The Genre of Trolls - Doria

of them are not even texts, they may be images or merely motifs actualized
in diverse situations. The connection between folklore and the Bible is
construed as just such a vague relationship; the motifs exist in people’s
minds and they can be used, reworked and inserted into new contexts
(Wolf-Knuts 2000: 91–92). Wolf-Knuts’ work can be read in conjunction
with my own, as the subject matter and points of view are fairly similar.
Ole Marius Hylland has analyzed narratives about Elvis in terms of intertextuality
(Hylland 2002), and he isolates four groups of narratives, each
more complex than the preceding one, and with diverse strategies for handling
intertextual relations. The first group is constituted by biographies,
which must necessarily rely on anterior expositions of the subject, but still
distinguish themselves enough from these to merit publication and attention.
The second group of narratives is produced by Elvis’s fans, making
their individual selection from all that can seen, heard, read, visited and
bought in relation to Elvis. The fans construct their narratives by actively
creating a personal relationship to Elvis merchandise, services and expressions
connected to his person. The third group consists of parodies and
ironic treatments of Elvis and his fans, who function as the parodied intertexts.
As Hylland notes, parody is a very intertextual practice, something I
will also endeavour to demonstrate in my own examination of parody in
chapter 6. The fourth group is the one commenting on all the others: the
academic dissertation or the artwork. Finally, Hylland gives an example of
a text blending all four types of narratives, a Gospel of Elvis complete with
scientific commentary and replete with irony, written by a historian and
scholar of culture (Hylland 2002: 145). Thus, Hylland ends up straddling
wider territory than his usage of the term intertextuality suggests, tacitly
incorporating issues of interdiscursivity and intergenericity, since the intertexts
going into the production of the narratives represent a host of discourses
and genres, and particularly in the case of the narratives of the fans,
they are building blocks in the constitution of the intertextualized subject,
as the fans define themselves and their lives according to the narratives
about Elvis.
The same can basically be said of Anne Eriksen’s article on the narratives
about a Norwegian thirteenth-century historical personage, Mindre-Alv
Erlingsson (Eriksen 2002). Applying Lotte Tarkka’s notion of a web of
intertextual relations as the locus of meaning, and putting special weight on
Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of utterances—historically situated, finalized
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Introduction