Introduction
Intertextuality is a significant sign of Postmodernism fictions. And it was first coined by the French semiotics and feminism critic Julia Kristeva in her work Word, Dialogue and Novel when she was doing research on Bakhtin’s theory of double-voiced nature of language. After the coinage of Kristeva, many critics and theorists put forward their own views and perceptions on Intertextuality and intertextuality has been divided into the narrow sense and the wide sense. In the opinion of Sun Xiuli, who wrote the Brief Research of Kresteva’s Intertextuality in Wide Sense, Kristeva is the reprehensive scholar of intertextuality in wide sense and intertextuality in narrow sense is presented by Genette. Allen G. summarizes the opinions of predecessors in the way of list the followings: intertextuality origins Saussure and Bakhtin and Kristeva raise a production of it; Barthes holds a view of ―text unbound‖ when indentifying intertextuality; Genette and Riffaterre have their structuralist approsches on intertextuality; as situated readers, intertextuality influents Harold Bloom’s conflictual vision of the intertextual process; intertextuality’s influences on Feminism and Postcolonialism, etc.
The researches of intertextuality are very hot in China, and over 1100 pieces of theses can be in www.cnki.net. Most of them are referential to the purified academic researches toward intertextuality, such
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as the introductions, summarizing orientations of intertextuality and the category in intertextual research, the comparison between intertextuality in different systems and genres, etc. In the rest part of the theses, searches on intertextuality in advertisement field, in the www Text in network building, etc. and in other forms take occupied a part, on the contrary, intertextual researches on literary works, contrarily, are kinds of rare.
The Hours is an excellent postmodernism fiction. Michael Cunningham gives a rehearsal on the masterpiece Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours become a hotspot in American modern literature research. However, most researches are focused on the Stream-of –Consciousness technique and Feminism in The Hours, and except of the emphasis of the existence of “footnote” stylish intertextual pastiche to Mrs. Dalloway, rare intertextual researches in other angles have been done.
The intertextual researches in these two fictions become popular in China.
Lauren Shih-Ming Tang’s Virginia Wolf in Intertextuality: An Intertextual Study of Michael Cunningham’s The Hours which published in is a previous research thesis, and she analyzes the intertextual pastiche of Stream-of –Consciousness technique in The Hours.
In 2004, Song Tao and Zhu Jie points out in their thesis: intertextual referential to Mrs. Dalloway exists in The Hours, and the The
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Hours inherits the style and theme of Mrs. Dalloway through a way of intertextuality, and this inheritance contributes to remolding and expounding to the masterpiece. In the same year, the systemic analyses of pastiche intertextuality are rewritten by Wang LiLi in her thesis.
Yuan Suhua points out that the intertextual strategy in The Hours is not only simple pastiche, but also are oversteps and innovations. She also considers The Hours as introspection, criticism, subverting to the radical Feminism in Mrs. Dalloway.
But the above these are simply listing the similarities in these two fictions or listing the system of intertextuality. The realistic combination of theory and text rarely exists.
Two mature theses are the An Intertextual Study of The Hours of Xie Ye and Mrs. Dalloway and An Intertextual Reading of The Hours of Wang Chen. The former one drives the concrete forms of intertextuality in narrow sense to classify the analyses towards similarities between the two fictions; the later one has intertextual readings aspects such as symbol, theme, writing technique, etc.
This thesis synthesizes the predecessors’views, and innovates in that, the analyses are arranged by follows two thread: one is the intertextual study from symbolic, characters’to thematic, and the second is the concrete forms of intertextuality; in this way, the analyses shows the procedural steps of intertextuality. And the function of intertextuality in
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The Hours is also in investigation.
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I. Brief Reviews of the Literary Theory and Literary Text Intertextuality is one of the kernel terms both in modern literature theory and modern civilization research. Postmodern novel The Hours, which was published in 1988, is the third fiction of the American author, Michael Cunningham, and it won the PEN/Faulkner Award the year it was born, and won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Stream-of-Consciousness novel Mrs. Dalloway is a classic fiction was wrote by the famous British female writer and the precursor of feminism, Virginia Wolf. When reading the two works, we can easily notice the conspicuous intertextual relations in them, and we could even say that The Hours is the derived work of Mrs. Dalloway through an intertextual strategy.
1.1 About Intertextuality
―Works of literature, after all, are built from systems, codes and traditions established by previous works of literature. The systems, codes and traditions of other art forma and of culture in general are also crucial to the meaning of a work of literature. Texts, whether they are literary or non-literary, are viewed by modern theorist as lacking of independent meaning.‖[1] In this way, texts become intertexts. Intertextuality is the intertextual relations of texts and the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can refer to an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior
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