Hyperreality, Intertextuality, and the Study of Latin Poetry

INTRODUCTION

Traditionally, the creation of models is a mainstay of the scientific mindset. The idea is to capture the distinctive or essential features of a phenomenon through a simplified or idealized representation of it. Not all models are ontologically the same. They can be descriptive and, therefore, constituted by language, but they can also be non-linguistic and have visual and object-like qualities. Whatever the case, every model raises important questions about its relationship with the phenomenon that it seeks to grasp and the method or procedure by which a model is applied back to the phenomenon.¹ My aim in this article is to assess the methodological scope of intertextuality in light of recent and less recent reflections on the power of images and the notion of the hyperreal. My goal is to enable an open conversation within and beyond disciplinary and sub-disciplinary boundaries, and to continue to do so despite institutional crises and differences of opinions, experiences, and backgrounds.

As one of Arethusa’s readers rightly points out, my contribution “reads more like a suggestive lecture than a carefully argued and documented journal article.” It does indeed, and I left it so intentionally. I was collecting ideas and texts for this small project when, on the early morning of September 4, 2010, a 7.1 earthquake hit Christchurch, the city in which I live and work. On that occasion, the city suffered serious damage (including the library), but fortunately there were no fatalities. On February 22, 2011, on the same day the library finally reopened and the second day of the new academic year, another major earthquake hit the city. This time 185 people died, and it is unclear how many were injured. A week later, we resumed teaching in tents set up on campus and carried on business “as usual” throughout the whole year, without libraries to go to, and offering support as best we could to the students who did not flee the city. This article has developed in that environment. Most of the considerations that it contains arose during precious conversations with friends and colleagues, while browsing notes scattered in notebooks and electronic documents, and through Google searches. Accordingly, this is a theoretical reflection, but it is also an experiment in what it means to pursue humanistic work in crisis situations—and to keep doing so in spite of major disruptions and minimal resources.

DISCOURSE AND RELATED MATTERS

In the last decades, the term “discourse” has become increasingly common in a variety of disciplines, so much so that it is invariably left undefined as if its meaning were self-explanatory. In the analysis of literary texts, “discourse” invokes the work of a group of French philosophers of the late 60s. Michel Foucault is one of them, and in his Archaeology of Knowledge, he defines discourse as follows (1972.80):

Instead of gradually reducing the rather fluctuating meaning of the word “discourse,” I believe that I have in fact added to its meanings: treating it sometimes as the general domain of all statements, sometimes as an individualizable group of statements, and sometimes as a regulated practice that accounts for a number of statements.

In the first definition, discourse is an entity made out of sequences of signs organized in the form of enouncements (enoncés) or statements; in the second, discourse is the combination of statements that characterize large bodies of knowledge: something comparable to the disciplines or areas of human endeavor. In the third, it blends with practice and the cumulative norms that determine the production of specific statements.

Foucault’s definition of discourse draws heavily on Ferdinand de Saussure’s understanding of the linguistic sign and the enormous success that this understanding has encountered among theorists. In his Course in General Linguistics (1916, French ed.), de Saussure distinguished between parole and langue. Parole refers to the realm of individual moments of language use—of particular “utterances” or “messages,” whether spoken or written—and langue to the system or code of the language (le code de la langue) or, to put it in de Saussure’s words...