Picturizing narrative innovation: a bird’s eye view of hypervisualized intertextuality in Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English
Abstract
Via the use of ‘seeing’ strategies (pictographization) rather than just ‘telling’ strategies (textualization), Booker-prize shortlister, Stephen Kelman, in Pigeon English, successfully synergizes multimodality to inscribe and create a dual trope of active and passive visuality – of both ‘seeing’, and of being ‘watched’. Kelman’s intertextual strategies of narrative construction, while obviously simple and overt in their taxonomic variety, including, for example, Adaptation, Retro, Appropriation, Parody, Pastiche and Simulation (according to D’Angelo’s ‘rhetoric of intertextuality’, 2010), also function in subtly complex ways, inevitably entailing a covert, discoursed, hybridized, triumvirate of re-coded, textographic strategies including, but not limited to, multimodal-genre mixing, multisensory visual Englishization, and picturized meaning. The author argues that Pigeon English encapsulates an innovative polychromatic, 21st-century literary vision which is ultimately multisensory: visualized, auralized, and textualized.
Faculty Members
- Anjali Pandey - Salisbury University, MD, USA
Themes
- intertextuality
- visuality
- narrative complexity
- multimodality
- 21st-century literary vision
- literary innovation
Categories
- Humanities
- Visual and performing arts
- Visual arts, media studies design, and arts management nec
- Spanish language and literature
- English literature (British and commonwealth)
- Foreign languages, literatures, and linguistics
- Film, cinema, and media studies
- English language and literature, letters
- Visual arts, media studies, and design
- Comparative literature
- Rhetoric and composition, and writing studies