Intertextuality

Intertextuality is a term that addresses the meanings generated via the intra-influences of subjects/authors, addressees/readers or audience, and linguistic units—that is, any material or perceived signifier of meaning (e.g., in the form of text or utterance)—within and through other texts. As a concept, it accounts for the notion that no artifact possesses the ability to make meaning by itself. Meanings ascertained from a given text are always negotiated relative to other, preexisting texts to which the addressee has been previously exposed. In other words, no text, however original, is able to make meaning on its own. Intertextuality implies that there are always referent texts—for the author as he or she engages in the creative process and production of a text, for the viewer as he or she refers to other texts to which the viewer has encountered that inform his or her meaning making in the present, and in the textual artifact itself, which by its very existence is composed of already-existing linguistic units that have been used to generate other alternate meanings in prior instances. In identity studies, an understanding of intertextuality contributes to an understanding of identity, as how a text is interpreted is dependent on one's unique set of internally held understandings and more common understandings.

Julia Kristeva is identified as one of the first theorists to devise a theory of intertextuality. Her original conception of the term is based on a coconsideration of Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of dialogism, with its attention to the potential multiple meanings—or heteroglossia —within a given utterance or text, and Ferdinand de Saussure's structuralist semiotics, which is concerned with the use of signs in the process of meaning making in a given text. Where dialogism accounts for the utterance, whether between speakers and interlocutors, texts and texts, or texts and readers, Saussure's theory of semiotics accounts for the structure of the language through which meaning is made. Intertextuality places these two perspectives in conversation with each other, to the extent that interlocutors use signs to generate utterances that simultaneously come from somewhere and also go somewhere else.

Intertextuality refers to a situated meaning in a given text that resides at the intersection of three dimensions: the author, the reader, and the text. The shared codes among these three dimensions are conveyed through the word (or related linguistic unit) that serves as a mediator in the production of meanings from those intersections. Compared to Bakhtin's theory of dialogism, intertextuality more specifically parses out the distinctions between the functions of the word/utterance/text (or other linguistic unit) along two axes. The horizontal axis situates the word between author and reader. The vertical axis situates the word between present and exterior texts. Any word (or text) is a function of the intersection of these axes. Thus, as Kristeva notes, intertextuality replaces intersubjectivity, as meaning is transferred not directly between interlocutors but through the system of meaning making (word or text) that serves as an intermediate function in the production of meaning.

As such, Kristeva's conception of the term problematizes prior theories of literary criticism in significant ways. An important reconsideration is that although the author is still acknowledged as the subjective producer of a given text, intertextuality assumes that there is no such thing as a single-authored text. Texts are composed of preexisting linguistic units and meanings, from which the author borrows, that contribute to the process of textual production in the present. Relatedly, intertextuality disrupts the idea of a single author as the sole source and producer of meaning relative to a given text. Readers come to a text informed by other linguistic units and other texts in mind, which also contribute to the production of meaning in the present. Thus, readers’ distinct identities inform the meanings they ascertain from engagement with a given text.

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