Reinforcement of woolf’s canon in Michel Cunningham’s The Hours: An Intertextual Reading

Abstract

This research focuses on Michal Cunningham’s The Hours, where the author employs excessive intertextual apparatuses deriving from Virginia Woolf's life and her novel Mrs. Dalloway to relocate Woolf’s canonical place. The aim of this paper is to examine the various “transtextual” techniques adopted by Cunningham by drawing from Genette’s theories of intertextuality. There is explicit intertextual reference to Virginia Woolf’s work in Cunningham’s novel; even the reader unfamiliar to Woolf’s writing clearly notice it. Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway seems to be the original text in which Cunningham improvises. Drawing from theories of intertextuality developed by Gerard Genette, the paper outlines various levels of intertextual experiments. The post-modern practice of pastiche, palimpsest, ekphrasis, parody, allusion and quotation are the key areas of investigation in this research with special focus on various levels of transtextual practices. By illustrating the problematic experiment with intertextual techniques, this paper argues that Cunningham reinforces Woolf’s canonical status as well as her dominant themes. Key Words: Intertextuality, Transtextuality, Paratextuality, Metatextuality, Archtextuality, Hypertextuality, Pastiche, Palimpsest, Ekphrasis, Parody, Allusion, Quotation.