Stylistic subordination and expressive shifts as a consequence of intertextual (hypertextual) strategies in the prose of Tomáš Horváth and Balla Cover Image

Štylistická subordinovanosť a výrazové posuny ako dôsledok intertextuálnych (hypertextových) stratégií v prózach Tomáša Horvátha a Ballu
Stylistic subordination and expressive shifts as a consequence of intertextual (hypertextual) strategies in the prose of Tomáš Horváth and Balla

Author(s): Marek Mitka
Subject(s): Slovak Literature, Theory of Literature
Published by: Lingvokulturologické a prekladateľsko-tlmočnícke centrum excelentnosti pri Filozofickej fakulte Prešovskej university v Prešove (LPTCE)
Keywords: literary postmodernism; intertextuality; hypertextuality; fiction

Summary/Abstract: Marek Mitka's study deals with the interpretation of the short stories of two important Slovak writers who debuted after 1989 - Tomáš Horváth and Balla. In their work he finds diagnistical stimulus for the research of intertextuality - a typical phenomenon of literary postmodernism. Horváth's short story production is practically entirely built on the principle of imitation, parody or, more generally, more or less faithful imitation of foreign textual prefaces or writers' poetics. The situation is different with Balla, as he applied intertextual procedures in an explicit sense, especially in his collection of short stories Unglik, and he called his specific textual formations Tekuté poviedky. This is literally textual sampling, since Balla composed these short stories exclusively from sentences he had already written. Mitka has also used some theoretical background and opinions of the French literary scholar and semiotician Gérard Genette to determine in more detail the typology of these intertextual practices in Horváth and Balla. For example, Mitka productively considers the possibility of using Genette's terms transtextuality and hypertextuality as equivalents for the more frequently used notion of intertextuality. Last but not least, Mitka reflects on Horváth's and Balla's texts from a receptive or purely aesthetic point of view, considering what feelings these intertextual constructs evoke in the ordinary readers and in the professional literary critics.

  • Issue Year: 13/2022
  • Issue No: 51
  • Page Range: 152-161
  • Page Count: 10
  • Language: Slovak