Behind Bakhtin

Russian Formalism and Kristeva's Intertextuality

Bibliographic Data

ID4389477
AuthorsAndrea Lesic-Thomas (corresponding author)
Year2005
Volume28
Issue3
Pages1-20
Publication date2005-11-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueParagraph (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0264-8334 • E-ISSN: 1750-0176
PublisherEdinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.3366/para.2005.28.3.1
OpenAlexW2095174390
LanguageEN
Citations received9

Intertextuality is one of those extremely useful and yet strangely vague theoretical concepts: liberal definition would be that it refers to any form of interrelation between any number of texts, from instances of clear reactions of one text to another (as in parody, for example) to more general idea that there is not a single text that does not possess traces of other texts within itself. As Graham Allen points out, term in its variety of meanings and use has become 'akin to such terms as the Imagination, history, or Postmodernism it is far from being 'transparent' and 'cannot be evoked in an uncomplicated manner'.1 If diversity of current use of term can be seen as somewhat troubling, its origins appear to be beyond dispute: in 1966, Julia Kristeva, a young Bulgarian scholar, gave a presentation on Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of novel and nature of word/ utterance/ discourse in novelistic genres in Roland Barthes's seminar.2 This presentation was later published as a paper in Critique, and then included in Kristeva's book Semiotike : Recherches pour une semanalyse under title 'Le mot, le dialogue et le roman' ('Word, Dialogue and Novel'). The new term was introduced to replace Bakhtin's own notion of dialogism where it refers to text as a 'mosaic of quotations, an absorption and transformation of another text'.3 Taken on since as one of key terms of literary scholarship,4 intertextuality has become a term widely used to denote any form of interrelation between any number of texts, and conceptual change which accompanied this terminological change from 'dialogism' to 'intertextuality' is probably one of great intellectual repackaging and marketing schemes in recent history.5 It served double purpose of helping Kristeva establish herself as a voice to be reckoned with in French structuralist circles, as well as introducing those same circles to world of Bakhtinian thought. In her recent book Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts, Mary Orr tells a similar version of this familiar story, but at same time proposes

Art · Epistemology · Heteroglossia · Intertextuality · Linguistics · Literature · Postmodernism · Scholarship · Utterance · Literature, Musicology, and Cultural Analysis · Mathematics · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Russian Literature and Bakhtin Studies

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