Intertextuality by Christian Moraru

Christian Moraru composed an entry on “Intertextuality” for The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (2005) which gives an overview of the history of the concept as well as an overview of different approaches to the concept and their most prominent theorists.

     First of all, Moraru differentiates between four different approaches which can be divided further into two different categories. If a text A is incorporated in any way in a text B, A, the ‘pretext’, can be seen as the ‘intertext’ as it is the text that is worked into another text (1). Contrary, text B can be regarded as the intertext, as it is the text incorporating another, and, therefore, is the active agent in this intertextuality (2). A third approach regards both, text A and B, to be ‘intertextually bound’ to each other which makes both texts intertexts (3). The fourth and last approach mentioned by Moraru regards all texts as intertexts (4). Approaches 1-3 describe an “interplay of identifiable (Genette) or ‘traceable’ texts (Doležel)”, while the fourth approach indicates a universality of intertextuality in literature.

     The subsection “Bakhtin’s legacy: cultural and ideological analyses of narrative intertextuality” of the article takes reference to hypertext: “Once society, history, and culture are seen as ‘texts’, intertextuality becomes central to new Historicism, cultural studies and identity studies, post-colonial scholarship, debates around globalised ‘network society’, the Internet, and hypertext”.  Moraru adds to this aspect of intertextuality in the following subsection “Poststructualism and telling as retelling”. Here, he focuses on the aspects of interactivity, remodelling and referentiality. Oral literature, as in folktales or anecdotes, become a narrative labyrinth and ultimately a linguistic maze in the course of telling and retelling.

     Moraru’s oral literature resembles Jorge Luis Borges’s notion of an infinitive novel in his short story The Garden of Forking Paths. Both characterise hypertext as a kind of labyrinth or maze which poses the opposite of a linear text.

Moraru, Christian. “Intertextuality”. In: Routledge Encyclopaedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. Herman, Davis, Manfred Jahn, and Ryan. London New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.

S. Plum