Intertextual Reading Of The Ballad Of The Sad Café

The theory of intertextuality is a significant theory which belongs to the literary creation and literary reviews in the poststructuralism and postmodernism. Mallarme says:"all books, more or less, contain the fusion of some operative repetition."T. S. Eliot writes:"minor poets borrows, major poets steal."Intertextuality claims that no text exists in isolation. This text has a correlation with past texts, present texts, and future texts. The presence of all the texts is like a web. In the web, there is no source, no order, and no scale. Therefore, interpreting the text is no longer limited to the single text; other texts can be read for reference. The ultimate meaning of the text is end. The author's authority is disappearing. Therefore, reading the text varies from person to person, and interpreting the text is simultaneously the recreation of the text.Carson Maulers is a wunderkind in the 20th century of American literary history. V. S. Pritchett praises her as:"the most remarkable novelist…to come out of America in a generation". Tennessee Williams views"even if she is not the greatest writer in the world, she is also the greatest one in our country". The female writer is almost unknown in our country. Her Ballad of the Sad Caféis a famous one. It is Mr. Li Wenham who first translated the novella into Chinese in 1979.The Chinese version was collected into Contemporary American Short Novels. The first one who introduces the female writer is Mr. Zhao Yemen. His"Sad Ballad of Lonely Person"gave a general introduction of Carson McCullers and her major works. Today, papers on The Ballad in domestic research are concerned about the theme of loneliness and love, the significance of creating the freakish characters, which all belong to the introductory essays. The point of view is unitary. This paper will interpret the novella by virtue of other texts from the point of view of intertexutality.This dissertation is divided into four chapters. The first chapter is an introduction of Carson's life and works, especially The Ballad. The second chapter is combing the theory of intertextuality, including the origin, and significance of the term and theory. The third chapter is the key part of the dissertation. It starts to interpret The Ballad in details by virtue of intertextual reading. This chapter consists of five parts: the first part is the intertextual reading between Frazer's The Golden Bough and Carson's The Ballad; the second part is on Ballad's the absorption and quotation of Greek myths; the third part is concerned about the genre of the novella, the gothic novel to witness Ballad is a...