The Genre of Trolls - Doria

inherent in the text relieves these texts of the burden of being regarded as
contextless, and hence useless. Intertextuality posits a dimension of context
previously overlooked.
In folkloristic research, the most comprehensive theory of intertextuality
has been advanced by Lotte Tarkka, beginning with the essay “Intertextuality,
Rhetorics and the Interpretation of Oral Poetry” (Tarkka 1993; see
also Tarkka 1994; 1998a; 1998b). For Tarkka, intertextuality, construed as
“the idea of the text as a meeting point of different texts” (Tarkka 1993: 171)
represents the escape route from the dead ends of performance theory and
structuralism which have focused too much on a single aspect of folklore,
either the mental process involved in text production or on the text itself.
In her view, performance studies overstress the extratextual while disregarding
the textual, and structuralism emphasizes the textual to the detriment
of the extratextual (Tarkka 1993: 169–170). She establishes dialogue and reciprocal
relationships as the basis of interpretation, dismissing the quest for
“historical meanings”, origins and, in the vein of Roland Barthes (Barthes
1977), the inclination to give primacy to one dimension of interpretation
only. Tarkka advocates a mutual structuring of the relation between texts,
text and context, and text and subjectivity, the last of which will not concern
us here (see Asplund 2001 for further discussion). In this way, neither
the textual nor the extratextual is privileged; the construction of a text is
dependent on other texts existing in a community, text and context mutually
influence each other, and the text is shaped by the performing subject
which in turn is affected by the text and its message.
Recalling Kristeva’s horizontal and vertical axes (the word belongs to
both writer and addressee, and is oriented to another literary corpus), without
mentioning the terms, Tarkka describes the subject (writer or performer),
the receiver (reader or listener), and the cultural context, history and
reality as the focal points in the construction of meaning (Tarkka 1993: 171).
The merging of the horizontal and the vertical axis is expressed in the form
of the subject as receiver, creating the text in relation to already existing
texts (Tarkka 1993: 171). The receiver, not part of Kristeva’s theory as an
empirical being outside the writer, but certainly appearing as such in this
case, correspondingly interprets the text against the background of all he
has previously heard and read. Tarkka stresses the dialogically constructed
character of reality (Tarkka 1993: 178–179).
Like most advocates of intertextuality, Tarkka celebrates the multiplicity
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Intertextuality as Ideological Critique