Presently, ‘intertextuality’ has many fans, but everybody understands it differently;
ironically, the increasing number of publications has only added to the confusion of the
term (Plett 1991, 3). Julia Kristeva has an influential role in the popularity and practice of
intertextuality. By attacking work’s isolation, she introduces the birth of a new kind of
textuality. These new texts are infinitely flexible and manipulative because they shatter the readers’ habitual understanding and experiencing. The new definition of textual system
allows the reader to break off the authority of what appears to be the main text into
intertextual pathways, to the extent that the main text is forgotten. Intertext is of dual
nature: being a text by itself, thus intratextual, and a text that relies on the structure of
other texts, thus intertextual. Intertext has been defined as a text between other texts. A
host of critics have explained the in-between quality of intertextuality. Bloom (1975, 3)
declares that “[t]here are no texts, but only relationships between texts.” This space
between all texts is where reader/writer travels forever and forever. Barthes (1986, 58)
calls it an “activity,” a “production,” a moment of in-between “traversal.” Yet the explanation
is very elusive since the author, the reader, and all the agents of communication have very
different interpretations of “between” (Plett 1991, 5). What can reconcile different readings
of “between” lies in the dialogic nature of intertextuality. What matters is the “gradual
participation of the text in intertextuality and of the intertext in textuality” (Plett 1991, 6).
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