CARNIVAL OF INTERTEXTUALITY: KURT VONNEGUT’S TIMEQUAKE

Abstract

This paper analyzes Kurt Vonnegut’s hybrid genre text Timequake (1997), which with its dialogism and intertextual references to other texts and film creates new meanings and appears as a carnival of intertextuality. The study is informed by Julia Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality, which perceives the text as an open productivity (Kristeva, 1980), and by Bakhtin’s theory of carnival conflated with polyphony and dialogism, which articulate a unity of uninterrupted continuity and metamorphosis, “of the world’s revival and renewal” (Bakhtin, 1984), where a variety of colliding voices come into contact in a collective dialogue. The dynamic relationship of comic and dramatic recontextualizations between this and other texts, or body of texts, and mediums, illuminates how this interrelationship highlights the transposition and subversion of meaning, as well as the transgression and carnivalization, which augment the discursive reversals between referential and self-referential, fact and fiction.

Keywords

• intertextuality
• carnivalization
• dialogism
• kurt vonnegut
• mikhail bakhtin
• julia kristeva