Even though we read and write one text at a time, texts do not exist independently of each other but rather in a network of shared words, meanings, and issues.

Put another way, there is no writer who hasn't read, no text that isn't imprinted by other writings.

"Intertextuality" describes the process by which different books, poems, and articles share, connect, duplicate, relate, sometimes explicitly and according to a writer's intention, other times according to readers and the connections they make as they move from one text to another.

Intertextuality: To read literary texts as political, economic, and demographic products and agents that provoke responses or dialogues from other texts, voices and traditions.

Negatively put, literary texts are read less as timeless, autonomous, universal masterpieces than as nodes in a network of other texts and cultural expressions.

Intertextuality and dialogue (Columbia University)

Intertextuality (U. of Wales, Aberystwyth)

Wikipedia definition of intertextuality

“making the texts talk to each other.”

Intertextuality

Depends on post-structural linguistics of past generation (>Literary Theory)

Most characteristic quality: instead of old-fashioned idea that a word relates to what it describes (If “art imitates nature,” the word “rock” must somehow connect to the quality of rocks) . . .

Instead, words gain their quality not by relating to the world but to each other

Language is not a “mirror of nature” but a network of shared meanings

Practical contrast in literary studies:

mid-20^th century: “New Criticism” or close reading
Textual method: each text stands on its own, must be read according to its own terms, without reference to other texts or outside knowledge (author as godlike creative figure whose will determines meanings)

Now: post-structuralism, intertextuality, historicism
Textual method: each text takes its place and produces meaning in relation to “other texts” or referents beyond itself (“death of the author” > primacy of readers)

No such thing as an isolated text or a first reader—all readings are preconditioned by other texts and readings

Questions: how much of this have you heard before in Literary Theory or elsewhere? Other ways to explain or represent this understanding of language and texts?

For today, intertextuality—no final meaning to anything you’re reading, but continuing conversation of texts and readers