Enter Textuality
Echoes from the Extra-Terrestrial
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4375994 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Thomas A Sebeok (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1985 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 657 |
| Publication date | 1985-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Poetics Today (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0333-5372 • E-ISSN: 1527-5507 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/1771959 |
| OpenAlex | W2329292666 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 1 |
Jorge Luis Borges once observed that every writer of fiction creates his own precursors by modifying each of his reader's conceptions of the past. The same retrospective axiom surely constrains every other sort of fabricant, from scientist to, in the case in point, cinematic auteur. For purposes of this presentation, a text will be regarded as any significant object, or, more technically, as any autonomously blended string of signs. Although the internal simplicity or complexity such a string may display is not at issue here, multistranded strings tend to be more fascinating than single filaments, and syncretic aggregations of which film offers a conspicuous example even more so. The Janus-faced concept of intertextuality, which, in contrast with Borges's dictum, works as much prospectively as it does in a retrograde scape by extension of M. Bachtin's original, although hardly precise, formulation of heteroglossia, dialogism, and polyphony denotes ways in which works of art especially of literature are produced in response not to social reality but to previous works of art and the codes and other conventions governing them. In J. Kristeva's reformulation: texte se construit comme mosaique de tout texte est absorption et transformation d'un autre text. A la place de la notion d'intersubjectivite s'installe celle d'intertextualit~.. . (1969:146). Intertextual codes, which R. Barthes characterized (1974:10) as a mirage of citations, are ultimately insubstantial, every reader having become a more or less representative embodiment of a vague, generalized intertextuality; as he went on to write in the same work: Ce 'moi' qui s'approche du texte est deji lui-meme une pluralit6 d'autres textes, de codes infinis, ou plus exactement: perdus (dont I'origine se perd) (p. 16). To the degree to which a work of art is intertextual, it becomes distorted, opaque even, a darkly specular reflection of actuality as
Art · Epistemology · Intertextuality · Linguistics · Literature · Physics · Polyphony · Simplicity · Textuality · Theoretical physics · Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism · Computer Science · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Philosophy
| Citations per year | 0.21 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2012 - 2021 (10) |
| Highly cited | No |