L’œuvre d’Anita Brookner : transtextualité et idéologie

• Main Author: Eileen Williams-Wanquet
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2008-11-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/7170

The novels of Anita Brookner (1981-2004) associate pervasive transtextuality and realistic rooting in history to offer an ethical metacomment on postmodernity’s challenge to the values of modernity. The novels use three types of transtextuality. (1) Intertextuality points to a varied group of texts that have literally fashioned Brookner’s typical heroine, born in the 1930s. These texts, which all belong to the genre of romance, vehicle modernity’s philosophical « attitude » based on a « Christian rationality ». (2) Hypertextuality offers a metacomment on the postmodern questioning of modernity’s « world-vision » in the second half of the twentieth century. (3) Through architextuality, all the novels function as a sort of global hypertext. Indeed, Brookner’s novels are ironical romances, which show that, recontextualised in the second half of the twentieth century, the paradigm of modernity is no longer valid.