's 1922 novel
Ulysses bears an intertextual relationship to
Homer's
Odyssey.
Julia Kristeva coined the term "intertextuality" (
intertextualité) in an attempt to synthesize
Ferdinand de Saussure's
semiotics: his study of how
signs derive their meaning from the structure of a text (
Bakhtin's dialogism); his theory suggests a continual dialogue with other works of literature and other authors; and his examination of the multiple meanings, or "
heteroglossia", of texts (especially novels) or individual words. "the notion of intertextuality replaces the notion of
intersubjectivity" when we realize that meaning is not transferred directly from writer to reader but is instead mediated or filtered by "codes" imparted to the writer and reader by other texts. For example, when we read
James Joyce's
Ulysses we decode it as a
modernist literary experiment or as a response to the epic tradition, or as part of some other
conversation, or as part of many conversations at once. This intertextual view of literature, as shown by
Roland Barthes, supports the concept that the meaning of a text does not reside in the text, but is produced by the reader in relation both to the text in question and the complex network of texts evoked by the reading process. While the theoretical concept of intertextuality is associated with
post-modernism, the device itself is not new.
New Testament passages quote from the
Old Testament and Old Testament books such as
Deuteronomy or the
prophets refer to the events described in
Exodus (for discussions on using 'intertextuality' to describe the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament, see
Porter 1997;
Oropeza 2013; Oropeza & Moyise, 2016). Whereas a
redaction critic would use such intertextuality to argue for a particular order and process of the authorship of the books in question,
literary criticism takes a synchronic view that deals with the texts in their final form, as an interconnected body of
literature. This interconnected body extends to later poems and paintings that refer to Biblical narratives, just as other texts build networks around Greek and Roman
Classical history and mythology.
Post-structuralism More recent
post-structuralist theory, such as that formulated in Daniela Caselli's ''
Beckett's
Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism'' (MUP 2005), re-examines "intertextuality" as a production within texts, rather than as a series of relationships between different texts. Some postmodern theorists like to talk about the relationship between "intertextuality" and "hypertextuality" (not to be confused with
hypertext, another semiotic term coined by
Gérard Genette); intertextuality makes each text a "living hell of hell on earth" and part of a larger mosaic of texts, just as each
hypertext can be a web of links and part of the whole
World-Wide Web. The World-Wide Web has been theorized as a unique realm of reciprocal intertextuality, in which no particular text can claim centrality, yet the Web text eventually produces an image of a community—the group of people who write and read the text using specific discursive strategies. == Examples in literature ==