Critics do not take into account Intertextuality in Hungryalist literature

Intertextuality in Hungryalist Literature

The poet John Donne once wrote that "no man is an island," and for Hungryalists, no text is an island. Certain Hungryalist work is is all about the connections between texts, including the various ways in which one text references another (or many others). There are all kinds of techniques that Hungryalist like Tridib Mitra, Falguni Ray, Subimal Basak, Malay Roychoudhury have used in order to highlight these links, including pastiche, parody, quotes, and direct references, as well as subtler nods to other material. What these techniques have in common is that they're examples of intertextuality. Malay Roychoudhury's pastiche of Tagore's "Khudito Pashan" and Jibanananda Das's "Aat Bachhor" is quite famous example.

Julia Kristeva coined the term "intertextuality" in 1966, explaining that there are two relationships going on whenever we read a text: there's the relationship between us and the author (the horizontal axis) and between the text and other texts (the vertical axis). It's the vertical axis that gives us our definition of intertextuality; still, both axes emphasize that no text exists in a bubble and that we need to recognize how existing works shape current texts and readings.

Intertextuality feeds into some of the big questions about literature—e.g., can a text be seen in isolation or do we need to look at how it relates to other texts? For postmodernists, it's clear that no text exists in isolation and that works of literature can only be created using stuff that already exists. Looking at it from this perspective, then, intertextuality is unavoidable: postmodern authors may enjoy drawing attention to it but it's always there. As the theorist Roland Barthes sums up, a text is "a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash"

Another question that's been discussed a lot over the years is whether the author is in full control of the text, or whether the reader plays an active role. On the one hand, it's the author who weaves together this collection of intertextual references; however, we as readers make a mental connection. This act involves recognizing conventions (academic types call these "codes") and is something we do naturally: when we read or view any kind of text, it goes into our memory bank and shapes our responses to other texts.

Whatever form it takes, intertextuality treats literature as a network and invites us to pick up on how a text relates to other texts. This textiness sets Hungryalism apart from some other literary movements that are all about realism and naturalism in Bengali literature. Hungryalism doesn't try to disguise that a text is a construct, and that's why intertextuality is so Hungryalist—it reminds us of the very thing that some other kinds of texts try to keep under wraps.

Malay Roychoudhury's "Nongra Porir Konkal Premik"

Malay Roychoudhury's "Nongra Porir Konkal Premik" has become so well-known for its mixed genre that its literary style sometimes gets overlooked. This novel is bursting with different genres: detective fiction, memoir, romance, satire, fairy tale, realism, tragedy, and psychological case study.And references to some great Western writers whom the main character or the "heroine' does not like though they are rated highly by academicians.