Distance Education...discourse mechanics/January 6, 2011/Use of Conceptual Relations to Distance Education by Margith Strand/Fielding Graduate University/2011 [2010]

Kristeva’s coinage of “intertextuality” represents an attempt to synthesize Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics—his study of how signs derive their meaning within the structure of a text—with Bakhtin’s dialogism—his examination of the multiple meanings, or “heteroglossia,” in each text (especially novels) and word (Irwin 228). For Kristeva (69), “the notion of intertextuality replaces the notion of intersubjectivity” when we realize that meaning is not transferred directly from writer to reader but instead is mediated through, or filtered by, “codes” imparted to the writer and reader by other texts. For example, when we read James Joyce’s Ulysses we decode it as a modernist literary experiment, or as a response to the epic tradition, or as part of some other conversation, or as part of all of these conversations at once. This intertextual view of literature, as shown by Roland Barthes, supports the concept that the meaning of an artistic work does not reside in that work, but in the viewers. More recent post-structuralist theory, such as that formulated in Daniela Caselli's Beckett's Dantes: Intertextuality in the Fiction and Criticism (MUP 2005), re-examines "intertextuality" as a production within texts, rather than as a series of relationships between different texts. Some postmodern theorists[citation needed] like to talk about the relationship between "intertextuality" and "hypertextuality"; intertextuality makes each text a "living hell of hell on earth" (Kristeva 66) and part of a larger mosaic of texts, just as each hypertext can be a web of links and part of the whole World-Wide Web

Reference: Wikipedia/ January 6, 2011