Questão 67225

A university professor is teaching a seminar on literary genres, focusing on the theme of 'tradition and innovation' within the genre of the novel. He wants to challenge the students' linear and progressive view of literary history, which often assumes that modern and postmodern novels are simply 'more advanced' than their 19th-century predecessors. To do this, he proposes a comparative analysis of two novels that, despite being written more than a century apart, are in deep dialogue with each other: Charlotte Brontë's 'Jane Eyre' (1847) and Jean Rhys's 'Wide Sargasso Sea' (1966). 'Wide Sargasso Sea' is famously a postcolonial prequel to 'Jane Eyre,' telling the story of Antoinette Cosway, the Creole heiress who becomes Rochester's 'madwoman in the attic,' Bertha Mason. The professor's theoretical approach is intertextual. He quotes Julia Kristeva: 'Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.' He wants his students to see Rhys's novel not as a simple 'correction' of Brontë's, but as a complex intertextual work that both depends on and radically subverts the tradition of the Gothic romance and the bildungsroman represented by 'Jane Eyre'.

Which analytical approach would best allow students to explore the innovative and traditional aspects of these two novels through an intertextual lens?