Wednesday, January 27, 2021

Finn Damgaard on Manfred Pfister's Six Criteria For Approaching Ways in Which Intertexts are Embedded

Commenting on the work of Manfred Pfister and his qualitative criteria “that offers a more comprehensive approach to the complex ways in which intertexts are embedded,” Finn Damgaard summed up Pfister’s six criteria thusly:

 

a Referentiality refers to the qualitative manner by which a pre-text is incorporated into the new text: the stronger the referential character is to the pre-text, the more powerful is the intertextual relationship (explicit quotation suggests a higher intertextual relationship than allusions etc).

 

b Communicativity assesses the communicative relevance of a proposed intertext. A higher degree is intended to recognize the intertextual reference.

 

c Autoreflexivity is present in a text if the author reflects on his or her text’s intertextual referentiality within the text itself.

 

d Structurality refers to the syntagmatic integration of a pre-text into the text. The intertextual intensity is highest in those texts whose literary framework has been affected by the structural concern of the pre-text.

 

e Selectivity examines the conciseness of the intertextual reference. A higher degree of selectivity is achieved if the author draws from a distinct segment of the pre-text.

 

f Dialogicity evaluates the degree of tension by comparing the original and the new context of the texts. A high degree of dialogicity and intertextual intensity is achieved if the texts exhibit conflict and conceptual divergence. (Finn Damgaard, Rewriting Peter as an Intertextual Character in the Canonical Gospels [London: Routledge, 2016, 2019], 9-10)