Intertextuality in T. S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats”: A post-structuralist approach

Аннотация

Intertextuality is one of the literary phenomena that has preoccupied structuralists and poststructuralists critics since 1960s. It is the technique of multi-levelled texts that have rhetorical, significantory, and textual facets. Previously critical studies of intertextuality in Eliot’s poems focused on his master-pieces like “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, but they did not throw light on his “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats”. This study is concerned with the aspects of the intertextuality in three selected poems of T. S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats”. Its purpose is determining the semiotic meaning of such aspects as allusion, parody, quotations, and we try to appropriate and uncover their functions as well as to investigate their literary presuppositions in Eliot’s selected poems. The study falls into three sections: a theoretical introduction of intertextuality, intertextuality in Eliot’s three selected poems, and a conclusion. The three selected poems are entitled “The Naming of Cats”, “Old Deuteronomy”, and “Growltiger’s Last Stand”. The research employs the semiotic conceptions of intertextuality among Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Michael Riffaterre. It departs from the philosophical theory of the contemporary French Philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the theory of “ensemble”. To sum up, intertextuality in T. S. Eliot’s selected poems of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is featured by the employment of allusions, sayings and quotations. They convert the poetic text from its mimetic aspect to its semiotic one. Intertexuality in the three poems performs poetic and esthetic functions through its intertexts that are positioned in dialogical spaces. These intertexts accomplish the significance of the poetic texts on the heuristic and hermeneutic levels of reading through their sentences (matrices), ungrammaticalities, and literary utterances of rhetorical presuppositions.

Ключевые слова:

dialogical, intertextuality, hypogram, ungrammaticality, presupposition