Popular Culture Review Vol. 24, No. 1, Winter 2013 | Page 40

36 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