Post-Colonial Writings - Essay Example

" (Lucy and Niall, 337) Linguistic and Literary Issue 4: Michael Anthony's "They better don't Stop the Carnival," one of the best Caribbean and post-colonial short stories, illustrates the link between intertextuality - both cultural and literary - and literary discourse, and intertextual reading of the story offers the most essential meaning of the literary text. Intertextuality in Anthony's "They better don't stop the Carnival" From a semiotical point of view, texts can be considered as complex and hierarchically structured signs which are themselves composed of signs" and intertextuality is a systematic semiotic phenomenon.

(Orosz, 445) That is to say, intertextuality is a semantic problem that covers the text-external semantic relations as well as the text-internal semantic relations. Intertextuality and the reciprocal interpretation based on authorship, an approach in a literary discourse that combines text-text relationship using the narrator as a criterion for delimitation, offers a complete understanding of the meanings in post-colonial writings. "A given text," Johansen declares, "is often, and often for good reasons, understood in the lights of other fictional texts by the same author(s), describing the same or similar fictional universes.

" (Johansen, 382) The cultural, as well as literary intertextuality, offers a clear understanding of the meaning by the author of post-colonial writing. One attains a perfect understanding of the author's meaning in literary discourse through a close analysis of the cultural elements in the literary text in relation to similar discourses within the interrelated texts. Cultural elements include political, economic, and religious factors within the texts and they also contribute to the literary intertextuality of the discourse.

In the short story "They better don't Stop the Carnival" by Anthony, one finds several examples of the cultural as well as literary intertextuality. In such a profound analysis of the story, it becomes lucid that the author has a deeper meaning to the story which is revealed only in a close intertextual understanding of the various literary and linguistic patterns within the story. In conclusion, Michael Anthony's "They better don't stop the Carnival" illustrates the relationship between intertextuality and the interpretation of meaning in literary discourse.