TRACING BORGES’ SHORT STORIES WITH DETECTIVE MARTIN MYSTÈRE: DELIBERATELY CONSTRUCTED INTERTEXTUALITY

Text analyses have drawn the attention of many researchers, critics and scholars after intertextuality has been defined as an inevitable relation with any written texts, utterances or even an idea. Comic books, as written examples, give the reader a ground to catch intertextual relations with literary works. The comic books are one of the most read literary texts and any study on the intertextual relation between comics and short stories may encourage the studies of intertextuality and also comics studies that has become an academic field interrelating with comics theory, comics criticism, comics historiography and so on. This study aims to identify and discuss the intertextual relations between the two issues of the comic book Martin Mystère (Kum Kitabı and Alef) and the two short stories (The Book of Sand and The Aleph) of Jorge Luis Borges within the post-structuralist approach to intertextuality and transtextuality categorization of Gérard Genette. The study examines the Turkish versions of the comic books Martin Mystère and the English versions of the Borges’ short stories. The findings show that the intertextual relations between earlier and later texts are ‘deliberate’ as the authors of the comic book intend to inform the reader. The relations mostly manifest themselves with intertextual, paratextual, architextual and hypertextual relations appearing as quotations, allusions, allegories, and references in prefaces, in titles or in its kind.

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