Intertextuality has signaled change, appropriation, adaptation, and derivation. It has focused readers on irresolvable questions of influence and origination, progressive or regressive movement across continents, periods, and media. Inhabited by Stories: Critical Essays on Tales Retold takes a different approach. What would a model of literary study look like that steps out of time's river and embraces not only the presence and proximity of the world to the senses, but also of the past and the future to the present here and now? When stories inhabit us, imagination and memory extend our ability to see and feel. Phenomenological experience is lived, not just thought. Such a perspective suggests that the past and future inhabit the present, increase the depth of sensory perception itself, and enrich the range of our affective and ethical responses. Grounded in the lived experience of reading, this perspective offers an alternative to an idea of intertextuality as simply following lines of influence and appropriation. It focuses on the expansion of experience created by telling and retelling stories. Ironically, for literary theorists and critics, perhaps the highest form of both praise and critique is a tale retold, since such retellings attest to literature's instructive power and its perennial regeneration.
About the Author: Nancy A. Barta-Smith is Professor of English at Slippery Rock University. Her research and teaching areas include intertextuality, intersections of literature, science, philosophy, and the environment, critical theory, and rhetoric. Her research is informed by feminism and the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. She has published in the International Philosophical Quarterly, Forging Radical Alliances (Rowman and Littlefield) and Literature, Writing, and the Natural World (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). She co-authored the book In Search of Eloquence: Cross-Disciplinary Conversations on the Role of Writing in Undergraduate Education (Hampton Press) with Cornelius Cosgrove, and essays in Teaching English in the Two-Year College and Eloquent Images (MIT Press) with Danette DiMarco. She is past recipient of Slippery Rock University's President's Award for Scholarly and Creative Achievement. Danette DiMarco is Professor of English at Slippery Rock University, where she teaches courses in intertextuality, composition, and British and world literatures. She has published essays in College Literature, Mosaic, Papers on Language and Literature, Sagetrieb, and What Really Works! (Christopher-Gordon Press). She has co-authored essays in Teaching English in the Two-Year College and Eloquent Images (MIT Press) with Nancy A. Barta-Smith. She is past recipient of Slippery Rock University's President's Award for Scholarly and Creative Achievement and its President's Award for Excellence in Teaching. Her essay Going Wendigo: The Emergence of the Iconic Monster was awarded Best Article for 2011 by the Margaret Atwood Society, an international organization of scholars, teachers, and students interested in Atwood's work.