In the introduction to a recent journal volume devoted to intertextuality (American Journal of Philology 134 (2013) p.4 n.22), Yelena Baraz and Christopher van den Berg mention Tesserae as offering one of several new approaches to intertextual study. Their discussion prompted consideration of how the project figures in this larger conversation, so I thought I would venture a few thoughts.
Other new approaches were offered in a series of panels at American Philological Association (APA) annual meetings: “Allusion and Intertextuality in Classical Historiography” (2011, organized by John Marincola), “Intertextuality and Its Discontents” (2012, organized by Baraz and van den Berg, and the basis of their volume), and “Historiography, Poetry, and the Intertext” (2013, organized by Christina Kraus). I was able to attend the last two, as well as now read the papers from the 2012 panel.
As one would expect, these contributions showed a kaleidoscopic variety. The 2012 volume alone deals with Pindar (Nicholson), Machon (LeVen), Cicero (Stull), Valerius Maximus (Welch), Roman law (Peirano), Pliny and Martial (Marchesi), and Augustan monuments (Roller). For all of this diversity, the authors were unified in attempting to offer a new view of intertextuality. As the description of the 2012 conference panel put it, their efforts explore “whether a more diverse application [of methods] will alter or challenge current orthodoxy” and take into account “traditionally overlooked genres, cultural practices, or terminology, and . . . alternative theoretical models to intertextuality.”
These attempts to renewing intertextual studies have largely involved shaking off Derrida’s dictum that il n’y a pas de hors-texte. Roller sees intertextuality as part of a larger cultural phenomenon of “intersignification” that involves connections with spaces and physical objects. A restlessness with the text was also evident in the recent emphasis on intertextuality in prose works. The discussion at the end of the 2013 “Historiography, Poetry, and the Intertext” session centered on the possibility of ancient historians referencing events that were common knowledge, rather than passages in texts (an issue raised by David Levene in his Livy on the Hannibalic War). When Livy writes of the battle of Cannae, he may be referring to common knowledge of those events, not to any particular written account of them. If so, is that intertextuality? How do we understand it?
The pull away from the text would seem to have consequences for how we view our avowedly textual project. We tend to think that there is a lot left to understand about classical and other intertextuality, where it takes place, how it works, and what it means. The current burst of research on intertextuality within historical texts, and Greek texts generally, shows that this is in fact a common view in classics. The discussions highlighted here are naturally, and inevitably, aimed at building on this textual base an expanded view of semiotic relatedness. We hope to support this continued textual work, and note in particular that the recent addition of Latin historical prose to the Tesserae site should make it easier to do the kind of research on these texts traditionally done on poetry. We also suspect that the restlessness with textual strictures comes from the sheer difficulty of taking in the mass of potential intertexts and their significance, in the fullest Kristevan sense. Here too, we hope that by moving toward more intuitive large-scale views of intertextuality, including visualizations, we can help make sense of a potentially vast network of connections.
There are reasons to be optimistic, then, that digital methods will provide a fresh look at intertextuality. They may also prove productive in studying the broader phenomenon of intersignification. Roller is interested in the meaning generated by conceptual connections made by observing physical objects in space, in particular, monuments. As it happens, Tom Elliott and his colleagues at Pleiades have developed a protocol for making common, canonical references to places, in digital media and elsewhere. This may sound like just a system for providing unique identifiers for spots on a map. If it were just that, it would in fact still be quite useful, since we could then try to devise productive ways to link and understand together texts and geospatial locations using such identifiers.
But Pleiades has actually done something much more interesting and forward-looking. The Pleiades team has in effect asked itself: What do we do about a place that no longer exists? Where do we locate an ancient town swallowed by an earthquake? Or one attested to have been in various locations? To address these questions, they have come up with a particular concept of “place.” The Gallic town Treveri is associated with modern Trier, but its exact extent in antiquity is unclear. Rather than being tied to one particular location on a map, “Treveri” exists as a “place” in Pleaides that has a variety of attributes, including a set of possible geographic locations. By moving to this level of abstraction, the Pleiades team has in effect shifted from mapping spatial locations to creating conceptual entities. In a turn of events that would have pleased Saussure, these entities are defined exclusively by their relationships with other markers, as when the name “Treveri” is associated with makers for several map locations.
Juxtaposing this work with that of Roller and others on extra-textual connectedness leads to an obvious suggestion: use Pleiades or a similar system to trace intersignification. So, in the world of monuments, we could create a unique identifier for the obelisk of Montecitorio,
as a “place” or possibly a “thing.” We could equally well create an identifier for the vanished Solarium Augusti that the obelisk used to occupy (image above). We could then construct some sort of model of the kind of intersignification that Roller proposes, connecting the texts, places, and other entities associated with the obelisk and Solarium, employing the sort of linked data architecture that Pleiades is based upon. The resulting model would not give us an answer all the cultural questions involved in the combined Augustan semiotic system that these monuments participated in. But it could at least provide a clearer view of some constituents of this sort of intersignification and so perhaps help us address their cultural significance.
Whether this sort of system would be part of or outside of the text—we can leave that for the spirit of Derrida to decide.