UTEL
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Glossary of Literary Theory |
Intertextuality
:
A term used by Julia Kristeva to describe the preexisting body of discourse
that makes an individual text intelligible. Every text is a response to
and an interpretation of other texts, and it can be read only in relation
to them. The meaning of a text is dependent upon other texts that it absorbs
and transforms, for, as Roland Barthes puts it, "the text is not a
line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning . . . but a multi-dimensional
space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and
clash."
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