INTERTEXTUALITY

Intertextuality is the relationship between texts, it can be produced by the use of quotations, allusions or
references of other texts.
This term can be used even to give a stable set of rules for interpretation.
Even in the past ages there were authors who spoke about this literary phenomenon: for example, Plato in
his works used many words of authors of previous ages; Aristotle, thought that only the voice of the writer
had to be heard but in many of his works we can find dialogues; Cicero and Quintilian believed that
imitation was a right intertextual practice because it can help to give new life to ideas, languages and styles.
However we can set the origins of intertextuality in the 20 th century when, after different studies about the
sign made by Ferdinand de Saussure, he created a new science SEMIOLOGY, but even Bakhtin who was a
Russian scholar spoke about intertextuality; however we can say that the inventor of this term was Julia
Kristeva who summarize the works of Saussure and Bakhtin.
Intertextuality wants to give a new meaning to the text, and it give us the opportunity to discover authors
that were less known and It help us to build more inclusive literary canons.
Authors don’t just select words from a language system but they select plots, aspects of characters and
ways of narrating from previous works.
Bakhtin was a scholar of Russian Area, he lived in France where he was translated; he lived in the Russia
during the ages of the soviet system which was very strict and cruel, and the ones who don’t conform with
their rules were exiled. He was trying to defeat this system, by trying to explain that an ideological system
doesn’t last forever because ideologies are always changing; he tried to offer an alternative perspective, the
, which was perfect to explain that even if we want or wish It’s impossible to silence discordant voices.
The novel mirrors life and reality, and thought it we can try to find our way.
For Bakhtin our self is not monological, we are made of many selves and our inner self is hidden between
our self and our social self, that is the public self. So we are always changing depending on the different
situation or context; we have always to negotiate our vision of the world with other culture.
So our self is dialogic because we have to activate exchanges between cultures, we are always moving from
one culture to another and this ability of the mind is called PSICHY MOBILITY.
Always in the 20th century, T.S. Eliot who was one of the biggest poets of Modernism, create the theory
about the importance of the TRADITION, that is, a writer get in touch with what has been said before but
analysing it within his own life. He was convinced that a world was been lost, and this world was made of so
many beliefs that in the 20th century were shaken and intellectual started doubting about heaven and
reality. He was convinced that this cultural matrix had been broken into pieces and by quoting some
passages from other text of the past culture and putting them together in his poems, he could show his
ruins and protect us. He was trying to look for something to comfort us.
Intertextuality in the modernist era was used also in painting, we have Dali and Picasso who were always
breaking past art pieces to put them together again but in a different way.
He was consider a post modernism because he wrote not only about high literature, but he put together
fragments of popular culture and high culture.

REWRITING is a practice of the 20th /21st century: by rewriting a text a writer starts a dialogue with it,
discovering new meanings in it and helping to the reader to discover new aspects.
We have different kind of examples of rewriting, the most famous is given by Joyce who rewrite the
Odyssey by setting it in a contemporary Dublin: the epic poem and the novel are cultural text, that means
that they can’t be separated because they have the same textual material.
The figure of Ulysses stands for someone who is in searching of something else about his family, his country
and his liberty; in Dante, Ulysses in someone who is searching for much more knowledge while in Joyce,
Ulysses stands for someone who is searching for self-definition and for the meaning of the world. We can
say that rewriting is used to page homage to the past authors and to find the real meaning of our existence
in history and to see how the world, with his attitude, has changed.
A writer can transform a text by omitting some parts, by amplification, by introducing new characters, by
renaming characters, by changing settings, by changing characters’ motivations and by changing plot.
An example could be: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, it was a work by Stoppard, who was a
contemporary dramatist in England: these two characters, in Hamlet by Shakespeare are two minors
characters but Stoppard decided to focus on them trying to understand their motivations, their history.
In Hamlet the main focus is on this prince so fascinating and also Ophelia.
Stoppard decides to focus on them because they were really closer to his contemporary public, because we
have no prince nowadays but many Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Other examples are given by Charles and Mary Lamb, two siblings that wrote tales from Shakespeare in
1807 and they rewrote Shakespearean’s plays but transcoding these plays in tales, prose writings.
They decided to rewrote Shakespeare because it was necessary to educate young ladies, in their preface
they thanks to Shakespeare for the well-educated boys who were well appointed with Shakespeare
because they could have access to their parents’ library and they also could learn about Shakespeare at
school, while the large majority of the ladies were trained at home and they were forbidden from reading
Shakespeare because some of his plays were very cruel.
So these two siblings started to rewrite these plays for young ladies but transforming the books, because
plays were meant to be performed so composed of dialogues and there is no space for a narrator and so,
Charles transform tragedies into tales, and Mary transformed comedies, they introduce a narrator because
they wanted to filter these stories. Sometimes this narrator choses some adjectives to define characters
and so immediately the young lady could understand that this character was very malicious.
For instance they could understand that lady Macbeth was a very cruel woman; they omitted some parts of
the plays written by Shakespeare because were scandalous and so they cut off some parts and decided to
added a CODA, that is the morale of the plot. So these young ladies could be instructed and that’s why they
decided to have an explicit moral warning at the end of these tales.

One of the most important thing in intertextuality is the role of the reader, and also the role of the writer as
a reader.
Kristeva, in one of her essays, wrote that the writer’s interlocutor is the writer himself but as a reader of
another text. The one who writes is the same as the one who reads. Since his interlocutor is a text, the
himself is no more than a rereading itself”
So a writer is first of all a reader, while reading a text he will memorize some texts , some techniques used
and then, we writing he can’t forget these words and techniques and he will try to forge his own text. So
the writer is not a person but a text which is made of so many fragments and he interacts with other text.