The reader—nowadays a rare species, to be sure—who has not yet been infected by the "virus" of postmodernist theory would probably find the idea of intertextuality counterintuitive, although it denotes, categorizes, and interprets processes that have for some time accompanied texts' production and reception. It would be difficult to convince such a reader, hardbound book in hand, that the text is boundless and that other texts and discourses intrude amid the printed lines, much less bring him to Jacques Derrida's idea that nothing exists outside the text. The traditional value of the print medium precludes such speculations. A...

Explaining the meaning of the expression "intertextuality" with simple semantic analysis and etymology would be naïve, since such terms depend on their theoretical outline—in this case on Kristeva's writings of the late 1960s (see Mai, "Bypassing" 32). However, the word's inherent semantic properties did influence the primal shaping of the theoretical concept, and even more its subsequent developments, applications, and transformations. Besides, the components of the term "intertextuality" may justifiably function as a linguistic prototype with which, among divergent definitions of intertextuality, it is possible intuitively to seek minimal common content.

It was Julia Kristeva who, between 1966 and...

As suggested earlier, an explicit theory of intertextuality arose in the late 1960s during a crisis in the arts and sciences when transitioning from the modern to the postmodern; however, when considering the history of the idea that a text is but a mosaic of citations, we may adduce older concepts, especially those that had almost as wide currency in literary studies. It is not only a matter of ideas from which the new category was directly derived (e.g., Bakhtin's dialogism and Saussure's research of anagrams), but also of perceptsex postinterpreted as anticipatory premonitions or polemical targets that...

As I already introduced previously, in 1966-67 Kristeva advanced the notion of intertextuality in an intertextual, interdiscursive, and it might be said intercultural way (see, e.g., Clayton and Rothstein 18). In working out the concept she asserted her own position into the contemporary theoretical discourse: in one of the West's intellectual centers, Paris, she was a shining theoretical success among those on the cutting edge of literary studies and the humanities, even though she was a newcomer from a totalitarian state in the socio-economically weak East. In 1965, at age twenty-four, she had left her native Bulgaria for Paris where...

Exploring the history of the idea of intertextuality, the archeology of its conceptual articulations, and tracing the theoretical derivations and applications that it engendered since its inception have shown that intertextuality has been manifested in many facets and versions. We might say that it was a concept belonging to "high theory" because it was in fact hatched from it. While from Jenny and Genette onward it might also be called—according to Brian McHale's essay "Whatever Happened to Descriptive Poetics"—a category of "middle-range" theory or "descriptive poetics." As a peripheral although not insignificant outgrowth of the discipline we are...

Like any other concept in scholarship, intertextuality is but an explanatory tool, one of a number of disposable cognitive models. Be that as it may, in barely forty years it has successfully demonstrated its viability: it joined and fleshed out cognate though less comprehensive theoretical understandings from the past; it took advantage of disparate methods and sparked in them—paradoxically, because of its contradictory applications—creative shifts; and it proved profitable for interpreting a wide variety of subjects, especially literature of all periods. Not least of all, having opened new fields of research, it modified scholarly discourse in the humanities...