READING AND WRITING AS WEAVERS OF INTERTEXTUAL WEBS. ANALYSIS OF AN ADAPTATION: MRS DALLOWAY AND THE HOURS

In her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, Virginia Woolf recognises the pivotal role of the reader 40 years before Reader Response Theory came around, as she argues that reader and writer should see themselves as equals in the creation of a book (Woolf 1924: 23). In this article, we investigate how writing and reading together weave intertextual webs. Although Barthes’ wide sense of intertext informs many of this paper’s claims, we will focus mainly on a phenomenon of intense intertextuality: adaptation. More specifically, we will analyse writers and readers as character typologies in a miniature intertextual web: Virginia Woolf’s own Mrs Dalloway, Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours, and the film The Hours, directed by Stephen Daldry. We chose these three texts, because the processes at play in adaptation are mirrored by an intensified preoccupation with readers and writers when it comes to the content proper. This is a methodological artifice meant to instrumentalize metatextual phenomena to shed light on how one should approach texts themselves. Finally, we decided to include in our analysis the film adaptation as well, even though it does not deviate greatly from its hypotext, because the specificity of the medium does in fact reveal insights and demands theoretical repositioning in regard to our analysis of reading and writing.