How does “Boating for Beginners” (Jeanette Winterson) use intertextuality to comment the world?

Type :

Book review

Pages :

5 pages

Format :

.doc

Published date :

01/15/2009

Category :

Philosophy & literature

Sub category :

Literature

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Summary :

Introduction.
Boating for Beginners as a parody of different literary genres.
1. Parody and rewriting as subversive elements.
2. Boating for Beginners: A 'comic book'.
3. A mixture of literary genres.
Boating for Beginners as a 'Satire Parody' of our modern society.
1. The 'Satire Parody' is at work in Boating for Beginners.
2. A critic of contemporary modern society.
3. A male-dominated society.
The deconstructed narrative as the mirror of the deconstructed world and self.
1. The questioning of history and science.
2. Importance of the metaphors of the Flood and God's creation.
3. A post-atomic writing.
Conclusion.
Bibliography.

Abstract

boating for beginners is a novel by jeanette winterson which belongs to post-modern literature and can be defined as a re-writing of the Bible. In her text, she uses a literary device called intertextuality in order to make comments on what she thinks is wrong in our modern society and for what reason. intertextuality is one of the five transtextual relation types given by Genette. It is not something proper to post-modern literature; however, it is a constant feature in post-modern texts. According to Genette's definition, intertextuality is "a relation of co presence between two texts or among several texts" and "the actual presence of one text within another" (Graham Allen, intertextuality, London, Routeledge, 2000, p.101), the presence of the other text can be presented either by a quotation, mimesis or allusion.