Intertextuality and Influence
No text stands alone. Comparative literature has long studied how works relate to one another — through influence, allusion, imitation, and reception — and intertextuality reframed these relations as constitutive of textuality itself.
Definition
The branch of comparative literature concerned with the relations among texts — influence, intertextuality, reception, and recurring themes — and with the theories that explain how literary works are bound to one another.
Scope
Covers the relations among texts that have been central to comparative literature: the older study of sources and influence, Bloom's psychological theory of poetic influence, structuralist and post-structuralist intertextuality and its taxonomy of transtextual relations, the history of reception, and the comparative study of recurring themes and materials. Concerns inter-textual relations rather than any single text or tradition.
Sub-topics
Core questions
- How are literary works related to the works that precede and surround them?
- Is influence a matter of conscious borrowing, unconscious anxiety, or impersonal textual relation?
- How do later readings and receptions remake the meaning of earlier works?
- How do themes and materials migrate and recur across literatures?
Key theories
- Intertextuality
- Kristeva, drawing on Bakhtin, argued that every text is a mosaic of quotations and an absorption and transformation of other texts, dissolving the boundary between text and context.
- The anxiety of influence
- Bloom recast literary influence as an oedipal struggle in which strong poets misread their precursors to clear imaginative space for themselves.
- Transtextuality
- Genette systematized the relations a text maintains with other texts — intertextuality, paratextuality, hypertextuality, and more — providing a precise vocabulary for textual relations.
- Aesthetics of reception
- Jauss relocated literary meaning in the history of reading, arguing that a work's significance unfolds through successive readers' changing horizons of expectation.
History
Source-and-influence study was the bedrock of early comparative literature, especially the French school. The later twentieth century transformed it: Kristeva coined 'intertextuality' around 1966-1969, Bloom's 1973 The Anxiety of Influence psychologized influence, Genette's 1982 Palimpsests (English 1997) mapped transtextual relations, and the Constance School's reception aesthetics (Jauss) shifted attention from production to reading.
Debates
- Influence versus intertextuality
- Whether textual relations should be understood through authorial influence and intention (Bloom, traditional source study) or as impersonal, structural intertextuality independent of authors (Kristeva).
Key figures
- Julia Kristeva
- Harold Bloom
- Gérard Genette
- Hans Robert Jauss
Related topics
Seminal works
- kristeva1980
- bloom1973
- genette1997
- jauss1982
Frequently asked questions
- How is intertextuality different from influence?
- Influence study typically traces deliberate or traceable borrowings between authors. Intertextuality, as theorized by Kristeva, treats all texts as woven from other texts regardless of authorial intention, making textual relations a structural feature of language rather than a matter of personal debt.