Intertextual Exchange
The following post is Part VI in a series containing the introduction to my PhD dissertation. New readers might find that it's helpful to begin here. Below I define what the terms “intertextual exchange” and “intellectual interaction” mean and why they were important for Chinese and Korean writers in Manchuria.
Intertextual exchange, in its most basic form, is the process through which readers respond to writing via their own textual creations. In Karen Thornber’s study of East Asian writers in the early twentieth century, she argues that intertextual exchange occurred within literary contact nebulae. According to Thornber, literary contact nebulae, as opposed to “contact zones,” highlights the unfixed and fluctuating nature of “active sites both physical and creative of readerly contact, writerly contact, and textual contact…”[1] In other words, the movements of writers and texts characterized the location of literary contact nebulae. Moreover, writers not only knew about the work of their colleagues at home and abroad, they often also knew one another personally. For that reason, the phrases “intertextual exchange” and “intellectual interaction” stress the physical and social aspects of textual contact.
While Manchuria can be viewed as a contact nebula in its own right, my thesis further identifies the region’s urban and rural spaces as containing their own distinct intellectual activities. In so doing, I aim to address two specific questions: 1) How did Manchuria’s urban and rural literary contact nebulae operate? 2) What is the significance of differences in these operations? I argue that dissimilarities of literary contact nebulae contributed to the unequal power relations that played into Chinese and Korean interactions in Manchuria. Highlighting the differences in contact environment sheds light on the cross-purposes behind intertextual exchange.
The exchanges featured in the following case studies offer a multifaceted look at intertextuality in Manchuria. Be it translations published in the Manchukuo capital (Case Study 1) or military marches composed in mountain camps (Case Study 2), the texts I investigate contain conversations between people who saw themselves as a part of (potential) communities. Yet in spite of the distinct creative environments that produced the representative texts, both cases were shaped by, and contributed to, a larger conversation about nation-building in Manchukuo and beyond. Thus, intertextual exchange may involve a variety of processes, including “appropriating genres, styles, and themes, as well as transculturating individual literary works via the related and at times concomitant strategies of interpreting, adapting, translating, and intertextualizing.”[2] By turning the word “transculturation” into a verb, Thornber highlights the relationship between creative texts in East Asia and the collective identities they were written to represent. Put another way, writers produced cultural works by drawing from other cultures. Intertextual exchange in Manchukuo was no exception.
[1] Karen Thornber coined the term literary contact nebulae to sharpen the focus the more familiar “contact zone” advocated by Mary Louise Pratt. See Thornber, Empire of Texts in Motion, 2.
[2] Ibid., 2.