Research Article

Kristevan intertextuality between Waiting for Godot and The Pillowman

Number: 28 June 21, 2022
  • Ajda Baştan *
TR EN

Kristevan intertextuality between Waiting for Godot and The Pillowman

Abstract

This study is focused on intertextual interpretation over the common elements in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman. Both plays are excellent examples of how reality and imagination interact with one another. Waiting for Godot and The Pillowman are psychological plays that explore the relationship around existentialism, death, and future hope. Beckett and McDonagh are two well-known Irish playwrights who will probably always hold a special place in world literature. In this context, Beckett is widely regarded as one of the greatest playwrights of the twentieth century, both in Europe and across the globe. Besides, despite the fact that McDonagh began writing plays at the end of the twentieth century, he should be regarded as a playwright of the twenty-first. On the other hand, intertextuality is a text analysis strategy based on postmodernism, introduced by literary theorist Julia Kristeva in the late 1960s. According to the intertextual theory, all texts interact with one another inside the writer’s and reader's social and cultural background. Kristeva's intertextual theory later began to be used as one of the contemporary literary criticism methods. During the intertextual criticism, a bond is formed between the reader and the work they are reading. In this framework, the reader becomes the critic who delivers a unique process by detecting parallels between works. Actually, The Pillowman was written half a century after Waiting for Godot, and the plots of the two plays are quite different. However, the character pairs, character names, told stories, themes, phrases, setting, and feeling of hope in The Pillowman are similar to Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. All these support Kristeva's theory of intertextuality that writers create a new text under the influence of several works they read in the past.

Keywords

References

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  4. Beckett, S. (1954). Waiting for Godot. Grove Press.
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  6. Clare, D. (2015). The Intertextual Presence of Samuel Beckett's All That Fall in Martin McDonagh's Six Shooter, Irish University Review 45 (2), 335-351.
  7. Cliff, B. (2007). The Pillowman: A new story to tell. In R.R. Russell (Ed) Martin McDonagh: A Casebook (131-48). Routledge.
  8. Fairclough, N. (1992). Intertextuality in Critical Discourse Analysis. Linguistics and Education 4, 269-293.

Details

Primary Language

English

Subjects

Linguistics

Journal Section

Research Article

Authors

Ajda Baştan * This is me
0000-0001-8171-8644
Türkiye

Publication Date

June 21, 2022

Submission Date

May 21, 2022

Acceptance Date

June 20, 2022

Published in Issue

Year 2022 Number: 28

APA
Baştan, A. (2022). Kristevan intertextuality between Waiting for Godot and The Pillowman. RumeliDE Dil Ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi, 28, 522-531. https://doi.org/10.29000/rumelide.1132594