Plurality And Dialogue:Intertextuality In A History Of The World In 10^1/2 Chapters

Julian Barnes, having established himself as one of the three giants in contemporary British literary circle, is widely renowned for the experimental innovation in forms-and styles of literature. Being one of his representative works, A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters tries to compose a fictitious version of world history by eleven disintegrated and non-chronological-chapters, but thanks to its loosely related plots, a few critics put it down as a collection of short stories rather than a well-organized novel. Against this point of view, this thesis employs the theory of intertextuality to elucidate, on one hand, how Barnes transforms and absorbs pretexts and various genres; on the other, in what way all chapters in this novel construct an interconnected and dialogic world of texts. "Intertextuality" in this thesis is defined as the relationships between any text and the total knowledge of this given text, code, and signifying practice. The text here, instead of being restricted to literary texts, also includes non-literary works, society, history and culture.Based on this broad definition, this thesis manifests that intertextuality is one of the salient features of A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters. It is, firstly, demonstrated as the extratextuality represented by the transformation of pretexts and the collage of various genres. Secondly, it is evidenced by the intratextuality by means of the recurrence of images and motifs. Through the intercourse with the pretexts, Barnes manages to reconstruct a series of small histories from the marginalized voices, calling into question the grand narratives in western civilization, but these marginal voices cannot completely subvert or get away from the original ones in the mainstream. The mixture of genres, or generic intertextuality, above all, rebels against the cult of generic purity, eliminating the discrepancies of genres in ranks; in addition, it blurs the boundaries between history and literature; finally the coexistence of different genres corresponds to the view that history is "a multi-media collage". Meanwhile, the repetitive images and motifs have all chapters entwined with each other, extending and deepening the novel’s themes.