Daniel Chander's Questions:
Chandler's notes on intertextuality
Intertextuality refers to the debt that any text has to other texts. This debt can be to texts of the same "sort" (genre, author, medium), or texts of other sorts.
Strictly speaking, intertextuality presses structuralist semiotics past its usual limits. Structuralist semiotics emphasizes the synchronic nature of codes, that is, the references they make to contemporaneous texts, and to the readers of the texts. Intertextuality relies as much on the diachronic nature of codes, the sequential and historical heritage or causal sequence of codes, as it does on the synchronic. Structuralism tends to isolate meaning in the present.
Intertextuality resists the classical tendency to regard texts as the unique work of geniuses. Texts exist in a network of already established meanings. Authors, then, assemble already available meanings, rather than produce new ones. And readers in an important sense create authors. In some cases, we know that writing is the product not of one person but of many (e.g., Aristotle's esoteric works). In other cases, we at least know that the meaning of a text is not the same as the author's intentions, but is mediated by the history of interpretation of that text.
Intertextuality also extends the notion of the text. No longer can we just look at the thing before us; we now have to take context into account as a fundamental feature of the text. This can be explicit (understanding Gulliver's Travels requires understanding something about British society of the time; understanding The Simpsons is helped by understanding contemporary culture in general), or it can be implicit (understanding any text requires experience of both formal and substantive elements that "frame" the text).
Examples
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