Intertextual Pursuits: Literary Meditations in Modern Spanish Narrative. Jeanne P. Brownlow, John W. Kronik, eds. Lewisburg, Pa. / London. Bucknell University Press / Associated University Presses. 1998. 273 pages. ISBN 0-8387-5370-1.

Gerling, David Ross

Twelve essays plus a substantial introduction make up Intertextual Pursuits. The introductory article and the final essay, respectively, define intertextuality and argue convincingly for its continuing importance as a universal literary philosophy. Each of the eleven essays in-between addresses a particular facet of intertextuality in modern Spanish peninsular prose. Nevertheless, the scope of all thirteen contributions takes in as well the cinema, opera, ethics, historiography, feminism, religion, and even genetics.

In the introduction, "The Death and Life of Intertextuality," editors Jeanne Brownlow and John Kronik develop a composite definition of intertextuality, a term coined by Julia Kristeva in the 1960s. For their purpose they enlist the aid of an impressive group that includes, besides Kristeva, Mikhail Bakhtin, Harold Bloom, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. The editors determine that intertextuality is discourse and that it transcends the mere recognition of sources and influences to embrace the characteristics of the cybertext, where there is an "absolute and infinite interconnectedness of things, conditions, and ideas."

In "Splitting the Reference: Postmodern Fiction and the Idea of History in Francoist Spain," David Herzberger subsumes into the realm of intertextuality the poststructuralist penchant to eradicate the distinction between historiography and postmodern fiction. This "splitting of the reference" denies historiography its special status as exclusive truth bearer and argues that all narrative, whether nonfiction or fiction, invents rather than presents life. Gonzalo Navajas, in "Intertextuality and the Reappropriation of History in Contemporary Spanish Fiction and Film," exposes the subversive nature of Spanish cinema and literature that appropriated history during the Franco dictatorship. He also reveals the intertextual compulsion of Pedro Almodovar to reconfigure popular culture through parody and irony in the film Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (Eng. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), where he turns upside down the concept of male dominance. Post-Foucauldian theory on the body as text evolves smoothly into an intertextual discussion on Galdos's novel La desheredada and female corporeality in Akiko Tsuchiya's piece "The Female Body under Surveillance." The essay also confronts the naturalistic underpinnings of the nineteenth-century fear of the unfettered female and details how the protagonist of La desheredada used her sexuality to foil male tyranny.

In "The Domestication of Don Juan in Women Novelists of Modernist Spain" Roberta Johnson recounts how Concha Espina, Carmen de Burgos, Sofia Casanova, and Blanca de los Rios turned the tables on Valle- Inclan's latter-day rake, the Marquis of Bradomin, by encoding into their narration the original axiology expressed by Tirso de Molina and Jose Zorrilla apropos of Don Juan. The final essay, Harold Boudreau's "Memes: Intertextuality's Minimal Replicators," significantly brings the entire book to the threshold of the new millennium in that it equates cultural units of information, "memes," with genes. His cutting-edge article puts intertextual theory into practice by melding harmoniously genetics and literary criticism, areas of thought hitherto considered unrelated by most literary theorists.

Intertextual Pursuits is more than a critical approach to the modern belles lettres of Spain. It is mind-expanding in the tradition of books of ideas and removes Spanish literature from its spatial and temporal boundaries by thrusting it into the flux of interconnected humanistic discourse.

David Ross Gerling

Sam Houston State University