Intertextuality became one of the most significant concepts in contemporary theory of literature. Although the term was introduced only in the twentieth century, the phenomenon has been present and widely used in literature since the Middle Ages. A very basic and almost intuitive understanding can be derived from the term itself: Latin prefix ‘inter-’ means ‘among’, ‘between’. Therefore intertextuality implies interrelatedness or interdependence of a text with other literary and non-literary texts that antecede it. These references not only influence both the form and the meaning of a new text to which they are employed, but also somehow transpose employed texts themselves (Sławiński “Intertekstualność”)1. Despite attempts to explain intertextuality …show more content…
Although he did not use the exact term, his new approach towards language was a starting point for others (Allen 10). What Bakhtin observed in his work on Dostoevsky was a dialogic nature of a language and thus a literature. Written texts (as well as everyday speech) take part in a particular kind of dialogue: utterances are always a response to previous ones and create a possibility for new contexts. Thus interpretation of a text requires taking into account interrelationship between those two 'voices' combined into a dialogue, for “someone else's words introduced into our own speech inevitably assume a new interpretation and become subject to our evaluation of them” (Bakhtin …show more content…
First of all, he re-defined terms ‘text’ and ‘work’, interchanging their traditional meaning, so to speak. According to his explanation, a work is a material object that can be seen and “held in the hand”, whereas a text is “a process of demonstration (…) held in language” (157). In the theory of intertextuality, a text can be compared to a fabric woven with quotations, allusions from numerous literary and cultural sources, and it ought to be considered as “a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash” (146). What comes with such an approach is also a new role of a writer. The title of Barthes' essay, The Death of the Author, expresses openly this new literary reality. It is the end of a God-like powers attributed previously to poets and writers, who can no longer be perceived as unique. An author is not an independent creator inspired by some divine forces to design worlds of his own words. The process of writing involves borrowing and mingling texts of both predecessors and contemporaries. Hence all texts are to be recognized as imitations. Work of a writer resembles an echo chamber in which borrowed vocabulary awaits to be repeated and assembled. What lies within author's reach is only the ability to “mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them” (146). In this
An example of intertextuality is in West Side Story. Although this is a play, I could connect it back to Romeo and Juliet. The musical is a modern day version of the Shakespeare book, so there was a lot of intertextuality between the two. When watching the play, I noticed that two gangs have always been enemies and are fighting for control over the area. This is much like the on going battle between the Capulets and Montagues. Knowing this helped me see the rivalry between the two gangs. On top of this, one of the gang members falls in love with a rival’s sister. Again, having read Romeo and Juliet,I could relate this part to it. The both have the same theme of wanting something you can’t have. Another example
The clearest vision of reality is often the most abstract. While the rise of science and progress suffocate the notion of an extrasensory experience within the reading of literature, the phenomena persist. Meanings are communicated, participating in a magnificent cosmic-cultural aura, penetrating a communication of meaning, intent, and scandalously--truth. There is a process of intertextuality occurring, a conversation between authors, texts themselves, and the readers who venture to interpret them. Richard Brautigan's imaginary novel, In Watermelon Sugar converses well with a poem written many years after his death, Tunnel Music by Mark Doty. This conversation appears to be about the collapse of our techno-egocentric society.
Throughout literature and novels we can find authors who will reference history, other authors works and most often the Bible. One may ask themselves the reasoning behind allusions and how it can affect our perspective and the authors meaning when reading the novel. In the late sixties, Julia Kristeve, who studied the elements of literature and other communication systems, introduced the word “Intertextuality”. In Kristave’s essay “Word, Dialogue, and Novel” she went into deep analysis of an authors work and its text, “A literary work, then, is not simply the product of a single author, but of its relationship to other texts and to the strucutures of language itself. Any text," she argues, "is constructed of a mosaic of quotations; any text
In How to Read Literature like a Professor one of the new literary skills I learned was intertextuality. Intertextuality is a connection between different literary sources, such as “the ongoing interactions between poems and stories” (Foster 29). Similar to intertextuality, the
Roberts, Edgar V., and Robert Zweig. "A Glossary of Important Literary Terms." Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing. Boston: Longman, 2012. 1945. Print.
Baldwin, J. (2000). Down at the Cross. In Brunk, T., Diamond, S., Perkins, P., & Smith, K. (Eds.), Literacies (pp. 27-42). New York, N.Y.
Skillfully mixing criticism and biography, Klinkowitz demonstrates how Barthelmeís life influenced his work; how his time in the army as a service newspaper writer, and later as a publicity writer and editor prepared him to handle ìwords and images as blocks of material rather than as purveyors of conceptions ...î[3]But the use of autobiographical material makes a point beyond that relevant to critical biography.Klinkowitz argues that a consistent thematic in Barthelmeís writing was life as text--and therefore text as some sort of incarnation of life.As Klinkowitz writes of his meeting with Barthelme in the village, Barthelme ìwas firmly inside his text.
The Intertextuality and Analysis of Homoerotic Relations and Desires between UbiquitousMixie’s fan fiction “As Long As You Love Me” and its canon The Hours by Michael Cunningham. Intertextuality according to Genette is a “relationship between two texts [...] the actual presence of one text within another” (Allen 98). Genette’s theory of hypertextuality is presented as “literature which are intentionally inter-textual”. Genette uses the terms hypo- and hypertext, which means that the hypotext is considered as the source for the hypertext. In this case, “As Long As You Love Me” is the hypertext and its source is the hypotext; The Hours. Genette also argues that “the meaning of hypertextual works are depended on the reader’s knowledge [...] imitates
Her analysis of the metaphysics behind literature derived from Jean Baudrillard who proposed that reality has become an artifice in reality. His precise term for this occurrence is called hyper-reality and consists of society using motifs and signs in order to coincide for what is real, basically, that reality falls far from the understanding of Americans due to the “information-saturated, media-dominated contemporary world”. Gonzalez uses this idea to make the argument that in literature we have lost our grasp with verity and reality; we’ve lost this perception by trying to recreate our pasts and never creating our "now". Moreover, we’re so obsessed with explaining the theories of our ancestors that we’ve created a “perverted” culture of intertextuality. Gonzalez’s most substantial argument stands in that the novel has lost its credibility today because contemporary authors seek to recreate and call the results “postmodernism”, hence, intertextuality. This theme has also been a recurrent one that seems to be the most compelling: people are tired of the same ideas bouncing from one generation to the next, tired of cliché themes, and tired of seeing the same thing in novels. She also portrays technology’s role in this issue with evidence of its threat to the future of the novel; basically, she argues that literature entirely is at risk because all technology does is create an epidemic that destroys present day aesthetic and ideas of the
In attempting to discriminate between the nature of a "literary" text and a "non-literary" text, a metaphor from Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being comes to mind. Especially in considering this same novel in contrast with a novel such as Danielle Steele's Vanished, the idea of lightness versus heaviness presents itself, and with it, a new way of approaching the decipherment of any high/low dichotomy of "literariness". When the "literary" text is imagined as "heavy" and the "non-literary" as "light", an interesting illumination is cast upon the scene, and parallels emerge alongside ideas originally presented in the writings of A. Easthope and Wolfgang Iser.
In his essay dated 1968, Roland Barthes sought to convince the individual reader that the author is obsolete; writers only have the capacity to draw upon existing themes (or structures) and reassemble them in a different order. This typically structuralist view completely defies a writer's ability to express himself through unique, individual stories leading many to term the approach as 'anti-humanistic'. Barthes clearly drew influence from Northrop Frye, author of 'Anatomy of Criticism', who outlined these repeated narratives as the comic, romantic, tragic and ironic. In turn these corresponded respectively to the four seasons, compiling what Terry Eagleton refers to as 'a cyclical theory of literary history'. It would seem through this that Frye achieved his ultimate aim, by creating a critical theory that was objective and systematic. To summarise, Frye and most structuralists soug...
Through vivid yet subtle symbols, the author weaves a complex web with which to showcase the narrator's oppressive upbringing. Two literary critics whose methods/theories allow us to better comprehend Viramontes. message are Jonathan Culler and Stephen Greenblatt. Culler points out that we read literature differently than we read anything else. According to the intertextual theory of how people read literature, readers make assumptions (based on details) that they would not make in real life.
It is the way of venerable texts whose authenticity has impressed itself on the human imagination: he has said many things in what seems an ultimate form, and he is a fountainhead of quotation and universal center of allusion. “A rose by any other name” comes to the mouth as readily as “Pride goeth before a fall,” and seems no less wise. [. . .] The Ophelia-Laertes relationship is strongly felt near the end of Goethe’s Faust, Part I, and the Hamlet-Gertrude-Claudius triangle echoes throughout Chekhov’s Sea Gull (24-25).
In conclusion, I would say that the power of literature is connoted exactly in this unparalleled symbolic order of language that can never produce or pin down a definite meaning but nevertheless passes on "the desire and curse of meaning”. It is what the transcendent signification of the text that leaves the reader always anticipating and curious and at the same time delighted from the pleasure this play of the authors brings to her/him. On the other hand there is always this uncanny component of meaning that cannot be clarified or rationalized but nevertheless is an intrinsic part to our reading experience.
The New Critics, just like Wimsatt and Beardsley put forward in their essay, also believed in the ‘organicity’ of the text. In the essay, they write, “A poem should not mean but be.” And, since the meaning of the poem or the text is the medium through which it can exist, and words, in turn, is the medium through which the meaning is expressed, the poem or the text b...