Exploring the Intertextual Webs: A Comparative Study of Sophocles’ Antigone and Bertold Brecht’s The Antigone of Sophocles (1948)

Abstract

As a matter of fact, it has always been claimed that there are voices embedded in any literary text. In other words, any literary text involves different layers of voices: that of the author and those to which the author reacts in his/ her text. This claim suggests the matter of textual influence which started in the mid of the 18th century with the growing interest in originality and genius asserted by Bloom’s theory as stated by the art historian Michael Baxandall (1985). Therefore, ‘influence’ has to do with the author and the historical / socio-political context of the text, and studying it requires studying the context of the text. The study of ‘influence’ has proceeded anonymously and was neither able to accommodate for different analysis such as psychological, feminist, Marxist, and others, nor for studying two texts regardless of their historical priority. Hence, it lacks the benefits of implementing an interdisciplinary approach. This narrow form of ‘influence’ considering authors as agents and questioning their originality has begun to be obsolete as it shaped authors as authoritative disregarding the reader’s role and promoting outworn humanism.  Shifting the focus to the reader encouraged the procedure of ‘intertextuality’. In fact, Julia Kristeva was the first to coin the term ‘intertextuality’ based on Bakhtin’s dialogism which suggests multiple meanings in each text and even in each word and the continual dialogue with works of literature and authors. “Every word,” Bakhtin wrote, “is directed toward an answer and cannot escape the profound influence of the answering word that it anticipates”. (18) This study aims at comparing Sophocles’ Antigone and Bertolt Brecht’s The Antigone of Sophocles highlighting the significance of the intertexts resulting from the different contexts in which these plays and adaptations were made, in addition to explaining the political and social dimensions in the adapted discourse. The study, therefore, highlights the intertextual webs in the examined texts, denoting the infinity of meanings in the adaptations of Sophocles’ Antigone.