David Cowart

Bio: David Cowart is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Deconstruction & Intertextuality. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 30 citations.

Literary Symbiosis: The Reconfigured Text in Twentieth-Century Writing

Abstract: Usually literary borrowings are so integrated into the new work as to be disguised; however, according to David Cowart, recent decades have seen an increasing number of texts that attach themselves to their sources in seemingly parasitic - but, more accurately, symbiotic - dependence. It is this kind of mutuality that Cowart examines in this book. He considers, for instance, what happens when Tom Stoppard, in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead", rewrites "Hamlet" from the point of view of its two most insignificant characters, or when Jean Rhys, in "Wide Sargasso Sea", imagines the early life of Bertha Rochester, the mad woman in the attic in "Jane Eyre". In such works of literary symbiosis, Cowart notes, intertextuality surrenders its usual veil or near invisibility to become concrete and explicit - a phenomenon that Cowart sees as part of the postmodern tendency toward self-consciousness and self-reflexivity. He recognises that literary symbiosis has some close cousins and so limits his compass to works that are genuine reinterpretations, wuinings that cast a new light on earlier works through "some tangible measure of formal or thematic evolution, whether on the part of the guest alone or the host and guest together". Proceeding from this intriguing premise, he offers detailed readings of texts that range from Auden's "The Sea and the Mirror," based on "The Tempest", to Valerie Martin's reworking of "The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde" as "Mary Reilly", to various fictions based on "Robinson Crusoe". He also considers, in Nabokov's "Pale Fire", an example of text and parasite-text within a single work. Drawing on and responding to the ideas of disparate thinkers and critics - among them Freud, Harold Bloom, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Hillis Miller, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr - Cowart discusses literary symbiosis as Oedipal drama, as reading and misreading, as deconstruction, as Signifying, and as epistemic dialogue. Although his main examples come from the contemporary period, he refers to works dating as far as back as the classical era, works representing a range of genres (drama, fiction, poetry, opera, and film). The study of literary symbiosis, Cowart contends, can reveal much about the dynamics of literary renewal in every age. If all literature redeems the familiar, he suggests, literary symbiosis redeems the familiar in literature itself.

Censored Translations in Franco’s Spain: The TRACE Project — Theatre and Fiction (English-Spanish)

Abstract: This article explores whether translational phenomena that are particular to censoring societies, such as Franco’s Spain, exist and, if so, whether they are exclusive to this type of recipient context. By using data from the TRACE project, translated theatre and fiction are analysed in terms of both the external restrictions imposed by official censorship and the long-term effects of official censorship on the recipient context. The study reveals three outstanding transfer processes during the period–adaptation, pseudotranslation and the massive cloning of genres, settings and character stereotypes originally imported through translation–, as well as the prevalence of intersemiotic chains that linked texts across languages and textual mode boundaries. When compared with work done on present-day texts translated from English to Spanish, our findings seem to indicate that these phenomena were more widespread in the period under study but cannot be considered exclusive to official censorship contexts.

Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel

Abstract: Images of loss and yearning played a crucial role in literary texts written in the later part of the twentieth century. Despite deep cultural differences, novelists from Africa, the Caribbean, Great Britain, and the United States share a sense that the economic, social, and political forces associated with late modernity have evoked widespread nostalgia within the communities in which they write. In this original and wide-ranging study, John J. Su explores the relationship between nostalgia and ethics in novels across the English-speaking world. He challenges the tendency in literary studies to characterise memory as positive and nostalgia as necessarily negative. Instead, this book argues that nostalgic fantasies are crucial to the ethical visions presented by topical novels. From Jean Rhys to Wole Soyinka and from V. S. Naipaul to Toni Morrison, Su identifies nostalgia as a central concern in the twentieth-century novel.

Rewriting Woolf s Mrs. Dalloway: Homage, Sexual Identity, and the Single-Day Novel by Cunningham, Lippincott, and Lanchester

Abstract: (2004). Rewriting Woolf@quot;s Mrs. Dalloway: Homage, Sexual Identity, and the Single-Day Novel by Cunningham, Lippincott, and Lanchester. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 45, No. 4, pp. 363-382.

“Once I Would Have Gone Back … But Not Any Longer”: Nostalgia and Narrative Ethics in Wide Sargasso Sea

Abstract: [Bertha is] necessary to the plot, but always she shrieks, howls, laughs horribly, attacks all and sundry—offstage. For me (and for you I hope) she must be right on stage. (Jean Rhys, Letters 156) We need, therefore, a kind of parallel history of, let us say, victimisation, which would counter the history of success and victory. To memorize the victims of history—the sufferers, the humiliated, the forgotten—should be a task for all of us at the end of this century. (Paul Ricoeur, “Memory and Forgetting” 10-11)

“Destabilising the Canon: a Survey and a Bibliography of Intertextual Critical Theory”

Abstract: The concept of intertextuality emerged from the specific historical and critical context of the nineteen-sixties: from Russian Formalism and French Nouvelle Critique in particular. During those years, as the notion of ‘text’ became central to the literary debate, critics began to analyse the historical process created by successive reader responses together with changes in the literary systems of reference which constitute the context for reading. The dynamics operating within one text and between different texts, and the typological systems to which the concepts of reader, author and historical context belong were under discussion. Now, at the beginning of a new century, the concept of intertextuality has achieved wide currency, especially among critics of postmodernism and those with an interest in destabilising the traditional canon of Western literature. It has not yet, however, been widely used to investigate the multiple and fascinating interactions of women’s writing in the broad context of Europe. Promising beginnings have been made in the parallel field of comparative literature,2 but few of these exploit the potentialities of intertextual theory. The purpose of this essay is, therefore, to encourage and facilitate new work in this field. The essay has a