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Populär Culture Review
Notes
1- Shakespeare is universally known for his theatre rather than his poetry.
2- It is indeed not by chance that the great 17th Century French dramaturge
Moliere was adamant in Controlling every aspect of his performances; the
sending entity in the theatrical medium is not solely the text, but all the
components of the performance: director, actors, prop-masters and so on.
3- Naturally, Eagleton’s casual elimination of an entire narrative genre from
literature—namely the hard-boiled detective story—might seem a bit excessive,
especially when we consider the significance this particular narrative structure
has acquired in modern and postmodem societies. (See Ferreras Savoye, “The
Detective Narration and the Myth of the Urban Truth.”)
4- For a critical analysis of the official literary canon, see Ferreras Savoye,
“Comic Books and the New Literature” and “Postmodem Doom and
Transmetropolitan Salvation.”
5- Simone Weil, author of La pesanteur et la gräce, was a socio-metaphysical
thinker Contemporary of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir who
attempted to reconcile faith and social consciousness.
6- Renown deconstructionist Paul de Man gloriously fuses literature and
criticism in the most nonchalant manner in the brilliant conclusion of his often
quoted essay, “Semiology and Rhetoric”: “Literature as well as criticism—the
difference between them being delusive—is condemned (or privileged) to be
forever the most rigorous and, consequently, the most unreliable language in
which man names and transforms himself.” (33); notwithstanding the inherent
sexism of de Man’s choice of words—after all, women should also be allowed
to “name and transform themselves”—and the fact that two contradictions in a
row—condemned/privileged, rigorous/unreliable—do not necessarily make for a
coherent Statement, we can observe that the alleged “delusiveness” of the
difference between literature and criticism is presented as a given, as if it were
such an obvious truth that it deserved neither any further demonstration nor its
own sentence.
7- “// n ’y a pas de hörs-texte”: the word hors-texte in French comes from the
lexical field of printing and refers to the illustrated plates that accompany the
text of a book, hence, a correct translation of this well-known Derridian precept
would be: “there are no illustrations,” a much less appealing formula than the
Creative English translation “there is nothing outside the text,” which adds the
word “nothing” to the original, suggesting a definite philosophical depth to what
appears to be a simple observation in the original French.
8- Most of the narrative paradigms found in Kristeva’s Murder in Byzantium
(2008) are strikingly similar to those we encounter in Dan Brown’s religious
thrillers—ancient secrets, mysterious cyphers, a religious sect and a killer on the
loose—and the author did state that her intention had been to write the “anti-Da
Vinci Code:” In terms of readership, Kristeva has indeed succeeded, for the