Intertextuality

The term intertextuality was introduced by Julia Kristeva to mean that any given text does not stand independent of other texts, events, or objects, but interacts with those to produce a mosaic of ideas. Kristeva was working off of Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of dialogism, which explains the primacy of context over text, the hybrid nature of language, and the relation among utterances. Both Bakhtin and Kristeva suggest a three-part nature of textual dialogue: The act of interpretation involves not just author and addressee, but a third entity as well, a super-addressee. The superaddressee term expands earlier theories of textuality such as formalism by problematizing the concept of the closed text since a wide variety of influences is always streaming in from outside social discourses.

The significance ...