The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms/Peter Childs & Roger Fowler; New York: Taylor & Francis,2006, 121-123p.
Intertextuality 121
Monroe C. Beardsley argued that the
authors intentions were not the proper
concern of the critic. Their argument has
produced many misconceptions about
descriptive criticism that poems are
autonomous, or autotelic, that they are
discontinuous from language and each
other, that any external evidence is criti-
cally inadmissible. Essentially the essay
disputed the formulae and terminology of
expressive criticism with its Romantic
concentration on the inspired utterances
of the poet, and asserted the existence of
the poem as a fact in the public language.
The characteristic vocabulary of expres-
sive or intentionalist criticism, its criteria
of sincerity, fidelity, spontaneity, original-
ity, pointed to a misconception about
the mode of existence of a literary work.
It was not a practical message, a real
statement, which could be measured for
its sincerity against a known context,
but a fictional utterance by a dramatic
speaker; so it was more properly judged
in terms of coherence, profundity, beauty.
Consequently, the essay argued, the
meaning of a work was better discovered
by attention to internal evidence, the
language of the poem, which paradoxi-
cally, because it was language, was pub-
lic, than to external evidence the private
disclosures of poets, their friends or bio-
graphers. This advice has often been
understood to mean the irrelevance to
critical enquiry of all information that is
not derived from the linguistic character-
istics of the text. But Wimsatt and
Beardsley do not dispute the usefulness of
this other information; the core of their
argument is that our ability to use this
information depends upon our sense of
its relevance, and that relevance can be
established only in relation to the poem as
a fact in language. In proposing that the
only public existence a work of literature
has is its existence in language, they were
stating an axiom of descriptive criticism.
See also ANALYSIS, AUTHOR, DISCOURSE,
EFFECT, NEW CRITICISM.
See Patrick Swinden, Literature and
the Philosophy of Intention (1999).
PM
Interior monologue See STREAM OF
CONSCIOUSNESS.
Interpretant See SEMIOTICS.
Interpretation See ANALYSIS,
HERMENEUTICS.
Intertextuality With the identification
in STRUCTURALISM of language as a series
of interconnections between signs came
the recognition of the importance of the
relationships between those signs and the
ways they interact to produce different
meaning-formations. Thinking in POST-
STRUCTURALISM subsequently tended to
emphasize the ways in which signs, and
their more complex relations texts
depend upon each other for their meaning
within the structures and frameworks of
GENRE and DISCOURSE. Intertextuality is
the name often given to the manner in
which texts of all sorts (oral, visual, liter-
ary, virtual) contain references to other
texts that have, in some way, contributed
to their production and signification. The
notion was initially introduced by Julia
Kristeva who envisaged texts as function-
ing along two axes: the horizontal axis
determines the relationship between the
reader and the text whilst the vertical axis
contains the complex set of relations of
the text to other texts. What coheres these
axes is the framework of pre-existing
codes that governs and shapes every text
and every reading act. In Kristevas view
the importance of a texts structure is
matched by its structuration, that is, the
pattern of interconnected fields within
which its meaning is transmitted to the
reader through already-known vocabular-
ies of generic and discursive formation.
For instance, the reader of a detective
122 Intertextuality
novel knows it is such not only because
of the conventions of style, action and
dnouement, but also because the book is
shelved in a specific section of the book-
shop and is graced by a suitably mysteri-
ous image on its front cover. The reader
knows what to expect from the novel pre-
cisely because of its similarities (whether
direct or indirect) to other texts s/he may
have encountered.
Intertextuality, with its endlessly
receding network of debts and legacies,
disturbs a casual belief in the uniqueness
of the text and of the originality of the
authorial consciousness. Such beliefs
are relatively recent phenomena. Until the
Renaissance, it was a widely accepted fact
that literary texts were patchworks of exist-
ing works either directly appropriated or
modified into a new form but in which the
identity of the author was of little impor-
tance. Even after the Renaissance texts
tended to be elaborate, often ostentatious
revisionings of prior works and interpreted
not as plagiaristic copies but as respectful
homages to tradition and to the skill of the
source-material. Only with the period of
Romanticism (in the late-eighteenth and
early-nineteenth centuries) does the notion
of authorial originality become an impor-
tant issue. It is tied to the Romantics idea
of the singularity of the creative con-
sciousness that also evidences a movement
towards a modern conception of individu-
alism. The text becomes a product of an
autonomously acting mind and something
that is as unique as the vision of the
individual that inspired it. This idea of
authorship was severely challenged by
structuralist and post-structuralist theorists
who claim supreme importance for the fact
that language is a system that is already in
place before the speaker makes a commu-
nicative act. The pre-existence of linguistic
codes and structures means that the subject
is always already positioned within
interpretive systems and can therefore only
employ those systems available to her/him
to describe the experience of reality. When
we speak, we are always revisiting what
has been previously spoken.
The implication of this circularity of
language for creative artists is that their
texts become collages of other textual
influences from the level of the phrase to
the arena of genre. The writer (or speaker)
becomes an orchestrator rather than an
originator, blending and rearranging mater-
ial to frame an idiosyncratic view of the
world. Critics can explore the range of
intertextual reference and the creative
engagement with the process of inheritance
but they cannot escape the framing that
contains their imagination, the media used
to express it nor the context within which
it is consumed. Postmodern artists have
deliberately drawn attention to the self-
referential quality of art and overtly
exposed the frames of both production and
interpretation. In a literary sphere, such
subversion is often referred to as metafic-
tion and frequently involves writers writing
about the process of writing. Many, accept-
ing the inescapability of the system, revel
in self-conscious flirtation with prior texts
through parodic reframing and rewriting,
drawing the readers eye not to the reality
of the world created but to its artificial
constructedness. The knowing distance that
is created between the acts of reading
and interpretation situates intertextuality
as a crucial feature of postmodernisms
cynicism towards authority and orthodoxy.
Centring on the imprecise intercourse
between author/text/reader, intertextuality
tends to privilege the reader as indispens-
able to the creative process. Because
the authors role is to manage the echoes
that emanate from her/his particular
arrangement of textualized forebears, the
readers decoding of that pattern is of
equal importance. The meaning that is

derived from any given text (whether it be
a novel, a poem, a film, a sitcom, an
advertisement) depends upon the readers
prior encountering of the intertexts that
are invoked without the necessary semi-
otic exposure the reception of the work
would inevitably bring forth differing, but
equally valid interpretations. This inter-
play between the reader and the author
empowered the Reader Response criticism
of the 1970s and 1980s which highlighted
the supremacy of readerly interpretation
over authorial intention, though some
form of middle-ground is now seen as a
more productive critical approach. The
popularity of intertextuality has seen it
become a significant element of popular
cultural discourse, so much so in fact,
that it can appear any time, any place,
anywhere. See also CREATION.
See Roland Barthes, The death of
the Author (1968), S/Z (1973); Jonathan
Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism,
Linguistics and the Study of Literature
(1975); Stanley Fish, Is there a Text in
this Class? The Authority of Interpretive
Communities (1980); Julia Kristeva,
Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach
to Literature and Art (1980).
DL
Irony A mode of discourse for
conveying meanings different from, and
usually opposite to, the professed or
ostensible ones. There are several kinds of
irony, though they fall into two main
categories: situational and verbal. All
irony, however, depends for its effective-
ness on the belief in and exploitation of
the difference and distance between
words or events and their contexts.
Since the contexts of situational
irony may be primarily social, moral or
metaphysical, irony can be further
classified as comic or tragic, though these
adjectives are in a sense inaccurate.
Irony 123
In tragic irony the ostensible reasons for
the heros downfall, whether it is the
anger of the gods or his own relentless
pursuit of an ideal, are undercut by psy-
chological reasons of a more mundane
sort. Joseph Conrads Lord Jim provides a
good example of this. Comic irony uses
similar kinds of juxtaposition to describe
and deflate the social aspirations of its
protagonists. In both forms the pivotal
character tends to be the eiron himself; a
dissembler who brings two conflicting
and contrasting worlds into sharp focus.
Examples of such characters are Conrads
Marlow and P. G. Wodehouses Jeeves.
Without such characters, there is a danger
that an authors ironies will be completely
missed by the reader; for, unlike the
satirist, he tends to suppress any direct
attitudes to his subject, and to rely upon a
shared set of assumptions or prejudices,
for the establishment of a context.
It is, however, possible to introduce
structural ironies without the use of an
eiron. Typically, this is the form situa-
tional irony takes in plays, where narrators,
concealed or otherwise, are more difficult
to employ; hence the term dramatic irony.
Here the eiron is replaced by members of
the audience who have been apprised of a
characters real situation before he knows
it himself, and who can therefore antici-
pate and enjoy the frustration of the ideal
by the actual. Sophocless Oedipus Rex
uses multiple dramatic ironies to criticize
nave rationalism by reversing all the pro-
tagonists normal expectations. Oedipus
in attempting to avoid his fate acts in such
a way as to seal it. Within this overarching
irony, many others operate both to
reinforce Sophocless view of life and to
express it with maximum dramatic force.
Dramatic irony can take many forms.
For a more extended discussion see
W. Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity,
(1947) 2nd edn, pp. 3847.