Hypotext

Abstract: Disney’s Mulan (1998) has generated much scholarly interest in comparing the film with its hypotext: the Chinese legend of Mulan. While this comparison has produced meaningful criticism of the Orientalism inherent in Disney’s cultural appropriation, it often ironically perpetuates the Orientalist paradigm by reducing the legend into a unified, static entity of the “authentic” Chinese “original”. This paper argues that the Chinese hypotext is an accumulation of dramatically conflicting representations of Mulan with no clear point of origin. It analyzes the Republican-era film adaptation Mulan Joins the Army (1939) as a cultural palimpsest revealing attributes associated with different stages of the legendary figure’s millennium-long intertextual metamorphosis, including a possibly nomadic woman warrior outside China proper, a Confucian role model of loyalty and filial piety, a Sinitic deity in the Sino-Barbarian dichotomy, a focus of male sexual fantasy, a Neo-Confucian exemplar of chastity, and modern models for women established for antagonistic political agendas. Similar to the previous layers of adaptation constituting the hypotext, Disney’s Mulan is simply another hypertext continuing Mulan’s metamorphosis, and it by no means contains the most dramatic intertextual change. Productive criticism of Orientalist cultural appropriations, therefore, should move beyond the dichotomy of the static East versus the change-making West, taking full account of the immense hybridity and fluidity pulsing beneath the fallacy of a monolithic cultural “authenticity”.

Abstract: In 2001, Montreal disc jockey Tiga, with the help of Finnish producer Jori ‘Zyntherius’ Hulkkonen, recorded and released a techno cover version of ‘Sunglasses at Night’, a song popularised in 1983 by fellow Canadian Corey Hart. This paper examines how a so-called ‘unoriginal’ musical practice such as the cover version, when re-contextualised into a brand new musical genre (a process called ‘trans-stylisation’), can engender new meaning, especially when it comes to the generic identity purveyed by the song's enunciator. The analysis of this new ‘original’ utterance relies on the theory of hypertextuality and describes, on the musical, lyrical and visual levels, the transformative processes from the hypotext (Hart's version) to the hypertext (Tiga's), thereby shedding new light on the poetics of the cover version and on the representational modalities of the postmodern subject.

Abstract: What is a paratext, and where can we find it in a Roman text? What kind of space does a paratext occupy, and how does this space relate to the text and its contexts? How do we interpret Roman texts ‘paratextually’? And what does this kind of approach suggest about a work’s original modes of plotting meaning, or about the assumptions that underpin our own modes of interpretation? These questions are central to the conceptual and practical concerns of the present volume, which aims to offer a synoptic study of the interplay of paratexts and their reception within the broad sphere of Roman studies. Its contributions, which span literary, epigraphic and visual culture, focus on a wide variety of paratextual features – e.g. titles and intertitles, prefaces, indices, inscriptions, closing statements, decorative and formalistic details – and other less obvious paratextual phenomena, such as the (implicit) frames that can be plotted at various points and intersections of a text’s formal organization. The volume then explores the nature of the relationship between a text’s frame, its centre and its contexts, as well as the ways in which audiences approach and plot this set of relations. Far from being an issue that preoccupies only the theoretically minded, the matter of the paratext is always – albeit often imperceptibly – already at work in the hermeneutic process. We may consider, by way of initial example, how readers of this volume could be approaching its reception paratextually. Perhaps you, whoever you are, first focused on the book’s title, taking its wording to be an initial guide for your reading of this introduction or any of the contributions. Or perhaps you moved directly to the table of contents, searching for a specific topic or Roman author of choice, or even to see what a scholar, whose work you follow, has to say about the reception of indices, prefaces or intertitles. It is also possible that you browsed the dust jacket and back cover first, scanning through the blurb, authorial details, or information concerning the illustration on the front cover, before selecting any one of the contributions. And, even if you approached this book from any of the above, you might have simultaneously consulted an available review of the book in an attempt either to get a general idea about the volume or to consult the opinion of a (naturally receptive!) 1

Abstract: The aim of this study is to examine the rewriting of the memoirs of the former pirate Alexander Olivier Exquemelin, Los Piratas de America, originally published in Amsterdam in 1678, which the Mexican writer Carmen Boullosa carries out in two recent novels: Son vacas, somos puercos and El medico de los piratas. In the light of Gerard Genette’s theory of hypertextuality this study deals with the formal as well as the thematic aspects of this rewriting. In order to situate the two novels in the context of contemporary Latin American literature, this study includes an introductory chapter on the “new” Latin American historical novel, preceded by a more general introduction to Carmen Boullosa’s narrative. In the first chapter a discussion is also maintained with former critics of Son vacas, somos puercos, with the intention of placing this study in a critical context, particularly in a confrontation with the postmodernist interpretations of the novel that generally have read it as a parodic subversion of its hypotext (intertext). In the second chapter Genette’s theory of hypertextuality is surveyed and a series of problems that this theory raises are addressed. The third chapter contains a survey of the textual history of Exquemelin’s memoirs as well a short look at the “estilization” of Boullosa’s language in comparison to that of Exquemelin. Finally, the fourth and fifth chapters are dedicated to the analysis of the two novels. Relevant aspects in the analysis are the textual amplificaction, the narrator’s attitude, and the thematic transformations. The dissertation concludes with the suggestion that Son vacas, somos puercos presents a hypertextual unfolding of the ideology of the pirate’s brotherhood; that the greater subjective presence of the narrator-protagonist in the rewriting highlights the temporal discrepancy between the narration and the history, and consequently also implies a greater emphasis on the disagreement between the experiences of the protagonist in the past and the present knowledge of the narrator. Furthermore it is suggested that the diegesis originally described in Exquemelin’s memoirs is nuanced by the inclusion or activation of women, African slaves and Indians. The idea that in Son vacas, somos puercos, the image of the pirate is “transvalorized” in constructive terms is also put forward. Finally it is underscored that Boullosa’s first rewriting of Los Piratas de America does not present a subversive nor an alternative version, but a complementary one.