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"Last in a long line of literary kleptomaniacs": intertextuality in Sarah Kane's 4.48 Psychosis

Research Output: Contribution to journal Article Peer-review

Open access

Sustainable Development Goals

  • SDG 3 - Good Health and Well-being
    SDG 3 Good Health and Well

Abstract

The article examines intertextuality as conscious dramaturgical strategy in the composition of Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis. Inspired by Jörg Helbig’s notion of intertextual marking, the analysis identifies intertextual inscriptions in the play and examines the relationship between manifest text (the text the author produces) and referent text (the text the author borrows from). Kane’s engagement with depression, psychosis, and suicide is mediated through ideas and structures that she adapts from a range of sources. Each of these frames and re-frames the experience of individual suffering explored in the text, and together, they chart the I’s journey from depression to psychosis to suicide. Moreover, the play contains a critique of diagnostic psychiatry and plays out medical discourses against poetic (counter) discourses that reveal mental illness as constructed and contingent on changing social and cultural perceptions and practices.

Publication Information

Output type

Research Output: Contribution to journal Article Peer-review

Original language

English

Pages from-to (Number of pages)

Pages 374-398

Journal (Volume, Issue Number)

Modern Drama (Volume 56, Issue 3)

Publication milestones

  • Published - 01/01/2011

Publication status

Published - 01/01/2011

ISSN

0026-7694

External Publication IDs

  • handle.net: 10547/224511

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