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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