Intertextuality (The New Critical Idiom)
Graham Allen
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 0415596947
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Theories of intertextuality suggest that meaning in a text can only ever be understood in relation to other texts; no work stands alone but is interlinked with the tradition that came before it and the context in which it is produced. This idea of intertextuality is crucial to understanding literary studies today.
Graham Allen deftly introduces the topic and relates its significance to key theories and movements in the study of literature.
The second edition of this important guide to intertextuality:
- outlines the history and contemporary use of the term
- incorporates a wealth of illuminating examples from literature and culture
- includes a new, expanded conclusion on the future of intertextuality
- examines the politics and aesthetics of the term
- relates intertextuality to global cultures and new media.
Looking at intertextuality in relation to structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, postcolonialism, Marxism, feminism and psychoanalytic theory, this is a fascinating and useful guide for all students of literature and culture.
a text is ‘a permutation of texts, an intertextuality in the space of a given text’, in which ‘several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and 36 ORIGINS neutralize one another’ ( ibid: 36). Texts are made up of what is at times styled ‘the cultural (or social) text’, all the different discourses, ways of speaking and saying, institutionally sanctioned structures and systems which make up what we call culture. In this sense, the text is not an individual, isolated object but, rather,
reverse of a sociolectic obverse, goes on pointing to this obverse even after the latter has been effaced by time; all that is needed for communication is the postulation of the absent meaning. All that is needed for the text to function is the presupposition of the intertext. Certainly, presupposition itself cannot exist unless the reader is familiar with 126 STRUCTURALIST APPROACHES the structures or ganizing a representation of reality: but these are the very stuff of our linguistic
of which bear directly on the constructions of femininity which revolve around the oppositional network of patriarchal culture. Kaup, in her 152 SITUATED READERS introduction, employs the famous breakdown of patriarchal binary oppositions mapped out by the French feminist theorist Hélène Cixous in her essay ‘Sorties’ (Cixous, 1994: 37–46). Cixous begins: Where is she? Activity/passivity Sun/Moon Culture/Nature Day/Night. (Cixous, 1994: 37) Moving through a series of cultural oppositions
punctuates its representation of a physical journey across Canada and the United States with intertextual references to literary texts from those two countries. The film not only merges a literal and a textual journey across Canada and the United States, it also foregrounds how place is itself textualized, the places represented always already being part of a received textual map. James Goodwin’s study of the films of Akira Kurosawa draws the two strains of intertextuality together when he
synchronic system of language could be constructed’ (1986: 66). This is because language is always in a ‘ceaseless flow of becoming’. Language, seen in its social dimension, is constantly reflecting and transforming class, institutional, national and group interests. No word or utterance, from this perspective, is ever neutral. Though the meaning of utterances may be unique, they still derive from already established patterns of meaning recognizable by the addressee and adapted by the addresser.