Intertextuality

The term intertextuality as used by Julia Kristeva (1980: 69) should probably strictly refer to the creating of an entire text based on a previous work. A much used example is that of James Joyce’s Ulysses, based on Homer’s Odyssey. For Kristeva “the notion of intertextuality replaces the notion of intersubjectivity” when meaning is not transferred directly from writer to reader but instead is mediated through, or filtered by, codes imparted to the writer and reader by other texts. This view relates to literature, suggesting that a reader reads a text in constant relation to other texts, which are all in some way interrelated. Joyce and Homer represent one extreme, but at a more basic level, even a song by Bruce Springsteen Darlington County contains the words ‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord”, taken from the American Battle Hymn of the Republic. Staying with this text, Steinbeck took the title for his novel The Grapes of Wrath from the second line of that same hymn. Steinbeck’s novel Tortilla Flat is based on Arthurian legends .. and so on.