American Gothic

We've all heard the phrase, "a picture is worth a thousand words"...

Most of us will recognize this image in some way, maybe not as 'American Gothic', a painting by Grant Wood from 1930. Some may reference it as 'The farmer and his wife' or recognize the image from some type of popular culture reference. This is a great example of intertextuality because we all interpret and digest the same image in different ways, based on our knowledge of other images, texts, films, etc that contextualize this meaning for us. "Every text (and we can insert any cultural object here: image, film, Web content, musical composition) is a mosaic of references to other texts, genres, and discourses"(Irvine).

The writer, The reader, Exterior texts...

Grant Wood was obviously expressing an idea in his art, as is the goal of an artist (usually), and his famous painting is quickly associated with American identity and all that is ideal and Midwest. Kristeva would argue that there are undoubtedly 'texts' and narratives that influenced Wood's painting, following the postmodernist model that nothing can be entirely original. NPR interviewed Thomas Hoving, who has written a biography on "American Gothic": the story behind the painting (if you will). Wilson's Music Man was the forum for the beginning of the parodies, that continue into today, with political, popular, and artistic themes alike. As Chandler concludes in Semiotics for Beginners, intertextuality presents a new paradigm in which art imitates art. And in fact, many artists have done their own versions, as well as artists in music (the Smashing Pumpkins have an EP titled American Gothic) and other categories have drawn influence.

I thought of a couple other things while reading everyone's posts. The current vampire craze reminded me of how Stephenie Meyer (the author of the Twilight Saga) revealed that each of the novels in the series was inspired by one of her favorite classics, and in reading the books, you definitely get a sense of this. For example, Twilight was inspired by Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, New Moon drew upon Romeo and Juliet, Eclipse was influenced by Bronte's Wuthering Heights, and Breaking Dawn follows Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice and A Midsummer Night's Dream. This is a great very recent example of the inevitability of intertextuality (especially since it is text-based), and this is of course in addition to the influence of traditional romantic vampire narratives.