What is "intertextuality"??

Intertextuality is a tricky term to get your head around. I think there are two ways to view intertextuality. The first is Bloom’s approach – that is, the influence of predecessors can be a source of anxiety for the artist. The artist is influenced by artists that have already made their mark, whether they want to be influenced by them or not. Sometimes, even by actively attempting to avoid the influence of those who came before, the work of an artist is nevertheless “contaminated” by the greats of the canon. The second view is summarized by Sanders. Sanders (17) tends to celebrate intertextuality in a way that allows the artist to freely rethink and redeploy the work in the canon and interprets such intertextuality through the lens of post modernism and the post-colonial notion of “hybridity.” Each approach began with the work of T.S. Eliot, in his famous essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” first published in 1919.

According to Eliot (406), writing in 1919, “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone.” Each artist must be set among his or her predecessors and attitudes toward it “readjusted” as the “past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.” The way we view artifacts produced in the past is influenced by what is created by the contemporary artist. Furthermore, Eliot suggests (407) that “the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.” I think this means that art is not created in a void – it is created against the backdrop of what has come before and finds its context within this pre-existing framework: “impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways” to form new works of art (409).

Bloom develops this idea further from the 1970s onward. According to Bloom (xix), “great writing is always at work strongly (or weakly) misreading previous writing.” “Misreading” means the reading of a text in new ways by artists. This can lead to a certain amount of anxiety in artists as they attempt to work around the influences that precede their work. Bloom (xxiii) calls this an “anxiety of influences.” This means that all writers “misread” the work of their predecessors.  As a consequence of this, writers poetically and creatively interpret, or “misprison,” the work of their predecessors, even if they do not intend or want to do so. “Misprisonment” means writers resurrect elements of the work of those that have influenced them. It is in this way, Bloom’s (xxiv) claim is that many authors have been and continue to be influenced by Shakespeare. He even goes so far as to call it “this horror of contamination” when related to Ibsen, who apparently loathed Shakespeare’s influence. Bloom (xxv) encourages the reader to develop an “awareness of the anxiety of influence” with regards to Shakespeare so that we might get over resenting it.

Sanders, writing more recently in 2006, has a different perspective to that of Bloom’s. The term “intertextuality” is actually used by Sanders (17). Sanders attempts to explain the meaning of the term as it is currently used by defining its parts: “adaptation” and “appropriation.” There are three types of adaptation: the first is transposition (a screen version of a novel), the second is commentary (adaptations that comment on the source text), and thirdly, analogue (a stand-alone work where knowledge of the source text is not essential but such knowledge may “enrich and deepen our understanding of the new cultural product” (22)).

Another part of the meaning of the term “intertextuality” is appropriation. Appropriated texts are not as clearly acknowledged as adapted texts. There are two broad categories, according to Sanders (26), of appropriated texts: embedded texts and sustained appropriations. Embedded texts are more than adaptations, where a film version of a novel is still, in essence, recognizable as the same story. An embedded story is a “wholesale rethinking of the terms of the original” (28). West Side Story is an example of an embedded text with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet being reimaged in a 1950s New York City setting. I think that Sons of Anarchy, as mentioned by Tom, could also be an example of an embedded text.

Sustained appropriation can be discovered through “examination of sources or creative borrowings, citing allusions to or redeployments of” the work of predecessors. It is up to the reader to trace the relationship between a new text and what may have influenced the new text (34 -5). Our study of Dickens’ Great Expectations helped us to identify the original materials of the “bricolage” (17) – similar, I think, to Eliot’s (409) idea that the artists “impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways” – and that kind of study forms part of the pleasure of reading a text for the reader. Furthermore, the artist, from this perspective, is free to embrace the act of creating an intertext, rather than be anxious about it, as Bloom suggests.

I think that identifying influence or intertextuality is what good readers do, without prompting. A good reader is always looking for connections to other texts, ideas, and the real world. Knowing this process has a name lends formality and legitimacy to the process. As Allen (6-7) suggests, in comparing a text by authors we read with those that may have influenced their work, we may arrive at a different perspective on each of the texts, old and new. Every reader will take something different away when working through this process. The important thing is that working through this process when reading makes us pay attention.

Works cited

Allen, Graham.  Intertextuality.  2^nd edition.   New York:  Routledge, 2011.

Bloom, Harold. Preface.  The Anxiety of Influence:  A Theory of Poetry.  New York, Oxford UP:  1973; 2^nd edition, 1997.

Eliot, T. S.. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”  Criticism:  Major Statements.  Ed.  Charles Kaplan and William Davis.  Boston:  Bedford, 2000.  404-410.

Sanders, Julie.  Adaptation and Appropriation.  New York:  Routledge, 2006.