product of a single author, but of its relationship to other texts and to the structures of language itself.
So intertextuality can be differed into the narrow sense and broad sense. The definition of intertextuality in narrow sense lies in the early structuralism and semiotics, while broad sense intertextuality often embodies in the post- structuralism
And Kristeva has her own assertions, for example, assertions about text: “a text, in the narrow sense, cannot exists as a hermetic or self-sufficient whole, and so does not function as a closed system. A text can be a text only through two channels. One is the author, who brings other texts he has read into the particular text he is writing. The other channel is the reader, the addressee, who, while reading the text, realizes his own interpretations based on his previous experience of other texts. The “anterior or synchronic” texts the author or the reader brings into the text in question are termed as ‘pre-texts’, ‘hypotexts’or ‘intertexts’.”[7]
Generally speaking, through what we get from Kristeva’s interview, we can define that, the intertextuality in narrow sense means that intertextual relationships only appear in the situation that the texts can point out the obvious inter-referential connection. Narrow sense intertextuality has its own concrete forms, such as quotation, allusion, pastiche, plagiarism, parody, parallelism, annexation, motif, etc which
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will be the main tools to guide us to do the comparative reading wielded intertextuality in narrow sense.
“intertextuality in a wide sense refers to the inter-referential relations between a text and any knowledge, code, sign, ideographic practice that gives meaning to the text; intertextuality in a wide sense considers non-literary artworks, kinds of knowledge scopes of human beings, ideographic practices, even society, history, culture, etc as texts; intertextuality in a narrow sense, widely employed in analyses of the particular literary works, is a more practical one which delimits itself to the study of relationship between a text and its intertexts.”[8]
1.1.4 Different levels of intertextuality
After viewing the transition of intertextuality from narrow sense to broad sense, we could get the conclusion that there are three levels in intertextual conversation: the conversations of texts, the conversations of subjects and the conversations in cultures.
When being analyzed in the first level, the term of Intertextuality emphasis more on the research of literary form and style, and this stress is in accordance with intertextuality’s Origin of structuralism.
In the level of text, intertextuality emphasize that one text can expound and prove intertextual relationships among the other texts involved in itself. In another word, here is a certain text, and it quotes, absorbs, expands, or even drastically transforms some other texts, and
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only pursuant to these relationships can we understand the meaning of the certain text, then the relationships among the certain text and the later texts are the emphases intertextuality driven at in its fist level.
So the first step of intertextuality theory’s practice and operation is to investigate the relationships called intertextual traces, and words, figures of speech, literary styles and forms of texts are all expressions of intertextual traces. In this way, intertextual criticism finds its tenable preconditions in these textual details.
The second level is focusing on the subject conversation. The relationship between subject and object is always one pivot of literary theory, and what intertextuality overweighs structuralism is the former pays more attentions on the creative subject via a way of researching on plain text.
Thirdly, the study point changing from texts to subject shows that intertextuality research has been gradually giving up the traditional critical method which is only focused on the relationship between the author and its works, and turns to a hypotextual cultural research under a wider and vaster context. Moreover, in its researches of texts and subjects, intertextuality shows great solicitude for how and what influences the ubiquity cultural traditions, through the way of texts and subjects, acts on current literary creation.
1.2 The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway
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1.2.1 Mrs. Dalloway as Pre-text
In her dairy of October 14th, Virginia Wolf described her conceive: “I will do the research of the insanity and the suicide, with a double vision to observe the world through the eyes of both the person in right sense and the person in insanity.”“The person in right sense”in the novel is Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of the and “the person in sanity”is the young man, Septimus Warren Smith, he has just deactivated from the army of World War I. Septimus is a voluntary soldier to entre the war, to fight for guarding his homeland, to protect the Great Britain of Shakespeare, but after the miserable war, he gets involved into the psychosis of delusion. In May, 1925, Virginia Wolf’s Mrs. Dalloway was published by the Hogan’s Press, and the working title of this fiction is The Hours, which is, we find out, used as the formal name the post-text, Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (a typical quotation).
1.2.2 The Hours as Post-text
The writer Michael Cunningham was born in 1952, and became famous in American Literatus for his maiden work, A Home at the End of the World, and The Hours is his third fiction. Being different from the prior two, The Hours is an experimental fiction with regards to the famous British Stream-of-Consciousness novelist, Virginia Wolf, and her masterpiece, Mrs. Dalloway.
The book follows one day in the life of three women from different
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decades of the twentieth century. As the stories unfold, we discover that they are paralleled and connected to each other in several ways. Virginia Woolf, a writer in Richmond in 1923, treating her panasthenia and conceiving her works at the same time, putting pen to paper and writing the first lines of her novel, Mrs. Dalloway; but she is too sensitive to endure the anxiety attacks of life. Laura Brown, a housewife in Californian in 1949, avidly reading Mrs. Dalloway with passages quoted verbatim. She has a seeming happy family, a husband who loves her very mush, a son, and another baby in her abdomen, but something anxious still exists in somewhere invisible. The life drives her desperate and in order to escape from the dull life, she attempts to suicide. And Clarissa Vaughan, a New-Yorker whose actions one June morning at the end of the 20th century bear so close a resemblance to those of Clarissa Dalloway herself. She is a mid-aged editor, and preparing a party for her good friend, Richard, but accidently discerning his suicide. By so doing, he offers all readers, whether they have read Mrs. Dalloway or not, the pleasure of recognizing the various allusions. The tree women seem to be strange to each other, but their destinies are twisted tightly by the mean of the fiction, Mrs. Dalloway. What’s more, at the end of the book, the author arranges the appearance of Richard’s mother, and she is Mrs. Brown in the 1920’ story. So the two masterstroke concourse to one and what greets readers is a literal symphony depicting living situations of
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