ABSTRACT
The common perception of authors as loners who refrain from any social interaction and prefer to wallow in their loneliness, looking to the Muses for creative inspiration is an exaggerated fallacy and based in the false perception that creative work involves the writing of a text ex nihilo. On the contrary, creativity is the process of integration of previous creative work in relation to the social world. The text that an author writes in essentially a tapestry made from fabric provided by previous creative work and the social text. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with its intertextual elements and reverse-intertextual elements is a classic example of the same. The notion of intertextuality has freed the reader from the grasp of the author blurred the lines between author and reader.
As I was reading the three essays that I wrote for this class, I noticed a common thread among them and as I started to pull on that thread, I uncovered more and more in my own work. This project is my attempt to do justice to everything that I implied but never directly addressed in my previous essays. My first essay discussed the collaborative approach to writing in the oral culture in contrast to the author-itative approach in the print culture while my second project analyzed Frankenstein as a hypertextual work and my third project discussed how the advent of hypertext is bringing us back to the community authorship era of the oral culture. I noticed that I was talking about how creative work feeds off of the creative work that came before it in all three of my projects. I was simply not addressing the issue directly and talking about it in a tangential manner.
With this project, I decided I want to address this notion of intertextuality and its larger implications on literature and literary theory in a more direct manner. This re-vision of my earlier projects was focused on bringing more clarity to the one element that connected all three of my projects. One of my biggest take-away points was how the process of revision and expansion of a project can sometimes lead to a change in perspectives and perhaps a change in the initial argument.
As we had not engaged with any critics who dealt with this matter directly in our class, my primary focus for this project was research. Most of the time spent on this project was spent finding and reading critical perspectives on the topic at hand and putting them in conversation with each other. The research was eye-opening for me as I found myself going from critic to critic to critic and soon realized that the discussion about intertextuality is more complicated and extensive than I had initially anticipated. One of the lessons I learned was when research stops being research and starts becoming procrastination for the actual act of writing.
As I am learning and practicing academic writing for the very first time, this course was monumental in my development as a writer. While I ended up adding more items to my “to-do” list than checking off of it, I feel that the writing strategies I have learned in this class have been incredibly helpful in my growth as a writer as well as broadened my perspective on literature and reading as a whole.
Going ahead, I would like to continue work on becoming better at utilizing the writing strategies that I have learnt and applying them to my academic life.
Marking Up The Margins 