Interpretation Of Flight To Canada From The Perspective Of Genette’s Transtextuality Theory

Flight to Canada is the fifth novel by African-American writer Ishmael Reed.The novel expresses Reed’s sincere hope for the black community to construct a free identity after the Civil War.Scholars have mainly studied the novel from postmodernism,new historicism,neo-slave narrative,Neo-Hoodoo Aesthetics and multiculturalism.The phenomenon of multiple intertextualities in Flight to Canada has yet to receive widespread attentions from the academic community.Therefore,the thesis attempts to adopt the transtextuality theory of French scholar Gerard Genette to analyze the multiple intertextuality phenomena of the novel and to focus on Reed’s continuous thinking on African-American groups’ pursuit of freedom behind intertextualities.The thesis makes an in-depth analysis of intertextuality in Flight to Canada from three different levels:hypertextuality,intertextuality,and metatextuality.Through hypertextuality,Reed intends to connect the figures with Pocahontas,Nat Turner,and King Arthur to realize the dialogue between the past and the present.Reed intentionally refers to the plottings with other texts through intertextuality,underlining the multiple themes.Reed aims to express comments on historical phenomena outside the text through metatextuality,thus exploring various ways for the black community to gain freedom.The three intertextuality practices make up the novel’s intricate intertextual network,which are independent of and connected one another,and progresses from shallow to deep.The thesis analyzes that through the adoption of a complex intertextual network,Reed has embraced many representative figures,plottings and historical phenomena in the novel,created a social scene in which time and space are intertwined,and reflected a more hidden and pluralistic spiritual repression faced by African Americans after the Civil War to highlight the importance of individual freedom in the new colonial context.