CALL FOR PAPERS
National Conference
on
Intertextual Adaptations and Literary Discourses
27 & 28 December 2011
Organized by
Department of English, The University of Burdwan
West Bengal, India
Venue: DDE Building
Intertextuality, a term coined by Julia Kristeva, builds on the thesis that a text cannot
exist as a hermetic or self-defined cultural object. It develops as a system of referentiality,
a heterogenous and polysemic network of references, citations, quotations and influences.
It is a cross-fertilisation of diverse epistemological processes. Cicero’s mouthpiece
Crassus in De Oratore points out that a cultural text moves beyond the normative
boundaries of knowledge systems which become meaningful through what Derrida later
terms as “iterability”.
Texts of intertextuality may re-inscribe the embedded meanings that move from the
heuristic and linear to the retroactive and hermeneutic. Critics therefore argue for
considering intertextuality as a form of ontology. Intertextuality requires an
understanding of “texts” which, as John Frow believes, are not “self-contained structures,
but differential and historical” and not shaped by “immanent time but by the play of
divergent temporalities”. Texts are therefore “tracings of otherness” and largely shaped
by “the repetition and transformation of other textual structures”. These figurations of
structural “interweaving” leads to adventures and experiments in the domain of multilayered generic possibilities and discursive formations. This is what Kristeva probably
describes as “transformational method”.
The foundational poetics was distinctively inaugurated and developed in the late 1960s
and 1970s by Kristeva, Raffaterre, Gennette and Bloom, setting in motion a complex
array of nuanced taxonomies. But in the second wave of responses to this critical theory,
critics like Marc Angenot, Peter Nesselroth, Susanne Holthuis or Donald Bruce begin to
reformulate it as a form of “interdiscursivity”.
This national conference will address the following issues:
• Trajectories of intertextuality
• Intertextuality and Interdisciplinarity
• Intertextuality and Cultural scholarship
• Intertextuality from Kristeva to Holthuis
• Hypertext/Hypotext Submission of Paper Proposals: Paper proposals should include a title and a 200-word
abstract, together with a short biography. Proposals should be received by 20 December
2011.
Registration Fees: Rs 600 (with accommodation), Rs 400 (without accommodation)
Proposals should be e-mailed to:
Professor Deb Narayan Bandyopadhyay, Head, Department of English, The University of
Burdwan: debnarayan@gmail.com
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