text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. Employed in structuralist, post-structuralist, semiotic, deconstructive, postcolonial, Marxist, feminist and psychoanalytic theories, the term ―intertextuality‖ has, itself, been borrowed and transformed many times since it was coined by poststructuralist Julia Kristeva in 1966. As critic William Irwin says, the term ―has come to have almost as many meanings as users, from those faithful to Kristeva original vision to those who simply use it as a stylish way of talking about allusion and influence‖ [2].
1.1.1 Origin of Intertextuality
It can be said that intertextuality has its origin in 20th Century linguistic, particular in the seminal work of Ferdinand de Saussure, a great Swiss linguistic. Saussure created a definition in which a sigh can be imagined as two-sided coin combining a signified (concept) and a signifier (sound-image). This notion stresses that its meaning is non-referential: a sign is not a word’s reference to a certain object in the world, but the combination between a signifier and a signified. So no sign has a meaning of its own. Signs only possess meaning on account of their combination and association to other signs. In Saussure’s opinion, signs exit within a system and have meaning through their similarity to and difference from other signs; ―Authors of literary works do not just select word from a language system, they select plots, generic features, aspects of characters, images, ways of narrating, even phrases and sentences from
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previous literary texts and from the literary tradition‖[3] P11.
Mikhail. M. Bakhtin has been styled one of the most important literary theorists of the 20th Century. His work is influential within the fields of literary theory and criticism, in linguistics, philosophy and many other disciplines.
The age 1920s sees the beginning for understanding of Bakhtin and his forerunning ideas about intertextuality though at that time the term ―intertextuality‖ didn’t see the light. As to the attempt by Saussure linguistics to explain languages as a synchronic system, Bakhtin in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language argues that Saussure linguistics remains something describes as ―abstract objectivism‖ for its lack of attention to social specificity. Bakhtin is more concerned with the social contexts within which words are exchanged. For Bakhtin, the relational nature of the word ―stems from the word’s existence within specific social sites, specific social registers and specific moments of utterance and reception‖ [3] P11.It is Bakhtin who invites public attention to focus on the term ―dialogic‖ which refers to the idea that ―all utterances respond to previous utterances and are always addressed to other potential speakers, rather than occurring independently or in isolation. Language always occurs in specific social situations between specific human agents. Words always contain a dialogic quality, embodying a dialogue between different meanings and applications.‖[3]
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P211
. Bakhtin’s emphasis on
dialogism and other concepts and his insistence on the social and double-voiced nature of language are opposite to unitary, authoritarian and hierarchical conceptions of life, society and art. This perception can also be seen as origin of the term intertextuality.
1.1.2 The Production of Intertextuality and Kristeva
The term of Intertextuality was first coined in the late 1960s, by the French semiotics and feminism critic Julia Kristeva in her work Word, Dialogue and Novel. She concluded that ―any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double‖ [3] .
The basic connotation of intertextuality is, “every text is the mirror of other texts, and every text is the assimilation and transformation of other texts. These texts consult, refer, and involve each other, so that they can intertexture an open network with eternal potential. Then this network can on one hand to build a huge and open literary system of the past, the present as well as the future texts, on the other hand to constitute the developing processes of literary semiotics”.[4]
Kristeva’s Intertextuality theory was mainly inspired by the Russian scholar Bakhtin’s views and it is who Bakhtin drew the conception of “Intertextuality—text/culture relationships” into the literary critics theory. In Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetic, he put forward the
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term of “Literary Carnival”, and it, actually, had given the expression of an Intertextual sense. Bakhtin also posted the systematic relationships between literary dialogues an extra-literary dialogue.
Kristeva had once given a special explanation of the differences between herself and Bakhtin. In one 1961 interview, she pointed out that : “Bakhtin did not use the term ‘intertextuality’definitely in his dissertation, but it seems that we could deduce this term from Bakhtin’s view.‖ [5] P189~190 Kristeva’s purpose was not only giving a faithful and exhaustive introduction of Bakhtin, but also deepening and expanding Bakhtin’s views.
She said: “Firstly, I think, the parts, the sentences, the speeches and the passages of texts are not only the direct or indirect crossover of two voices in dialogue. I’d rather say, the passages of texts are the crossing of many voices and many texts’ interventions. And these plenty of voices and texts’ interventions are not only involved in the semiotic field, but also the field of syntax and phonetics in language expressing. Then I conceived the multielement of the participations of the phonetics, the syntax and phonetics. I think, compared with Bakhtin, my innovation is, I treat those outside interventions from different levels as syntax and phonetics levels as well as significance level. I’m more interested in, which is much unique to me，the mental activities areas showed by the intervention of various texts from different sections. Analysis should not
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been simply limited in the final participated texts or just affirmed the Origin of those texts appeared in the work. We should considerer that what we’re referring to is a particular dynamics with a spoken subject. As a result, just because of the existence of intertextuality, the spoken subject does not just turn out be a etymological subject or a identity subject.‖[5]
P160
1.1.3 Intertextuality in Narrow and Broad sense
Intertextuality includes both the concrete and abstract ways of
referring. The concrete referring is the mention of the visible and obvious references between the text itself and another text, or among different texts, while the contents abstract referred are in the outside word: the wider and more metaphysical literature, the social and civilization system, or even the invisible things.
The French literary critics Gérard Genette’s views insists that intertextuality refers to the obvious relationship between one particular literary text and other literary texts. His intertextual views belong to intertextuality in narrow sense. While Kristeva and Roland Barthes as poststructuralists explore intertextuality in a wide sense. Roland Bathes asserts that “meaning derives not from the author but from language intertextuality viewed”10. In Julia Kristeva’s views, quotations are by no means the direct or pure ones, but are transformed, dislocated, condensed, or edited against the original text; a literary work, then is not simply the
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