Intertextuality as a Feministic Strategy For Rewriting Texts

Abstract

This thesis entitled Intertextuality as a Feministic Strategy for Rewriting Texts is the causatum of an innate curiosity ignited when introduced to this compelling, beguiling and provocative critical concept Intertextuality. Interestingly even before knowing the critical tool, in the reading of literary works of authors across aeons the researcher discerned a pattern that typecast women in to a set behavioral structure. These representations of women transcended language frontiers and they are manifest more or less on similar lines in all discourses. Of course such compartmentalization of women was invariably bound to divine doctrines which again had common attributes irrespective of religion and region. Such connectedness, universality of human experience and behavioural attributes abound in literature of all languages. This interconnectedness is termed as Intertextuality by critics and the concept probes how cultural patterns have imposed and superimposed themselves on human psyche and how it is reflected in the written word. Though individual texts have been taken for intertextual feministic study there has hardly been an exclusive attempt to establish Intertextuality as an effective feministic strategy for rewriting texts. The project tries to ensconce how women writers have and could successfully employ Intertextuality as effective tool and strategy to rewrite texts that would reinterpret and reassign new meanings to canonical, patriarchal texts. Rewritings not only respond to the canonical text but also interrogate the entire environment in which the text was written, published 2 and received along with the role of the author. The researcher hopes to provide insight in to the idea of rewriting as a method of writing back and attempts to reinforce the feminist viewpoint that intertextual writing was motivated by a desire to counter a tradition of silence and alleged misrepresentation. Enabling authorship, it aimed at representation, both in literature and culture. newline