Mikhail Bakhtin was the one who developed the concept of intertextuality.
The notion of intertextuality refers to the link that a text establishes with other texts , which may be historical or contemporary. The Russian philologist and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) is identified as the person responsible for developing the idea of intertextuality, highlighting that all discourses have a dialogic character because they relate to others.
Intertextuality, which encompasses both written and oral texts, has an impact on the generation and understanding of discourses. According to Bakhtin , each sender was previously the recipient of multiple texts that marked him, so the production of his own text is influenced by the texts he previously read or heard. Therefore, underlying every discourse is a dialogue with multiple overlapping voices .
Intertextuality and citations
It is important to consider, in this framework, that intertextuality goes beyond the quote. There is an obvious relationship between two texts when one cites the other, but intertextuality is associated with a cultural tradition shared by a linguistic community . This tradition affects the register, style and other features.
At this point it is important to emphasize that intertextuality is mainly cultural. That is why when learning a second language , intertextuality can make it difficult to understand texts if the references are not understood.
A style resource
Transcending discursive analysis , intertextuality is called the stylistic resource that establishes a relationship, explicit or implicit, between two texts.
In this case there is a quote from one within the other with paraphrased or literal references. Although in most cases this is done voluntarily, given the nature of language we can engage in intertextuality without being aware of it.
History and evolution
In 1967, the Bulgarian-French writer and university professor Julia Kristeva published an article titled Bakhtin, the word, the dialogue and the novel , in which she pointed out the proximity between structuralist semiology, a concept developed by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand Saussure , with the academic environment of France and Bakhtin's studies on language. It was then that she used the word intertextuality for the first time, so she was the one who coined it. Broadly speaking, he states that for Bakhtin texts are made up of many quotations, which absorb and transform other texts.
In her article, Kristeva also talks about intersubjectivity , a back-and-forth process through which the knowledge and consciousness of two people are shared. According to his point of view, this concept belonging to the field of philosophy is replaced by that of intertextuality since the reader does not receive the meaning of the written word directly from the writer, but rather this transfer is mediated by the existence of other texts and their respective codes that are present in the current one.
Intertextuality is the relationship that a text establishes with others.
Intertextuality was adopted and studied by many authors from divergent fields of semiotics; Such was the case of Schapiro, Yuri Lotman, Jan Mukařovský and Ernst Gombrich , representatives of aesthetic semiotics , and Roland Barthes, Lamberto Pignotti and Umberto Eco , of those focused on mass communication .
For his part, the Italian semiologist and philologist Cesare Segre coined the term interdiscursivity to refer to the relationship that exists between a literary text and other artistic languages, explaining that there are not only written texts and intertexts, but also textuality and transtextuality that are can be seen in human communication. The German writer Heinrich F. Plett , on the other hand, uses the term Intermediality to talk about such a concept.