File spoon-archives/seminar-11.archive/collage_1994-96/seminar-11.Oct94-Nov94, message 8


Date: Tue, 25 Oct 1994 10:27:31 -0800 (PST)
From: Will Garrett-Petts <PETTS-AT-CARINS.CARIBOO.BC.CA>
Subject: subjectivities & collage


In her last post, Anne Berkeley asked "What I don't get is collage.  What
the heck are we referring to?  Did I miss something?  Or are we trying
to "invent" a definition . . .?"

It strikes me that the initial cluster of comments re: subjectivities
implies an answer to some of Anne's questions:  that is, in an academic
setting, any conversation about an observed form (or form of response)
will likely begin with "disciplinary" presuppositions.  And any inter-
disciplinary (or multidisciplinary) conversation is likely to foster all
kinds of misunderstandings.  I'd like to suggest, therefore, that we
"frame" the discussion of "collage" by situating it within its various
and competing disciplinary incarnations.  Let me begin by offering
some observations about the place of collage in literary studies/theory:

	Generally speaking, the notion of collage has been imported
into literary studies as an equivalent term for "intertextuality": as a
form of allusion, citation, or echoing.  Interest has tended to focus
on collage as a formal strategy linked to a larger rhetorical enterprise.
Eva-Marie Kroller, for example, writes of collage as a means of unsettling
the prosaic: it deconstructs "hegemonies, definitions, and unities."
Similarly, Manina Jones (in an excellent "literary" take on the topic:
_That Art of Difference: Documentary-Collage_) sees collage as affiliated
with "a group of writings Mikhail Bakhtin refers to as the 'seriocomical
genres,' which bring a multiplicity of disparate styles and voices into a
single contextual space."  In their most overt manifestation literary
collages make extensive use of "inserted genres, such as letters, found
manuscripts, parodies of high genres, and parodically reinterpreted
citations..." (Jones).  This dual process of insertion and ironic
citation emphasizes the reader's sense of "mediation" and "materiality"?

Will

W.F. Garrett-Petts
English & Modern Languages

petts-AT-cariboo.bc.ca


   

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