Literary Spinoffs Rewriting the Classics - Re-Imagining the Community
:
Birgit Spengler
:
Literary Spinoffs Rewriting the Classics - Re-Imagining the Community
:
Campus Verlag
:
9783593430645
:
Nordamerikastudien
:
1
:
CHF 36.30
:
:
Englische Sprachwissenschaft / Literaturwissenschaft
:
English
:
500
:
Wasserzeichen/DRM
:
PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
:
PDF
Birgit Spengler untersucht in ihrer Arbeit das zeitgenössische Genre der »Spinoffs« - Romane, die klassische kanonische Werke der amerikanischen Literatur kreativ um- und fortschreiben. Am Beispiel der schreibenden Auseinandersetzung mit Klassikern wie »Moby- Dick« oder den »Adventures of Huckleberry Finn« entschlüsselt sie die literarischen Strategien, die »Spinoffs« nutzen, um auf gesamtkulturelle Sinnstiftungsprozesse Einfluss zu nehmen und sich in die kulturelle Imagination einzuschreiben. Dabei stellen diese Romane auch die Frage nach der Abgeschlossenheit von Kunstwerken, nach kulturellem Kapital und geistigem Eigentum neu.
Birgit Spengler, PD Dr., ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin im Bereich Amerikanistik der Universität Frankfurt am Main.
Introduction
In the spring and summer of 2001, a literary 'case' kept readers of the New York Times and other American dailies busy. Like other literary headlines, this case involved central aspects of the United States's literary and cultural heritage-questions as to the ways cherished authors of the past and their oeuvres 'live' in the contemporary imagination, how they are constructed in popular and academic discourses, and what effect the publication of new or hitherto unknown material has on such constructs. However, Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone was a case in the literary and the literal sense of the word: a novel that triggered a lawsuit and fostered debates concerning the nature of creativity, intellectual property, and cultural communication-about who 'owns' culture and whether literary and cultural artefacts and the imaginative realms associated with them constitute 'private' terrains that can or should be protected from trespassing, or a 'commons' available to the imaginative strolls, or even extended excursions, of all.
The Wind Done Gone put the limelight onto a type of text that proliferates in contemporary literature and that I will refer to as 'literary spinoff.' As applied in the following, the term 'spinoff' describes fictional texts that take their cues from famous, and often canonical, works of literature, which they revise, rewrite, adapt or appropriate as a whole or in parts, thus producing alternative voices and/or historical or geographical re-locations for texts that are generally well known to contemporary audiences-be it because of their status as cultural classics and long-term readers' favorites, or because of their medial presence in cinema or tv versions. Specifically, Randall imagines the story of a female (ex-)slave from the Tara Plantation of Margaret Mitchell's Civil War epos Gone With the Wind. As Scarlett's half-sister and Rhett Butler's mistress, Cyanara's story unveils an alternative vision of the 'Old South,' one that includes miscegenation, gay relationships, and the death, both actually and symbolically, of the Southern heroine. The 'danger' that plot elements such as these pose to the 'myth' disseminated by Mitchell's novel and its famous film version becomes apparent when considering the Mitchell estate's considerable efforts to protect it: In fact, Randall broke each of the conditions that are pre-requisites for authorized rewritings, continuations, or prequels-no miscegenation, no homosexuality, and the survival of the heroine.
Although most contemporary spinoff novels do not start their public careers as court cases, The Wind Done Gone highlights a problem increasingly encountered by writers who propose to explicitly rework the popularly and/or critically esteemed texts of the past and the cultural heritages associated with them: Just like The Wind Done Gone, J. D. California's parodic reprise of Salinger's Catcher in the Rye (1951), 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye (2009) has recently triggered a lawsuit, as did Lo's Diary by Pia Pera, a rewriting of Lolita, on the eve of its publication in English translation (1999), and, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Astrid Lindgren retelling Die doppelte Pippielotta in 2009. As the back and forth between the lawyers of the Mitchell estate, Randall's defenders, and the affidavits of literary and scholarly heavyweights such as Toni Morrison, Harper Lee, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Linda Hutcheon, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. demonstrate, the question as to who 'owns' culture, and who may claim the leeway to meddle with powerful mental images and interpretatory traditions as conveyed by literary texts, hits the nerve of the time and has far-reaching consequences. Not the least, these include the bases of plurality in societies increasingly determined by ownership and the accumulation of resources in the hands of a powerful few as well as by an increasing control of processes of social and cultural meaning-making that is a consequence of the above.
Accordingly, and despite its somewhat unusual-although by no means singular-'career,' the engagement with powerful myths and narratives of the past renders The Wind Done Gone an apt representative of what in fact constitutes a contemporary and timely genre as I will argue in the following. As characteristic of texts of this emerging literary tradition, The Wind Done Gone signals and even openly 'advertises' its intertextual nature in the title and through other paratextual markers, as well as by means of shared characters and/or plot elements. Through such striking gestures of affiliation, literary spinoffs direct their readers to a mode of reception that will acknowledge the text's deliberate association with a literary predecessor and take it into account. In Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), a rewriting of Jane Eyre (1848) and one of the founding texts of the genre, Jean Rhys resurrects the lost voice of Antoinette Cosway alias Bertha Mason, thus telling a well-k
Contents
6
Acknowledgements
10
Introduction
12
1. Literary Spinnoffs: An Intertextual Genre
31
1.1.Spinoff Aesthetics: Explicitness and Intensity of the Intertextual Relation
33
1.2Oscillation and Good Continuation
37
1.30–2: Text and Context/Text and Matrixes
42
1.4The “Dialogic” Involvement with the Pre-Text: Dark Areas
42
45
42
1.5Spinoffs as Communicative Genre: Dialogue and Dialogics
49
1.6Intertextual Contexts
51
2.Re-Visioning Intertextuality:
51
62
51
2.1Predecessors: Poststructuralist vs. Descriptive Intertextuality
63
2.2Alternative Positions
74
2.3A Working Model of Intertextuality in Cultural and
74
79
74
3.Cultural Work and the Functions
74
98
74
3.1Cultural Work
100
3.2Exclusion and Inclusion: Spinoffs and/as
100
103
100
3.3The Literary Marketplace and Cultural Capital
108
3.4Copyrights and Copywrongs: Who “Owns” Culture?
112
3.5Revisiting the Nineteenth Century
117
4.Ahab’s Wife: A Cannibal of a Book?
126
4.1Appropriating Melville
132
4.2The World as Ship: Mad Hunts, Male Myths
151
4.3Re-Writing the Quest: From Soaring Spirit to
151
181
151
4.4The Quill and the Quilt: Art as Social Vision
212
5.From Playing Pilgrim to Waging War: March
230
5.1Little Women: Alcott’s Classic?
234
5.2Little Women and Colossal Fathers: March’s Pre-Texts
246
5.3March’s Civil Wars: Gender, Soul-Wrestling, Slavery, and Innocence
260
6.American Pastorals? Re-Reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884/85)
305
6.1Twain’s Fame: The Hypercanonization of Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn
305
6.2Reading Huckleberry Finn: Hermeneutic Agendas
312
6.3My Jim: Huckleberry Finn as Neo-Slave Narrative
339
6.4The Bequests of the Fathers: Fatherhood, Inheritances,
339
386
339
Conclusion: Story-Telling, Libraries,
339
Conclusion: Story-Telling, Libraries,
339
430
339
Bibliography
453
List of Illustrations
493
Index
495
