The Genre of Trolls - Doria

vocabulary of intertextual theory, or transtextuality as he prefers to call it,
defined as “tout ce qui le [i.e., the text] met en relation, manifeste ou secrète,
avec d’autres textes” (Genette 1992: 7). 8 He divides transtextuality into
five types: intertextuality, reduced to quotation, plagiarism and allusion;
paratextuality—titles, headings, prefaces, illustrations; metatextuality, i.e.,
commentary; architextuality, the generic framework, and perhaps the most
important, at least in this context, hypertextuality, the relation uniting the
hypertext, the text studied, with an anterior text, the hypotext. In his use of
the concept, Genette restricts himself to obvious hypertextuality, where the
whole of the hypertext is derived from the whole of the hypotext, due to
his refusal to accord the reader too prominent a role in the interpretation of
hypertextual relationships (Genette 1992: 13, 18–19). The hypertext can be
created on the basis of the hypotext either through transformation or
imitation, the latter being a more complex and indirect procedure. An imitation
is essentially another story inspired by the anterior text, while a
transformation merely transfers the same story to another setting (Genette
1992: 14). The rigid definition of hypertextuality utilized in practice limits
the applicability of the concept, especially since many texts have more than
one hypotext, and these may be less easily discernible than Genette would
hope for.
He has also elaborated a taxonomy of intertextual techniques, which are
far too numerous to mention here in their totality; some of the most common
are condensation (contraction of the text), amplification (substantial
additions) and substitution (Genette 1992: 341–342, 375, 384). Once again,
his categories are keyed to the study of effortlessly identifiable hypotexts,
and are more difficult to apply in less evident cases. His work has not figured
much in folkloristic discussions of intertextuality, but I will be applying
some of his terms where appropriate, in a rather unsystematic fashion.
Susan Stewart was one of the first to apply the theory of intertextuality
to folklore in her study of nonsense (Stewart 1979) in which she viewed
nonsense as generated in relation to a standard of common sense, the aim
being to scrutinize the transformative operations utilized in moving from
one domain to another. The concept of intertextuality is employed to describe
the interdependence of different provinces of meaning, and to estab-
8 “…all that places it [the text] in relation, manifestly or secretly, with other texts” (my
translation).
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Introduction