Moderna | 2021 | N. 1-2

«Nulla è più essenziale a una società che la classificazione dei suoi linguaggi. Cambiare questa classificazione, spostare la parola, è fare una rivoluzione»: questa affermazione perentoria di Roland Barthes sintetizza il clima culturale degli anni sessanta, quando si accende il dibattito sull’intertestualità. Barthes tira le somme di due secoli di classicismo che […]

The issue of the relation between text and image has been central in the visual culture debate on verbal and visual representation, at least since it has been posed within the ‘pictorial turn’. Years after Picture Theory, the possibilities of rupture, synthesis and relation concerned still need to be addressed from different points of view: that of the ‘literal’ manifestations of the imagetext, that of the ‘figurative’ versions of the image-text, and that of the unrepresentable gap of the image/text. However further possibilities can still reopen the question by means of a new and eccentric point of view: that of the imageXtext, to which this paper is dedicated.

In the 1980s, intertextuality represented the beginning of a process of brotherhood and creolization between homomedial texts. This however was just the first, moderate beginning of a process that, thanks to the digital turning point, would have led not only to the progressive overlapping of author and reader, broadcaster and recipient, but above all to the liquid, inevitable interchange between different media. This is the so-called transmediality: the term implies a movement through the media in direct relationship with a new type of subjectivity that favors a mobility of which grassroot creations are particularly emblematic. The contribution intends to highlight the new forms of seriality widespread in the transmedia world, with particular attention to the innovations made by the amateur works of fanfictioners. In fact, if the so-called transmedia storytelling constitutes a narrative form that perfects and integrates the user experience with new and distinct information, in the case of fanfiction the question becomes even more complicated: the media market is becoming increasingly transmediated precisely because fans can follow multiple paths through a multimedia universe.

The relationship that binds translation to the concept of intertextuality is extremely close but quite difficult to circumscribe. It is true that intertextuality manifests itself as an act of quotation, of re-proposing elements and situations, but it is just as true that, through the use of another language, translation affects the terms at stake, with a consequent alteration of the conceptual framework of reference. By observing a number of examples, the essay shows how the changes can be understood as data capable of enlivening the culture of arrival but also that doubts always remain about the distortions of the original and the relevance of each choice.

According to the classical tradition, in one of the sculptor Phidias’ most impressive works he included an image of himself amongst the characters portrayed on Athena’s shield. The sculptor thus left his mark on his creation, in a most dynamic way, since the self-portrait, set alongside his patron Pericles and the other prominent figures, was perfectly integrated into a sort of visual narration. Dante follows a similar process when he tries to transcend poetry in the Divine Comedy in order to astonish his readers, providing us with examples of ekphrastic descriptions. In turn, ekphrasis conjures up stories, calls forth myths, and makes the beholders identify themselves with the story that is alluded to, which they can see in their mind’s eye : images interact with the narrative. The Divine Comedy displays a vast array of these devices, which are a sign of Dante’s appropriation and command of the art forms of his contemporaries. The author’s presence in the context of his masterpiece has a symbolic and diegetic value, which determines and coordinates this multimedial practice.

The article defines intermediality as collaborative experimental and creative practice across genres and forms. It traces the historical origins of this understanding of intermediality in Italy to the 1960s and to the emergence of new hybrid media such as sound art, video art, performance and visual poetry. More specifically, the author focuses on the history of Italy’s neoavanguardia and considers the progressive unfolding of the new aesthetic paradigm through three related case studies : the novissimi poets, Luciano Berio’s collaboration with Edoardo Sanguineti and Umberto Eco’s critique of the Crocean model.

Intertextuality wreaks havoc on established translation practices, or at least on those that envisage back-translation as an ideal way of verifying the validity of translation as a linguistic act of decoding and recoding. Intertextuality highlights the fact that the translated text is relatively autonomous, and brings into play the inquisitive, hermeneutic, and creative contribution of the reader-interpreter, who cannot ignore the cultural and historical complexity of the act of translation. Intertextuality urges us to think of the source text and its style as a cohesive, unique and complex fabric in which the intratextual constraints, i.e. its formal, metrical, and grammatical elements, are intimately intertwined with the explicit or implicit intertextual constraints. Through references to three literary examples (Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, Twain’s The Jumping Frog, Pound’s Canto VIII), this article aims to show how various strategies employed in the translations of intertextuality by different kinds of translators (poets, linguists, philologists, critics, etc.), incessantly shape the source text, in a constant process of distancing and resuming that does not subtract but adds ; a process that is not a loss but a vital movement, necessary for the life and afterlife of the text.

Contemplating the effects of the ‘cartographic turn’ and the more recent ‘post-representational theory’ on the fields of literary studies and cultural geography, the essay encourages an in-depth reading of the relationships between literary texts and cartography. Can one move away from a general consideration of intertextual or interdiscursive dynamics, in order to adopt a properly intermedial perspective? While looking at maps as prominent media and vigorously operating through contemporary theory, arts and literature, the critical hypothesis here developed revolves around the idea of a distinct narrative mode that inspires or promotes the articulation of variable configurations, or subgenres, of encounters between cartographic and literary forms.

How to read the literature born on the web? What are the most suitable methodologies to interpret it? And above all: is it important for someone to deal with it, or is it a marginal phenomenon which will never be able to jeopardize the Italian literary tradition? In an attempt to provide an answer to these questions, the essay proposes a historical-critical survey of the problem of born-digital literature, followed by a cross-section of the status quo of the Italian 2.0 literary scene, starting from the identification of hybrid forms of writing, born on the web and arrived at the printed volume.

The article proposes a new way of looking at intertextuality in the medieval world. The theoretical part starts with a quick review of the interrelation between Kristeva’s intertextuality, Zumthor’s mouvance, and Cerquiglini’s variance. Stock’s idea of textual community and Pasquali’s concept of allusiveness are then used to take a closer look at early Cistercian exempla, and how we need to consider their shared knowledge within twelfth- and thirteenth-century Cistercian communities in the editorial process. Intertextuality and intratextuality are not only elements that characterize learned poetry, but they are also features of popular literature as well, and also tools that help us better deal with mixed, oral/written traditions.

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975) is probably the best known of John Ashbery’s poems, and the one that has produced the highest number of readings and critical responses. This article focuses on the semiotic and material flow that the poem traces between the self and the mirror – a flow that is fully visible, furthermore, in the painting by Parmigianino which is the source of inspiration of Ashbery’s verses. Rather than foregrounding the final overcoming of the split between the subject and its reflection – the main concern of the scholars who have written on the poem – this continuity emphasizes the desire of unexplored forms and technologies of subject-making. The mirror, in fact, far from being the site of perfect symmetry between the subject and its other, becomes the instrument through which the subject undoes itself and the world in order to transform both. The reflected image does not represent the recovery of a lost harmony of the subject who finally recognizes itself, but the impossibility of reaching a complete and final appropriation of any otherness.

The aim of this paper is to compare three recent republications of Michele Mari’s works, Di bestia in bestia (1989 Longanesi and 2013 Einaudi), Asterusher. Autobiografia per feticci (2015 and 2019 Corraini edizioni) and Leggenda privata (2017 Einaudi),which all show consistent changes. The intention is precisely to point out the reciprocal relationships between these works and the different ways they have been transformed, both in the cases of literary writing alone and in those involving phototextual forms, in order to trace a possible unity of intent. In Di bestia in bestia Mari chooses to thin out the novel ; in the second case to increase the number of pages of the phototext, and in the last example to give a double version of the autobiographical story, whose very first version contained no photographic images. Based on the paratextual and metatextual indications, the intertextual and intermediate relations traced in the three case studies serve to support the evolution of a unitary process of individuation and a continuous experimentation with new forms to narrate an autobiographical core.

The essay deals with literature as metadiscursive device for cinema. In the field of author cinema, literary writing can act as a challenge to the director’s eye, far beyond (and to some extent regardless of) the common practices of adaptation. We know that painting, as Barthes suggested, provided the realist novel an aesthetic model to define its status and its horizon of representation. And cinema has often taken up this particular intermedial relationship to question and force the limits of visibility, moving between reality and imagination, mimetic illusionism and expressive transfiguration. Within this theoretical framework, the essay takes into account a typical narrative situation explored first by literature, then by cinema : the relationship between the painter and the model. It then investigates two films that share, despite their historical distance, a similar authorial stance : on the one hand Michael by Carl Th. Dreyer (1924), whose visual techniques represent an innovation for the cinema of the period, and, on the other, La Belle Noiseuse by Jacques Rivette (1991), which comes to terms with the legacy of the Nouvelle Vague and tackles The Unknown Masterpiece by Balzac to suggest a reflection on the process of artistic creation and on some central issues of Western aesthetics.

The text focuses on the analysis of a sequence from the movie drawn upon De Filippo’s play Filumena Marturano (1951) compared to the same as witnessed in a TV recording (1962). Some episodes and statements from the playwright’s long career are considered in order to reflect upon his outstanding activity in theatre, film, television and opera, his legacy, and intertextuality as a key to approaching and deciphering the relationships in the field of performing arts.

Intertextuality, even in the sense of parody, is not simply a rhetorical strategy or a form of writing, but a complex cognitive, hermeneutic and critical practice, a transcultural action that redefines the plural and dynamic identity of literary works. The essay explores two contemporary rewritings of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The first is Giovanni Testori’s Macbetto, an expressionistic mixture of dialect, Latin, Italian and neologisms. The second, I Polacchi dall’irriducibile Ubu di Alfred Jarry, staged by Teatro delle Albe in 1998 in Ravenna, in 2005 in Chicago and in 2007 in Diol Kadd in Senegal, is a multilingual, multiethnic, and multicultural rewriting of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, in turn a parody of Macbeth. In both cases, these works break through the boundaries of parody and testify to a broader and more personal itinerary of poetic, aesthetic, linguistic and multicultural research.

Don Juan is a rare example of a series of theatrical performances that evoke an apparently cohesive production chain in terms of both subject and text and the use of various theatrical expedients. However, although such presumed organicity certainly serves to contextualize the diachronic intertextual dimension of such an iconic plot, it is also a fact that it may divert the audience’s attention from the process through which each of these plays implements the Don Juan myth. Each new performance of Don Juan expresses a multiple relationship which mirrors different artistic, cultural and political contexts. Every new staging of Don Juan is the result of a montage that goes way beyond the original script. This essay focuses on Carlo Goldoni’s Don Giovanni Tenorio, which the artist conceived at the beginning of an intense experimentation phase. It represents a bold attempt at systematizing the 17th Century representative plot, marked by autobiographical elements and linked to the Italian pastoral tradition.

Intertextuality is a meta and multi textual expressive form of literature, the ensemble of various features which qualify literature as self-reflexive per se. Intermediality, in turn, as often happens in literature, is able to overcome the barriers of narrative bidimensionality, going on to discover new modes of communication. Visual culture, media studies and reflections on storytelling are extensions of a literary macrotext that attempts to transcend its limits so as to generate innovative hybrid media whose origins are however not obliterated. The present bibliographic repertory of literature is not structured in separate sections because it is meant to reflect the heterogeneous and mutually interactive forms through which intertextuality presents itself.