The Genre of Trolls - Doria

ployed to organize other cultural concepts, symbols and relations. Additionally,
the scholar examines relations of opposition and exclusion; the force
of the female genitalia, female väki, should not come into contact with
men’s travel gear, for instance, since that would ruin them or the horse in
some way (Stark-Arola 1998: 67–68, 23–24, 224–230).
The emphasis on an understanding arrived at through the reading of a
corpus of texts in its entirety necessitates a substantial research material, as
a single text or a very small number of texts are deemed inadequate for the
production of a reliable interpretation of cultural thought. Hence a sizeable
corpus is primarily needed for the identification of key texts, those
texts which will throw light on all texts involved. Such key texts may be
ones overtly articulating the assumptions remaining tacit in many other
records, as in Stark-Arola’s case (Stark-Arola 1998: 68).
The scholarly interpretation of the semantic systems extracted from the
intertextual universe is worked out through reference to various contextual
frames, consisting of textual context, performance context, social context,
cultural context, folk belief context, genre context and inter-genre context.
Only the last two are labelled intertextual—with a broader conception of
intertext, all but the first, which is rather intratextual, could be regarded as
intertextual (Stark-Arola 1998: 69–70).
Another seminal figure in the history of intertextuality is Michael Riffaterre.
His version of the concept, presented in Semiotics of Poetry (1978) and
several articles, differs markedly from the ones dealt with thus far. He
defines an intertext as “one or more texts which the reader must know in
order to understand a work of literature in terms of its overall significance
(as opposed to the discrete meanings of its successive words, phrases and
sentences)” (Riffaterre 1990: 56). Intertextuality then becomes the network
of functions forming and regulating the relations between text and intertext.
Riffaterre distinguishes between theme and intertext: the former is a
variant of a motif, and knowledge of it is not necessary for the interpretation
of a text (Riffaterre 1990: 57, 61); it does not always constitute an intertext,
but an intertext can simultaneously be a theme. This delimitation
of intertext is not congruent with the views of many intertextualist researchers.
Lotte Tarkka, for example, has successfully analyzed themes as intertexts,
and Ann Helene Bolstad Skjelbred has investigated the articulation
of the same theme in a diachronic body of material (see 1.4.4). In my own
work I have also regarded themes as intertexts, since I do believe the
Intertextuality in the History of Research 27