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In this sense seriality and repetition are not opposed to innovation. Nothing is more "serial" than a tie pattern, and yet nothing can be so personalized as a tie. The example may be elementary, but that does not make it banal. Between the elementary aesthetics of the tie and the recognized "high" artistic value of the Goldberg Variations is a gradated continuum of repetitious strategies, aimed at the response of the "smart'' addressee. |
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The problem is that there is not, on the one hand, an aesthetics of "high" art (original and not serial) and, on the other, a pure sociology of the serial. Rather, there is an aesthetics of serial forms that requires a historical and anthropological study of the different ways in which, at different times and in different places, the dialectic between repetition and innovation has been instantiated. When we fail to find innovation in the serial, it is perhaps a result less of the structures of the text than of our "horizon of expectations" and our cultural habits. We know very well that in certain examples of non-Western art, where we always see the same thing, the natives recognize infinitesimal variations and they feel the shiver of innovation. Where we see innovation, at least in the serial forms of the Western past, the original addressees were not at all interested in that aspect and conversely enjoyed the recurrences of the scheme. |
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The entire Human Comedy by Balzac presents a very good example of a treelike saga, as much as Dallas does. Balzac is more interesting than Dallas because every one of his novels increases our knowledge of the society of his time, whereas every program of Dallas tells us the same thing about American society. But both use the same narrative scheme. |
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The notion of intertextuality itself has been elaborated within the framework of a reflection on "high" art. Notwithstanding, the examples given above have been taken up provocatively by the world of mass communication in order to show how even these forms of intertextual dialogue have by now been transferred to the field of popular production. It is typical of what is called postmodern literature and art (but did it not already happen thus with the music of Stravinsky?) to quote by using (sometimes under various stylistic disguises) quotation marks so that the reader pays no attention to the content of the citation but instead to the way in which the excerpt from a first text is introduced into the fabric of a second one. Renato Barilli (1984) has observed that one |
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