a ‘relationship of copresence between two texts or among several texts’ (Genette, 1982, pp.1-2) and ‘the actual presence of one text within another’ (p. 2). Its most literal form is quotation, but it also covers plagiarism and allusion. • Paratextuality: those elements which help to direct and control the reception of a text, for example titles, subtitles, intertitles, prefaces, postfaces, notices, forwards (p. 3). This set of relationships also includes interviews, publicity, reviews by critics. Allen describes paratextuality as being the threshold of the text (Allen, 2011, p. 101). • Metatextuality: ‘is the relationship most often labeled ‘commentary’ (Genette, p. 4). It unites a given text to another, of which it speaks, without necessarily citing it (without summoning it), in fact sometimes without naming it. Genette’s example is of Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Mind ‘allusively and almost silently’ evoking Diderot’s Neveau de Rameau (p. 4). • Hypertextuality: by which he means ‘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 such a manner that is not that of commentary’ (p. 5). He draws attention to the provisional status of this definition. The derivation may be direct, such as when one text ‘speaks’ about another, or it may be that the hypertext cannot exist without the hypotext, a relationship Genette calls a ‘transformation’. An example of this might be the relationship between the Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses. A text derived from an earlier text through simple transformation, Genette refers to as a transformation. If it is an indirect transformation, he refers to it as an imitation (6). Genres that are officially hypertextual are parody, pastiche and travesty (9) but Genette moves beyond those to discuss also self-expurgations, excision, and reductions. He produces a table which maps out a whole range of hypertextual relations according to mood, from serious to playful. • Architextuality: which refers to the genres and models of discourse: ‘the entire set of general or transcendent categories – types of discourse, modes of enunciation, literary genres – from which emerges each singular text’ (p. 1). Traces of Genette’s poetics are to be found in some recent developments in knowledge organization systems, which in itself might be said to provide evidence of the all- pervasive nature of intertextuality. 353 Intertextuality in Knowledge Organization systems Genette’s categories have been used by Vernitski (2007) and Bartlett and Hughes (2011) in an explicit way in attempts to construct frameworks through which to theoretically describe and illustrate innovative bibliographic tools for fiction. Vernitski, designing a potential intertextuality-orientated fiction retrieval tool for academic use, argues that the work to work relationship in FRBR is the most relevant for an intertextuality-oriented fiction classification scheme. Writing in 2006/7, and using an earlier version of FRBR, she felt that there are some FRBR relationships that would be useful in developing an intertextual retrieval tool, however, even they were not without their limitations. Eventually Vernitski decided that neither FRBR’s set of relationships, nor Beghtol’s EFAS set of relationships (1994) provided her with quite what she needed to map out literary intertextuality, so she devised her own categories: Quotation, Allusion Variation and Sequel (Vernitski, 2007). Table 1: Notations in Vernitski’s Fiction Intertextually-orientated classification Quotation Q Exact Quotation Q/Ex Misquotation Q/Mis Allusion A Title A/T -Title of Work A/T/Wor -Title of a Section or Chapter in a work A/T/Sec Name A/N -Character Name A/N/Cha -Place Name A/N/Pla -Institution Name A/N/Ins -Concept Name A/N/Con Variation V Theme V/Th Form V/Fo Sequel S Bartlett and Hughes show how Genette’s typology can be used to create a mapping of intertextual relations using ‘Jane Eyre’ as an example. They include a diagram showing their mapping expressed in Linked Data, and they suggest that such an approach could result in the creation of rich retrieval tools, such as library catalogues and reading lists. In their model, they trace the relationships beyond literary texts, using LCSH, and suggest that through ‘modeling literary relationships within a broader context, we can see the development of literature in a wider cultural context’ (p.164). 354 Both Vernitski and Bartlett and Hughes refer not only to Genette but also to IFLA’s FRBR model in their exploratory studies. The Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) entity-relationship module is the product of a working party set up by IFLA in 1997 to develop new approaches to bibliographic description and is documented in FRBR (2009). FRBR’s entity-relationship model identifies groups of entities
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