Intertextuality as internal adaptation in Ann-Marie MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona (Good morning Juliet), Robert Lepage's Le Confessionnal, and Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter

Abstract

With the analysis of three intertextual works, this thesis presents a new concept of intertextuality in the arena of Comparative Canadian Literature. The inner workings of the intertextual work are examined as the internal adaptation of the textual components at play within Ann-Marie MacDonald's Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet ), Robert Lepage's Le Confessionnal and Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter. Internal adaptation studies the movement or oscillation between the narrative components and their inevitable (albeit rare) merging within the intertextual work. These components are the primary and secondary texts: the primary being the creation of the current author; the secondary, the excerpt or citation inserted into the intertextual work (the overall teat). These components control and assume the reader's or viewer's perspective or focus. As a scene shifts from one shot to the next, so does the viewer's perspective shift from one text to the neat. How meaning is transferred from one textual framework to another, from one teat and form to another, is the preoccupation of both the intertextual work and this concept of internal adaptation. Internal adaptation is introduced through an analysis of Ann-Marie MacDonald's play, Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet ), because of the clear-cut distinctions between its primary and secondary texts and because of the unmistakeable presence of the blended text (the merging between the primary and secondary). This study is followed by those of two (less evidently blended) works. Robert Lepage's Le Confessionnal and Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter expose the subtleties typically (and more realistically) associated with the intertextual work.