424
INTERTEXTUALITY
of readers (Bland, 367). These include illustrations by John Tenniel (1820–1914) for
the 1866 reprint of Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (Tenniel rejected the 1865 printing), E. H. Shepard’s
(1879–1976) images for the 1931 edition of
Wind in the Willows (1908) by Kenneth
Grahame, and illustrations by Quentin
Blake (1932–) for numerous works by Roald
Dahl.
In addition to children’s literature and
scholarly editions reprinting original illustrations, the illustrated novel continues in
luxury editions of classic texts illustrated by
recognized artists. The 1903 edition of A!
rebours (1884, Against Nature), written by
Joris-Karl Huysmans and illustrated by Auguste Lep!ere (1849–1918) was a tour de
force of literary illustration, of which only
130 copies were printed. Contemporary examples include illustrated collector’s editions of Jane Austen’s novels. Whether the
cultural currency of the GRAPHIC novel, developments in publishing technology, or the
novel’s changing form will revive the illustrated novel remains to be seen. What is
clear is that an extensive body of recent
scholarly work addresses the complex relationship between text and image.
SEE ALSO: Reprints, Typography.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bland, D.A. (1969), History of Book Illustration.
Briden, E.F. (1995), “Kemble’s ’Specialty’ and the
Pictorial Countertext of Huckleberry Finn,” in
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. G. Graff and J.
Phelan.
Flint, K. (2000), Victorians and the Visual
Imagination.
Goldman, P. (2005), Beyond Decoration.
Harvey, J.R. (1971), Victorian Novelists and Their
Illustrators.
Le Men, S. (1994), “Book Illustration,” in Artistic
Relations, ed. P. Collier and R. Lethbridge.
Maxwell, R. ed., (2002), Victorian Illustrated Book.
Patten, R.L. (2002), “Serial Illustration and
Storytelling in David Copperfield,” in Maxwell.
Ray, G.N. (1986), Art of the French Illustrated Book,
1700 to 1914.
Skilton, D. (2007), “The Centrality of Literary
Illustration in Victorian Visual Culture,” Journal
of Illustration Studies (Dec. 2007). http://www.
jois.cf.ac.uk/articles.php?article¼30.
Implied Author see Author; Narration
Implied Reader see Reader
In Medias Res see Time
Indig"enisme see France (20th Century)
Indigismo see Andes
Intertextuality
MARIE-MADELEINE GLADIEU
Intertextuality refers to the relationship
among texts that echo or refer to one another, often through allusion, citation, or
borrowing. Laurent Jenny defines intertextuality as “the necessary precondition of
reading literature,” and Michel Riffaterre,
as the mechanism of literary reading itself.
This change in ways of thinking about literary texts began in the final years of the
1960s and in the following decade, when
Mikhail BAKHTIN coined the notion of dialogism in 1970 and when the word intertextuality was used for the first time by Julia
Kristeva in S"em"eiotik!e in 1969 (1980, Desire
in Language).
Several critics have argued for a historical
dimension to intertextuality. The process of
writing in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance,
and the baroque and classical periods often
amounted to creating a new version of
previously existing narratives or texts, giving new form to a theme which in most cases
was not original. In such cases, intertextuality was an inherent part of the process of
rewriting and practically went without saying. These periods, then, did not encounter
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INTERTEXTUALITY
the problem of intertextuality per se. It is
only when literary production is no longer
tied solely to the author’s vision, when it is
divided between two poles, the writer—the
initial creator—and the reader—the second
creator—that the notion of literary reading
truly emerges, and with it that of
intertextuality.
The question of intertextuality thus revolves around the three forms of literary
intentio (intention) outlined by Umberto
Eco (1990, The Limits of Interpretation):
intentio scriptoris (writer’s intention), intentio operis (text’s intention), and intentio
lectoris (reader’s intention). It brings into
play the author, the text, and the reader.
Paul Ricoeur speaks of a “process of recognition” in three senses of the term: recognition as identification, self-recognition,
and recognition of the other (2007, The
Course of Recognition, trans. D. Pellauer).
The first stage consists in identifying and
recognizing the presence of intertexts in a
given text, and in addressing the problem of
how this identification is possible. Moreover, intertextuality raises the question of
memory and time. Like a palimpsest, the
text and the brain itself presuppose the
insertion of a subject, first author and then
reader, in a historical time outside of which
there can be no construction of the self to
serve as the basis for self-recognition. And
insofar as memory plays a role in the construction of identity, which is itself inseparable from the process of socialization, the
intertext inserted by the writer and recognized by the reader, who uses it as a starting
point for reconstituting a text, involves the
relationship between the reader and the
Other.
The notion of text inevitably includes that
of intertext. In his article “Theory of the
Text,” published in the Encyclopoedia Universalis in 1968, Roland Barthes explains that
the notion of text shifted from the expression
of an author’s absolute Truth to the idea of a
425
continuous production of meaning. The text
no longer expresses a single meaning imparted by the author at the moment of
writing, but serves as a vehicle for other,
prior connotations. In the 1960s there
emerged a “crisis of signification” due to the
evolution of philosophy and the development of LINGUISTICS. The notion that textual
utterances were endowed with stable meaning gave way to the idea that they were valid
in a given context. A new theory of meaning
appeared during this period: semiotics,
which raised the question of signification at
the level of the text’s macrostructure rather
than merely at the level of the sentence.
Under the influence of the Prague School,
research on the “poetics of form” was conducted (see FORMALISM). Grounding his work
in this research, as well as in Marxism and
psychoanalysis, Barthes reduced the scope of
the author’s intentio and underlined the
importance of determining factors—social
structures, the unconscious—beyond authorial control (see MARXIST, PSYCHOANALYTIC).
For Barthes, a text is a texture, an interwoven
fabric; it is a signifying practice accomplished in relationship to the discourse of
the social Other (the interrelational dimension) and of the Other that inhabits us (the
unconscious). As a result, the text is produced by a psychically plural subject. The
signifier can always be interpreted by either
writer or reader in a manner that differs
slightly from precedent: this leads to the
notion of the productivity of the text, which
produces meaning. This productivity, which
is also called signifiance, is opposed to signification, which is rigid, fixed, the result of
applying interpretive doctrines to the text.
Signifiance is open to contradiction. Like
Kristeva, Barthes differentiates phenotext, or
written text, and geno-text, the site of signifiance. Intertext, then, designates the text as a
meeting place for prior and contemporary
utterances, transcribed faithfully or unfaithfully, identifiable orunidentifiable, conscious
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
426
INTERTEXTUALITY
or unconscious. Intertextuality thus goes beyond the mere elucidation of a text’s sources.
“The work can be held in the hand, the
text is held in language,” writes Barthes, by
which he means that the work is closed,
while the text is open. The text, he affirms,
“is only language and can only be experienced via another language.” But simultaneously, in its “textual specificity,” text becomes one with signifiance, an unstable
entity in constant tension which tends to
exceed its own limits. Semanalysis, a concept
invented by Julia Kristeva, is the science of
the geno-text’s shifting meanings. If the
trend in textual theory is toward writing
(!ecriture), to suggest that “commentary
should itself be a text” amounts to postulating that the text as it is read becomes the
intertext of a “text that reads.”
For Michel Arriv!e, the text is poly-isotopic.
Following the lead of François Rastier
and Algirdas Julien Greimas, he distinguishes between formal and semantic
isotopies. Interlocking isotopies make it
possible to go back to other utterances
located upstream from the text. The isotopy,
defined as an assemblage of disparate elements gathered under the heading of a single
structural unit, makes it possible to avoid
reducing the intertext to only those elements that are based on a syntactical
continuity. According to Arriv!e, literary
texts present isotopies “which are not manifested by any lexeme” and called connoted
isotopies.
We thus arrive at five definitions of
intertextuality:
1. Intertext denotes each (external) utterance whose direct or transformed presence the
reader identifies in the text.
2. For Riffaterre, the intertext is “all of the
texts that can be brought into a close relationship with the text at hand.” He gives this
definition in his article “L’intertexte inconnu”
(1981, Litt!erature 41).
3. By intertext, Laurent Jenny designates
the “host text” insofar as it contains a certain
number of heterogeneous utterances: “the text
absorbs a multiplicity of texts while remaining
anchored by a central meaning.”
4. Arriv!e hesitates between a global
version—the intertext is “all of the texts among
which relationships of intertextuality are
functioning”—and a more targeted version—
“the site of the manifestation of the connoted
isotopy,” a formal or semantic isotopy.
5. For others, the intertext is the space of
free play created by different, preexisting utterances meeting within a given text: intertext
would then be a synonym of intertextuality.
With time, the first definition became the
accepted one: the term “intertextuality” refers to everything that concerns the relationship among texts; intertext refers to any
external utterances whose direct or transformed presence can be identified in the text
being read. Literary theory has shifted from
a broad understanding of intertextuality
(Barthes, Kristeva) to a more circumscribed
understanding (Bouillaguet, Genette). For
Kristeva, in Desire in Language, the presence
of paintings in a novel is an intertext; the
id!eolog"eme (exposition of a social and/or
historical situation) is also an intertext.
Laurent Jenny, in “La strat!egie de la forme,”
considers the reference to a text as a genre,
the transformations of meaning and form,
and the literal reproduction of a heterogeneous utterance as intertexts. He begins to
constrict the notion of intertextuality.
In Palimpsests, G!erard Genette calls all
types of relationships among texts transtextuality. He identifies five forms; architextuality (generic relationship to a category of
text), metatextuality (a commentary of a
prior text by a second text), paratextuality
(the role played by the peripheral guidelines
accompanying the publication and criticism
of a text), hypertextuality (the rewriting of a
prior text or hypotext), and intertextuality
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
INTERTEXTUALITY
(the relationship of copresence between two
or more texts).
Intertextuality manifests itself in three
ways: citation, plagiarism, and allusion. In
an article on intertextuality (“Une typologie
de l’emprunt”), Annick Bouillaguet adds
the reference, defined as the mere mention
of an author’s name or of a work’s title.
When intertextuality is literal or explicit, it is
called citation. When it is literal and nonexplicit, it is called plagiarism. Nonliteral
and explicit, it is a reference; nonliteral and
nonexplicit, it is an allusion. Let us note that
plagiarism covers the usurpation of author’s
rights (see COPYRIGHT) as well as collage,
which comes under the heading of another
problem. Moreover, according to Genette,
intertextuality often takes the form of hypertextuality, the transformation of a hypotext into a hypertext (a text that is read);
Kristeva, Barthes, and Philippe Sollers link
intertextuality to the notion of the text’s
productivity and to signifiance. And Jenny
affirms that “the very essence of intertextuality for the poetician” is situated in “the work
of assimilation and transformation which
characterizes any intertextual process.”
In “Intertexte et autotexte,” Lucien
D€allenbach adds the notion of autotext.
The intertext refers to texts by other
authors, while the autotext refers to texts
by the same author. For his part, Jean
Ricardou distinguishes between general intertextuality (the relationship to different
authors) and restricted intertextuality (the
relationship to the works of the same
author).
In a later, 1989 entry in the Encyclopoedia
Universalis, “Intertextualit"e (Th"eorie de l’),”
Pierre-Marc de Biasi defines intertextuality
as “the elucidation of the process by which
any text can be read as the integration and
the transformation of one or several other
texts.”
What role does the author’s intention and
the reader’s power of identification play in
427
intertextuality? The reader’s identification
of the intertext sometimes surprises the
writer, who had no intention of playing the
intertextual game. Inversely, authors sometimes reveal the presence of a hidden intertextual layer at the origin of their work. A
limit case of intertextuality that Ferdinand
de Saussure (1857–1913) claims to have
discovered in Latin poetry also deserves
mention—the hypogram (theme-word)
hidden by Venus in Lucretius’s work De
rerum natura (first c. BCE, On the Nature of
Things). It is sometimes hard to distinguish
between the author’s intention and the
reader’s recognition of a hypotext.
In Confessions of an English Opium Eater
(1821), Thomas de Quincey (1785–1859)
compares the human brain to an immense,
natural palimpsest where poems of joy and
pain have been engraved and lie dormant,
ready to come to the surface one day. This
image refers to the author, but also to the
reader. It underlines the double polarization
of any utterance. Bakhtin affirms that all
understanding is, in reality, dialogic, that original meaning is enriched by a supplement
constructed by the “second recipient”—in
the case of a written text, the reader.
The problem of the recognition-identification of intertexts raises the question of
their misrecognition: forgetting, as well as
the evolution of cultures, of contexts, leads
to deliberate intertexts going unnoticed.
Criticism and scholarship can help to fill
this gap. The intertext sometimes guides the
reader toward the constitution of the architext, both by its title and what it triggers in
the reader’s memory: it thus has an impact
on the contrat de lecture (reading contract).
If, as Riffaterre argues, the identification
of the intertext is indeed the condition of
literariness, it has repercussions on reading.
The act of borrowing from another work—
the presence of a “second hand,” as Antoine
Compagnon puts it (1979, La Seconde
Main)—may occur as homage, mockery, or
(c) 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
428
IRAN
merely a complicit wink. The relationships
between texts is either serious, satirical, or
playful. Intertextuality breaks with the linearity of a text, amplifies the circulation of
meaning and the movement from the denotative to the connotative realm.
In The Course of Recognition, Paul Ricoeur
adds a philosophical dimension to intertextuality. The word “recognition” is linked to
two ideas: the emergence of meanings (faits
de pens!ee), and the idea that these meanings
do not emerge ex nihilo. In writing, there
exists a sort of intertextual fertile ground.
Ricoeur distinguishes three levels of
recognition: the recognition-identification
of intertexts, the self-recognition resulting
from the symbolic play born of this recognition, and the mutual recognition that occurs when the author’s text becomes the
intertext of the reading text. Identity and
alterity, then, underpin intertextuality.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, G. (2000), Intertextuality.
Arriv!e, M. (1973), “Pour une th!eorie des textes polyisotopiques,” Langages 31:53–63.
Bellemin-Noel, J. (2001), “Interlecture versus
intertexte,” in Plaisirs de vampire.
Block, H. (1958), “The Concept of Influence in
Comparative Literature,” Yearbook of
Comparative and General Literature 7:35–37.
Bouillaguet, A. (1989), “Une typologie de
l’emprunt,” Po!etique 80:489–97.
D€allenbach, L. (1976), “Intertexte et autotexte,”
Po!etique 27:282–96.
Eco, U. (1990), Limits of Interpretation.
Genette, G. (1997), Palimpsests, trans. C. Newman
and C. Doubinksy.
Jenny, L. (1976), “La strat!egie de la forme,” special
issue, Po!etique 27:257–81.
Orr, M. (2003), Intertextuality.
Pi!egay-Gros, N. (1996), Introduction #a
l’intertextualit!e.
Riffaterre, M. (1984), Semiotics of Poetry.
Starobinski, J. (1980), Words upon Words.
Todorov, T. (1984), “Intertextuality,” in Mikhail
Bakhtin.
Iran
KAMRAN TALATTOF
As a specifically literary genre, the Persian
novel may have had its roots in the Western
tradition, especially if we consider the fact
that the rise of the Persian novel followed a
wave of translation of European and particularly French novels into Persian (Balay,
Kamshad). And as far as early novelistic
themes are concerned, they were devoted
to historical events (Aryanpur, Kamshad,
Yavari). However, one may also consider
the long tradition of classical narrative poetry, fable writing, poetic romances, and
prose fiction as indigenous sources of the
Persian novel. In this vein, the narrative
poetry of Hak$ım Abu’l-Q$asim Firdaws$ı T$
us$ı
(940–1020) and Nezami (ca. 1141–1209),
the Indo-Iranian stories of “One Thousand
and One Nights,” koranic/biblical stories,
and the popular legend of Amir Asrsalan
Namdar, which were circulated in society
orally for many centuries before being written down, are prime examples. Christophe
Balay believes that the latter work is the last
story to be written in the old, traditional
form of narrative. Like MIKHAIL BAKHTIN,
Balay cautiously uses the term novel in
association with old or long narrative stories. This relationship between the old and
the new is present more strongly between
classical Persian short stories and the European GENRE of short story, an analysis of
which can help further understanding of
the changes that Persian prose has experienced since the nineteenth century.
No matter how we define the genre of
these older works, their influence has certainly lasted until today. For example,
Nezami’s Layli o Majnun (1192, Layli and
Majnun) inspired many love stories set in
the modern era. Nezami’s characters in this
work are very complex, a feature Bakhtin
attributes to the modern novel. Even Golestan (The Rose Garden) by Sa’di (thirteenth
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