Who coined the term intertextuality?

Julia Kristeva introduced the term in the late 1960s, developing it from Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of dialogism and the polyphonic, many-voiced nature of discourse.

Is intertextuality the same as influence?

No; influence study traces a deliberate debt of one author to another, whereas intertextuality, in its strong sense, holds that all texts are constituted by other texts regardless of authorial intention.

Intertextuality and the Text

Intertextuality holds that every text is woven from other texts, so meaning arises from relations among texts rather than from a self-contained work.

Definition

The principle that texts are constituted by their relations to other texts, codes, and discourses, such that no text is wholly original or self-sufficient.

Scope

This topic covers the concept of intertextuality coined by Kristeva from Bakhtin's dialogism, Barthes's distinction between the closed 'work' and the open, plural 'text', and Genette's systematic typology of transtextual relations. It examines how the idea reconceives originality, influence, and authorship, and how it has been narrowed in some criticism into the study of concrete allusions and sources.

Core questions

In what sense is every text made out of other texts?
How does intertextuality differ from traditional source-and-influence study?
What distinguishes a 'work' from a 'text'?
How can the many ways texts relate to one another be classified?

Key theories

Intertextuality from dialogism: Kristeva's reworking of Bakhtin's dialogism into the claim that any text is a mosaic of quotations, an absorption and transformation of other texts, displacing the notion of a single authorial origin of meaning.
From work to text: Barthes's distinction between the bounded, authored 'work' and the 'text' as a plural, irreducible field of signification traversed by codes and citations, experienced in the activity of reading.
Transtextuality: Genette's typology of five kinds of textual relation (intertextuality, paratextuality, metatextuality, hypertextuality, and architextuality), offering a structured poetics of how texts relate to one another.

History

Kristeva introduced the term 'intertextuality' in the late 1960s while presenting Bakhtin's dialogism to French readers. Barthes generalized it into a theory of the text in the early 1970s. Genette later gave the concept a more systematic, formal treatment in Palimpsests (1982), and the notion has since been widely adopted, sometimes narrowed to the study of explicit allusion.

Debates

Broad versus narrow intertextuality: Whether intertextuality names a general condition of all signification, as Kristeva and Barthes intended, or a more limited, traceable set of relations among particular texts, as in much practical criticism.

Key figures

Julia Kristeva
Roland Barthes
Mikhail Bakhtin
Gerard Genette

Seminal works

kristeva1969
barthesworktext1971
genette1982

Frequently asked questions

Who coined the term intertextuality?: Julia Kristeva introduced the term in the late 1960s, developing it from Mikhail Bakhtin's concepts of dialogism and the polyphonic, many-voiced nature of discourse.
Is intertextuality the same as influence?: No; influence study traces a deliberate debt of one author to another, whereas intertextuality, in its strong sense, holds that all texts are constituted by other texts regardless of authorial intention.