- Browse by Subject
Browsing by Subject "intertextuality"
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Building new selves: identity, “Passing,” and intertextuality in Zoë Wicomb’s Playing in the Light(2018) Hoegberg, David; English, School of Liberal ArtsThis article examines Zoë Wicomb’s wide-ranging use of intertextuality in the novel Playing in the Light to explore the links between identity construction and postcolonial authorship. Focusing on the characters as intertextual agents, I argue that the three coloured women on whom the novel focuses – Helen, Marion, and Brenda – use texts in distinctive ways that illuminate their struggles to position themselves in South Africa’s complex and changing racial landscape. Racial “passing” is one form of a larger pattern in the novel of the use of citation and imitation to achieve specific ends. By embedding the citations of Helen and Marion within the citation-rich narrative of Brenda, Wicomb lays bare the mechanisms of identity construction within a work that stages and highlights its own intertextual practices.Item The Real McCloy: Fiction, History, and the Real in Zoë Wicomb’s “The One That Got Away”(Indiana University Press, 2017-02) Hoegberg, David E.; Department of English, School of Liberal ArtsThis article examines the intertextual connections between Zoë Wicomb's 2008 short story, "The One That Got Away," and Helen McCloy's 1945 novel, The One That Got Away, a piece of detective fiction used by Wicomb's main character as the basis for a work of contemporary art. Drawing concepts from Wicomb's 2005 essay on setting and intertextuality, I argue that Wicomb creatively interacts with McCloy's novel to explore issues of authorial ethics, historical representation, and ideological critique. At the heart of both works is a series of triangular relationships between readers, texts, and their corporeal authors that foreground acts of resistant reading and creative reframing. Familiarity with McCloy's novel reveals new forms of reference and commentary at work in Wicomb's story.