The Genre of Trolls - Doria

destinataire (ou du personnage), du contexte culturel actuel ou antérieur”
(Kristeva 1978: 83; see chapter 1.4.1 for a translation of this quotation). The
status of the word is defined both horizontally (the word of the text belongs
to both writer and addressee), and vertically (the word is oriented toward
another literary corpus) (Kristeva 1978: 84). Since the addressee is only
discursively present in a book, Kristeva argued, he merges with the other
discourse, and the horizontal axis (subject – addressee) fuses with the
vertical axis (text – context).
I explore these aspects of her theory at some length, as they are fundamental
for the very notion of intertextuality, and because they are somewhat
problematic from a folkloristic point of view. The relationship between
writer, addressee/character and context proves to be complicated. In this
essay Kristeva mostly operates with a conflation of writer and addressee,
and of addressee and context. The logic of this procedure seems simple at
first glance: through the word, the text is situated within history and society,
which are viewed as texts read by the writer and into which the writer
inserts himself by rewriting them. In this way diachrony is transformed
into synchrony (Kristeva 1978: 83). History and society, or, in folkloristic
parlance, context, are seen as texts, available for reading and rewriting. The
problem of viewing context as text is of course the textualization of everything
extratextual; there is nothing but text, and there is no way out of the
text. The ambiguity between context as history and society on the one
hand, and context as an anterior or synchronic literary corpus on the other,
makes for an occasionally peculiar oscillation between graphocentrism (an
almost exclusive concentration on written discourse) and historical awareness
in Kristeva’s text. Contextuality in the folkloristic sense is affirmed
only to be rejected in favour of an entirely textualized universe, based on a
limited selection of texts labelled literary. Critics have indeed noted that
while emphasizing context and the insertion of text into history and
society, Kristeva does very little to employ this apprehension in practice;
it remains a theoretical statement (Clayton & Rothstein 1991: 20; Frow
1986: 128).
Thus “le mot (le texte) est un croisement de mots (de textes) oú on lit au
moins un autre mot (texte)”, for “tout texte se construit comme mosaïque
de citations, tout texte est absorption et transformation d’un autre texte. A
la place de la notion d’intersubjectivité s’installe celle d’intertextualité, et le
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Intertextuality as Ideological Critique