Intertextuality in the Hours
AMERICAN LITERATURE
Intertextuality In The Hours
Intertextuality is a term first introduced by French semiotician Julia Kristeva in the late sixties. She says that a literary work is not simply the product of a single author, but of its relationship to other texts and to the strucutures of language itself. "Any text," she argues, "is constructed of a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another." ( www.litencyclopedia.com, Kristeva: Word, Dialogue, and Novel, 1966). The Hours is a piece of art which breaks the barriers between reality and fiction, between the world of books and the world of film and between the world of reader and the book he is reading and it makes parallels between these worlds. The Hours is a movie made from a screenplay that was based on a book that was also based on another book. And now you are reading a work based on subjective decoding of these works. Life itself consists of series of the texts, one on top of the other. Virginia Woolf wrote “Mrs. Dalloway,” a novel about a woman’s ordinary day, from which the reader can extract essential elements of life of her and human as well. Michael Cunningham, years later, reads that book, and writes another one about three seemingly normal days of three women. And then David Hare and Stephen Daldry write and direct a movie based on Cunningham’s book that adds even more layers to the whole story. The Hours was Woolf's working title for Mrs Dalloway. The book and the film follow one day in the life of three women from different decades of the twentieth century. As the stories unfold, we discover that they are paralleled and connected to each other in several ways. In the novel The Hours Woolf is one of three central characters. The writer becomes a character of another writer. The other two are fictional characters - Laura Brown, a
Intertextuality In The Hours
Intertextuality is a term first introduced by French semiotician Julia Kristeva in the late sixties. She says that a literary work is not simply the product of a single author, but of its relationship to other texts and to the strucutures of language itself. "Any text," she argues, "is constructed of a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another." ( www.litencyclopedia.com, Kristeva: Word, Dialogue, and Novel, 1966). The Hours is a piece of art which breaks the barriers between reality and fiction, between the world of books and the world of film and between the world of reader and the book he is reading and it makes parallels between these worlds. The Hours is a movie made from a screenplay that was based on a book that was also based on another book. And now you are reading a work based on subjective decoding of these works. Life itself consists of series of the texts, one on top of the other. Virginia Woolf wrote “Mrs. Dalloway,” a novel about a woman’s ordinary day, from which the reader can extract essential elements of life of her and human as well. Michael Cunningham, years later, reads that book, and writes another one about three seemingly normal days of three women. And then David Hare and Stephen Daldry write and direct a movie based on Cunningham’s book that adds even more layers to the whole story. The Hours was Woolf's working title for Mrs Dalloway. The book and the film follow one day in the life of three women from different decades of the twentieth century. As the stories unfold, we discover that they are paralleled and connected to each other in several ways. In the novel The Hours Woolf is one of three central characters. The writer becomes a character of another writer. The other two are fictional characters - Laura Brown, a
Bibliography: Cunningham, Michael: The Hours, New York:Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1998 Daldry, Stephen: The Hours, Miramax Films2002 Woolf, Virginia: Mrs Dalloway, 1925 www.litencyclopedia.com