Beschrijving

Seeks to transcend the barriers of time, space, and sexual identity that is imposed by traditional approaches to literature. This book cites as the shaping principle of her work the central tenet of intertextuality – that a literary work is not a closed system which can be characterized by reference either to its creator or to its beholder.

Four writers—the first, an eighteenth-century Frenchman whose works still retain their power to shock, scandalize, and instruct; the others, three twentieth-century Frenchmen, heirs and explicators of their earlier compatriot—form the central cast of characters of this literary-philosophical dialogue which seeks to transcend the barriers of time, space, and sexual identity imposed by traditional approaches to literature.

Professor Gallop, acknowledging her debt to such writers as Friedrich Nietzsche and Roland Barthes, cites as the shaping principle of her work the central tenet of intertextuality—that a literary work is not a closed system which can be definitively characterized by reference either to its creator or to its beholder. Rather, reader, writer, and text meet, react, and interact in a performance of \