Elias was a second-year doctoral student, currently drowning in the attempt to write his first major paper on modernist literature. He had used the word "intertextuality" a dozen times in his draft, throwing it around like a theoretical shield, but his supervisor had scrawled a red, jagged note in the margin: “You are using this as a synonym for ‘influence.’ Read the Kristeva essay. Understand the mosaic. Then rewrite.”
Kristeva, J. (1978). The Bounded and the Open: On the Nature of the Literary Text. Semiotica, 24(1-2), 31-47. [PDF available online] julia kristeva intertextuality pdf
Julia Kristeva, a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, and psychoanalyst, is known for her influential work on intertextuality. In her book "Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art" (1980), Kristeva develops the concept of intertextuality, which challenges traditional notions of authorship, text, and meaning. Elias was a second-year doctoral student, currently drowning
He began to write. He didn't write about "influence." He wrote about the dialogue. He wrote about how the words of the modernists were not merely "borrowed" from the past, but were consumed and digested, transformed into something new and strange. He wrote about the "writerly" text, where the reader is not a consumer, but a producer of meaning. Then rewrite
He found it: "The poetic word, polyvalent and multi-determined, adheres to a logic exceeding that of codified discourse and fully comes into being only in the margins of recognized culture."
Kristeva envisioned two axes of textual meaning. The horizontal axis connects the author and the reader, while the vertical axis connects the text to other prior and contemporary texts. 3. Rejection of the "Self-Contained" Text
The study of how signs and language function as systems. 2. The "Mosaic of Quotations"