The Genre of Trolls - Doria

forest—which are connected by metonymy, combining elements of the
same conceptual order into a sequence, and bridging the distance between
the poles of the metaphor. In linguistic parlance, metaphorical relations are
paradigmatic, whereas metonymic ones are syntagmatic. As instances of
metonymy Tarkka mentions the concepts of dialogue and communication,
and rituals involving communication with the otherworld (cf. chapter 1.1 on
the difference between Tarkka’s notions and common usage). Intertextual
relations, generated by the use of common themes and epithets, for instance,
and forming an intertextual universe, are conceived as a series of
metaphors, each constituent being comparable but not identical to the
others (Tarkka 1994: 293–294; cf. Tarkka 1998b). This approach facilitates
an investigation of networks of association in which similar themes recur in
a variety of texts, often representing different genres. I will return to this
topic in the discussion of intergenericity.
In her dissertation Magic, Body and Social Order (1998), Laura Stark-Arola
adopts Lotte Tarkka’s notion of the intertextual universe as an organic
whole in which a single text receives its meaning only in relation to other
texts. She also discusses macro-texts, i.e., broader cultural traditions such as
ritual descriptions of love magic, lempi-bathing and instances of women
being perceived as polluting men, which gain meaning through their interrelation
(Stark-Arola 1998: 67, 73). Nevertheless, the most important contribution
made by Stark-Arola is perhaps the delineation of a concrete,
intertextualist research method, something that has been largely missing in
intertextual scholarship. Her deliberations on this point therefore deserve
some attention.
She takes her point of departure in the act of reading the whole corpus
of texts to be analyzed, saying that the researcher forms a pre-comprehension
of recurrent correspondences, homologies and analogies among and
between the texts. A similar differentiation of the meanings contained in
the texts, applicable to the larger corpus, is made as well. This preliminary
picture constitutes the basis for the next step in the process of interpretation,
the employment of the method of intertextual abstraction, as she calls
it, which is glossed as the crystallization of the common denominators of
texts sporting the same theme into hypothetical generalizations like the
core motifs she treats in her study. The farm house is an example of such a
motif, organizing the relations between domains (home–village) and persons
(members of the household–outsiders); core motifs are specifically de-
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Introduction