Presented as part of the SLLL Literary Studies Seminar Series

Text, Context, Hypertext, Intertext: The Literary Text as Networked Object, OR: How To Read a Meta-Ish Crack Crossover Between the Wodehouseverse and, Among Other Things, Greek Mythology

The text—the object of our activity as readers and critics—has increasingly been understood over the last fifty years not as the repository of a singular meaning, placed there by an author and decipherable by a reader competent in a given set of codes, but as a networked object, best described as 'surface' (Marcus and Best 2009) or 'interface' (Batstone 2010). Felski (2011) suggests that context, too, might usefully be rethought as a cross-temporal network; and scholars like Pearce (1997) and Radway (2012) have traced readers' networked activities. This paper argues that the text-as-network might be understood as the mutual dynamic constitution of text, context, and reader. It will illustrate this through a reading of the fan-written short story ‘Deus Ex’, which brings together Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories with Twelfth Night, The Lord of the Flies, and Greek mythology in an intertextual network of its own.

Dr Ika Willis is Senior Lecturer in English Literatures at the University of Wollongong. Her research on reception theory extends from Harry Potter fan fiction to the poetry of Virgil and Lucan and its afterlife.