Stuff About Books and Literature

Texts – built from other texts. Image by National Library in Paris The theory of intertextuality is based on the idea that all signifying systems are a product of previous signifying systems; it proposes that texts are not the original product of one author, but of their connection with other texts, both written and spoken, and to the structure of language. The idea of intertextuality, a concept originated by French semiotician Julia Kristeva in the late 1960s, was founded on Ferdinand de Saussure’s  (1857-1913) theories of semiology and Mikhail Bakhtin’s  (1895-1975)  interests in the social aspects of language and his ideas of dialogism which he theorised in the 1920s. The founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure, viewed language as a socially-conceived structured system of elements, rules, and meanings. His theories of signs inspired the idea of structuralism, “the belief that phenomena of human life are not intelligible except through their interrel...

Palimpsests. What are you really reading? Image by Adam Jones How do you read texts? Are you sure your interpretation and understanding of what you are reading is only coming from the text in front of you or is some of the meaning being transferred from elsewhere? The idea of transtextuality suggests that it is. French literary critique Gerard Genette (1930) took the idea of Bakhtin and Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality - that texts are not the original product of one author- one step further; his work Palimpsests proposes and defines ‘transtextuality’ as a more comprehensive term that determines “all that which puts one text in relation, whether manifest or secret, with other texts.” In other words, Genette’s theory of transtextuality describes the numerous ways a later text prompts readers to read or remember an earlier one. He puts forward five types of transtextual relations which I have described in my article for Decoded Science , " What is Transtextuality? Unde...