Epigraph as an Intertextual Phenomenon (By Claude Simon and Françoise Sagan)

Abstract

The author's English summary from the article:

Key words: epigraph, interpretation, novel.

Intertextual analysis is one of the actual issues of the contemporary literary criticism. The article studies the variety of epigraph as an intertextual marker, its role and peculiarities of its function in the works of arts. In literature, an epigraph is a phrase, quotation, or poem that may serve as a preface, a summary, a counter-example and can link the work to a wider literary canon, either to invite comparison or to enlist a conventional context. Epigraphs are belonged to any cultural traditions. It is a textual ‘other place’, a retired paragraph or expression that indicate on the main points of a literary work. Between this meta-text and own text, a writer creates an interdiscoursal depend- ence that possibly can be analyzed in different plans: thematical, diegetical and also, in formulat- ing plans.

The aims of an epigraph are unlimited. The erudite a writer is the more frequently he will use the ‘other’s speech’, because any great idea has its echo to the other one - to the already existed ideas. The epigraphs are various. Sometimes their interpretation by readers is too difficult. The article consideres some epigraphs of the literary works of modern french writers - Claude Simon and Françoise Sagan in order to find out their epigraph’s content, sense or origi- nality. It is significant that in Claude Simon’s works the interest is the observation on the effect of functions and the influence of the epigraphs on the readers. This intellectual game makes a reader more attentive and searchers for literary small things.

As for Françoise Sagan, in her literary universe the intertext or epigraphs give a possibility to open the horison of the original epoch from where it is taken and include the ideology of the writer too. The new impulse of epigraphs helps a reader to penetrate in Sagan’s universe that has a stamp of absurdity and tragedy. The studding of Françoise Sagan’s novels and epigraphs indicates on the writer’s erudition, on her skills of creation the cultural relationship. The novelist can feel and express the tragedy not classical and fatal but in modern absurd form. The epigraph as a technique of a fiction and a component of Para text, is used in these writ- ers’ novels as a structural element of organisation of such creative space for making a diversity of narration that reflects the transformational and continually developing world.

It is very important to study epigraphs that are always compelled by readers’ attention.

Published in the journal Sjani, vol. 12 (2011), pp. 26–34. Open the paper