Intertextuality in Theory and Practice

Abstract

Intertextuality is a concept often associated with postmodernism, more particularly with that sphere of postmodernism where literature encounters critical theory.1 In many respects, and especially in the field of literature and poetics with which I am concerned, postmodernism can be viewed as a development of modernism which manifested itself during the first decades of the 20th century, in the years preceding and following the great fracture of the first World War. Modernism was characterized by the loss of stable values, by the loss of belief in the possibility of an objective truth and in the validity of totalizing ideologies, by the rejection of formal aesthetic theories, the emphasis given to subjectivity, to the discontinuous and the fragmentary, also by the place given to reflexivity and selfconsciousness in the production of texts. Postmodernism, I would suggest, merely went further in the same direction, sometimes with an added dose of scepticism and irony, mostly perhaps as a consequence of new developments like consumerism, the new technologies, globalization, but to me there was no new epistemological rupture like the one that took place with the emergence of modernism. What I will try to show in this lecture is that though the word for it had not yet been coined, the workings of intertextuality were already being explored by such modernists as T. S. Eliot and David Jones. In that respect also, there is an undeniable continuity between modernism and postmodernism, and I cannot imagine that if we have truly entered a new age “beyond postmodernism” we can do without the key concept of intertextuality to account for that all-important dimension of our experience as readers of literary texts, which we could call “the memory of literature”.2