Examples.
“Pastiche”. Meriam-Webster defines it as: artistic, musical, or architectural work that imitates the style of previous work; also : such stylistic imitation.
Related to postmodern intertextuality, pastiche means to combine, or "paste" together, multiple elements. In postmodernist literature this can be an homage to or a parody of past styles. It can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or information-drenched aspects of postmodern society.
It can be a combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative or to comment on situations in postmodernity: for example, William S. Burroughs uses science fiction, detective fiction, westerns; Margaret Atwood uses science fiction and fairy tales; Umberto Eco uses detective fiction, fairy tales, and science fiction, Derek Pell relies on collage and noir detective, erotica, travel guides, and how-to manuals, and so on. Though pastiche commonly refers to the mixing of genres, many other elements are also included (metafiction and temporal distortion are common in the broader pastiche of the postmodern novel).
5) architextuality as the genre connection between texts.
Lj. Gjurjan considers that “the relationship between Joyce’s Ulisses and Homer’s architext can be seen in Eliot’s terms as “a way of controlling, ordering or giving shape and a significance to an immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”.
***
Different types of insertions in the order a reader comes across them in the text are as follows:
- Quotation title;
- Epigraph;
- Preface;
- Reminiscence;
- Allusion, etc.
Quotation title. Such titles are more frequent, than can seem at first sight, because the citation can easily pass unnoticed. So, the name of Dudintsev’s novel “White clothes” at first sight pretends a beautiful synonym for a habitual phraseological unit “people in white-coats”. Actually this title is a quotation. St. John the Divine gives such an attribute to those who “had undergone grieves and came through trials”. Such understanding reveals the main idea of the novel glorifying courage of scientists-geneticists.
Sources of “another's voice” in citations are rather various. However, as it was desirable, that the reader knew about an initial context, writers of all times constantly addressed to the Bible. Quotations from classics are also very frequent: Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, and Pushkin.
Examples of the titles quoting the Bible are abundant: А. Кристи «Конь бледный» (Апокалипсис), Гр. Грин «Сила и слава» (Отче наш), Хемингуэй «И восходит солнце» (Экклезиаст).
So, the meaning of such titles does not lie on a surface and demands interpretation. The writer can give a helping hand to the reader in an epigraph or in author’s comments.
Epigraph is one of the most studied and at the same time specific kinds of quotation inclusion. Titles exceptionally happen to be quotations while the epigraph is a quotation by definition.
The informative connections of the epigraph are various: it explains the title; it sends memory to that context, from which it is taken; it initiates the dialogue with the book. Together with the title it takes of a strong position of the beginning, but unlike the title it is optional and serves to increase meaningfulness of the text (cf. the title and the epigraph from R.-P. Warren’s “All King’s Horses”).
The modal and evaluative information of the title and epigraph is considered here both through the in-text syntagmatic plot line, and against the background of cultural and socio-historical associations of the novel.
If the text quoted by the title is well-known to the reader, an epigraph can be reduced to an implication. For instance, the title of E. Hemingway’s collection of short stories «For our time» is a part of a prayer for the world: «Give peace in our time, oh Lord». In such a way the author conveyed his bitter irony as far as the collection stories described severities of war. In the novel by the same author «For whom the Bell Tolls» the title is an extended quote from John Donne's poem.