lecture no.4: “intertextuality”

Lecture no.4: “Intertextuality”

MUS4605 Research Seminar in Popular Music “Pop Production and Gender in a Transcultural Context”

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What is intertextuality?

What is intertextuality?• Derek Scott says:

• “Intertextuality acknowledges the circulation and interplay of meaning across numerous signifying practices (music, literature, film, the visual arts and so on)” (Scott 2009: 10)

• Example:

• “My favourite example of intertextuality is the answer given by a young person to the question: ‘How did Romeo die?’ It was ‘He drowned on the Titanic.’ (Ibid)

• The intertextual transposition of signs

What ‘signs’ can you identify in the following example?

Beck: ‘Sexx Laws’ (Midnite Vultures, 1999)

What is intertextuality?

• Michael Bakhtin (1953/1986) - the utterance

• Julia Kristeva (1969/1980) - the utterance as ideologeme

• Serge Lacasse (2007) - Intertextuality and hypertextuality

• John Richarson and Stan Hawkins (2007) - Intertextual method for reading

Michail Bakhtin: ‘The Problem of Speech Genres’

• “These utterances reflect the specific conditions and goals (…) not only through their content (thematic) and linguistic style (…), but above all through their compositional structure. All of these aspects - thematic content, style, and compositional structure - are inseparably linked to the whole of the utterance and are equally determined by the specific nature of the particular sphere of communication” (Bakhtin 1986: 60).

• The extreme heterogenity of speech genres (oral or written) (ibid)

• “(…) any speaker is himself a respondent to a greater or lesser degree. He is not, after all, the first speaker, the one who disturbs the eternal silence of the universe. And he presupposes not only the existence of the language system he is using, but also the existence of preceding utterances - his own and others’ - with which his given utterance enters into one kind of relation or another (…) Any utterance is a link in a very complexly organized chain of other utterances” (ibid: 69).

Julia Kristeva• Based on Bakhtinian intertextuality

• Ideologeme - a fundamental unit of ideology

• Semiotic notion of intertextuality - poststructuralism

• Author - reader (horizontal axis) and text - other texts (vertical axis)

• “every text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it”

• Rather than studying the structure of a text, we should study its ‘structuration’ - how the structure came into being

Serge Lacasse: ‘Intertextuality and Hypertextuality in Recorded Popular Music’ (2000)

• Based on Gérard Genette’s theory of transtextuality:

• Genette considers intertextuality as a subcategory of transtextuality alongside paratextuality, architextuality and metatextuality and hypertextuality

• Main focus on hypertextuality which Genette defines as “any relationship uniting a text B (the ‘hypertext’) to an earlier text A (the ‘hypotext’), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary”

• Hypertext as a result of some kind of tranformation or imitation of a hypotext

• Intertextuality - the inclusion of elements of previous texts within the present text

• Hypertextuality - practices that aim at producing a new text out of a previous one


• Intertextual practices:

• Quotation: The actual insertion of a text within another

• Allosonic: Quotations in a solo

• Autosonic: Sampling

• Hypertextual practices

• Parody: Retaining the stylistic properties of the original text while diverting its subject. Eks. ‘Weird Al’ Yancovick: ‘Smells Like Nirvana’

• Travesty: rewriting of some ‘noble’ text as a new text that retains the fundamental content but presents it in another style in order to ‘debase’ it. Eks: Señor Coconut: ‘Autobahn’

• Pastiche: “The parodist or the travesty writer gets hold of a text and transforms it according to this or that formal constraint or semantic intention, or transposes it uniformly and as if mechanically into another style. The pastiche writer gets hold of a style (…) and this style dictates the text” (Genette quoted in Lacasse 2000: 44). Eks: Promoe: ‘Svennebanan’




• Copy: A performance that aims at being closest possible imitation of a pre-existent, usually recorded performance (i.e. live performances of recorded music)

• Covering: Rendering a previously recorded song that displays the usual stylistic configurations of the covering artist. (See Georges Plasketes 2010 for an in-depth edited volume on cover songs in popular music) Eks. Johnny Cash: ‘Hurt’

• Translation: Allosonic or autosonic - translations of lyrics, but also music/sound. Ex. Mexican Institute of Sound: ‘Sinfonia Agridulce’

• Instrumental Cover: Instrumental/allosonic rendering of a previously recorded song where the main vocal line has been replaced by an instrumental melodic line. Eks: Brad Mehldau: ‘Paranoid Android’



• Remix:

• Edited version:

• Instrumental remix: a remix of the original song from which the leading voice has simply been removed.

• Remix:

Serge Lacasse: ‘Intertextuality and Hypertextuality

in Recorded Popular Music’ (2000/2007)

Questions:

• How do elements in the text (music, video etc) relate to other texts?

• How do these relationships affect the meaning of Beck’s song?

• How does this particular song relate to Beck’s repertoire?

• What are the sex(x) laws he wants to defy and how is this represented musically and visually?

How do we go about reading the following text for meaning?

Travesty

lecture no.4: “intertextuality”

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