The Biblical Subtext In Branimir Scepanovic's Mouth Full Of Earth (Report) by Serbian Studies - Books

The Biblical Subtext in Branimir Scepanovic's Mouth Full of Earth (Report)

By Serbian Studies Reference 22/06/2006

The tenn intertexuality has been used since the 1960s, with the transition from structuralism to poststructuralism in literary theory. French theoretician Julia Kristeva, who introduced this term to the theory of literature, deserves the greatest credit for devising its terminological definition. The tenn "subtext" was first used by Kiril Taranovsky (1) who defined it as an already existing text in a new text. The Bible as a book of universal value, and thereby literary value, has been for many writers a source of themes, motifs, ideas, styles and typologies. Twentieth-century criticism is dominated by theories asserting that everything has already been said in literature; ali that changes is how literary material created over the centuries is manipulated. New works create their value exclusively in intertextual relation to works that comprise the literary tradition. And the Bible is treated primarily as a literary text. In the 1980s, so-called "mythological criticism" appeared, a poststructural principle of literary analysis that discovers parallels between Biblical situations and specific literary works. Attitudes towards the Bible as a subtext vary: ranging from predisposition (where the author clearly intends for the problems and ideas to relate to the Bible and does not contest the aesthetic and stylistic principles it offers), to those that completely reexamine and parody Biblical themes and truths.