Intertextuality

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

The concept of intertextuality arose out of textual theory in literary studies and semiotics after 1960, notably in France, although its theoretical roots came from elsewhere. It has become a key concept in the area of text analysis and interpretation. It is essential to any sophisticated theoretical understanding of how meaning is created by texts; this applies to all case studies, because the textual material of the text must be analyzed for its meaning. Intertextuality at one and the same time theorizes the means by which textual meaning is understood (and thus stabilized), but it also problematizes the possibility of stable meaning at all. Because of this inherent dialectical opposition in the formulation of the concept, the term has often been used loosely to describe a wide variety of textual phenomena.

Derived from the Latin texere (“to weave”), the word's semantic origin speaks to the idea of the composite nature of any signifying entity. Whereas earlier theories of textuality emphasized the link to the biography of the author or the embodiment of some psychological state in the text, intertextuality grew out of a text theory that understood meaning as the result of the interplay of signs in a semiotic process. The notion found its initial origins in the work of the early 20th-century Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. In Bakhtin's work the inherent heteroglossia (nonunitary, hybrid nature) of language was a fundamental principle, as was dialogism (the inherently dynamic and productive nature of language); in Saussure's work, the notion of the relational basis of meaning in a synchronic model of language was paramount. The term immediately gained an important position in discussions of cultural practice when it was developed in the 1970s because it was an important tool in theorizing the interconnectedness of meaning in cultures: It is hybrid, it is textual and semiotic in nature, it has formal constituents, and it is sociohistorical in nature.

There is an inherent contradiction at the heart of the notion of intertextuality: Meaningful phenomena are boundless and without limits because of their inevitable interconnectedness, and they cannot recognize themselves for lack of boundaries, and yet some sort of empirical, definable measurement or boundary is necessary to make the signifying phenomenon perceptible. Whether a limited or a broader sense of the notion should be used, and which is the most powerful theoretically [Page 494]and practically, has been the subject of much debate.

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