The Genre of Trolls - Doria

constitutes an intertextual network within the tradition system of the performer,
and it vouches for the existence of a wider array of materials than is
actually employed in performed epics. Thus, the notion is very much linked
to the individual, and Honko doubts its relevance for larger social groups
and tradition areas, which do not furnish the same kind of thick corpus as
the multiply recorded repertoire of a single singer represents (Honko 1998:
94–99).
A concept somewhat akin to Honko’s pool of tradition is the notion of
ethnopoetic or ethnocultural substrate advanced by Lauri Harvilahti who
defines it as “those devices by means of which the singer gives clues, i.e.
uses specific registers and markers in order to enable the interpretation of
the discourse during the flow of the performance” (Harvilahti 2000: 68). It
is a common, essentially intertextual repository of poetic diction, prosody,
modes of performance, musical styles and traditional meanings that can be
utilized in various contexts (Harvilahti 2003: 125; cf. Harvilahti 2001). Both
Honko’s and Harvilahti’s terms are convenient for designating the store of
intertextual expressions out of which the individual texts under study are
constituted.
1.4.2 Interdiscursivity
The identification of intertextuality with mere source-hunting within a
paradigm of influence, implying unimaginative dependence on other texts
and authors, in later applications of the theory of intertextuality led Kristeva
to abandon the term intertextuality in favour of transposition, which better
expressed the important point that intertextuality involves a transposition
from one sign system to another, resulting in a rearticulation of the thetic
position, the enunciative and denotative position. As an example Kristeva
refers to her study of the medieval French romance whose sign system
sprang from the redistribution of the sign systems of the carnival, courtly
poetry and scholastic discourse (Kristeva 1985: 59–60). Put in these terms,
intertextuality comes closer to a notion of interdiscursivity or intergeneric
dialogue.
Norman Fairclough has utilized the concept of interdiscursivity or constitutive
intertextuality to describe the relation between different discursive
structures. Interdiscursivity denotes “the constitution of texts out of elements
(types of convention) of orders of discourse”, defined as the totality of
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Introduction