The Genre of Trolls - Doria

langage poétique se lit, au moins, comme double” (Kristeva 1978: 84–85). 23
Intertextuality implies that no text is an island, isolated from other texts.
However, it should not be reduced to mere source-hunting or deliberations
on authorial influence, since the concept of influence is usually understood
to imply that the relations between texts are rather static and unidirectional.
Kristeva’s English editor, Leon S. Roudiez, strongly disapproved of this
abuse of the term (Roudiez 1980: 15). The replacement of intersubjectivity
with intertextuality is, apart from a rejection of the humanist tenets of existentialism
(Friedman 1991: 156), the natural consequence of the textualized
addressee; no intersubjectivity can exist where the writer merges with the
addressee. The only reader that exists in Kristeva’s essay is the writer, and
her theory is therefore far removed from that of reader response critics.
Moreover, intertextuality in Kristeva’s early version is very much a theory
of writing, and Derridean grammatology is an important intertext to “Le
mot, le dialogue et le roman” (Clayton & Rothstein 1991: 18–19); later, in
La révolution du langage poétique, first published in 1974, Kristeva developed
the concept in a psychoanalytic direction (Kristeva 1985). The theory she
elaborated in La révolution du langage poétique is more suited to other types
of material than those constituting my corpus, and I will therefore refrain
from utilizing it in this context.
Nevertheless, the merits of the notion of intertextuality outweigh the liabilities.
For the folklorist, intertextuality encourages a return to the study
of texts, without necessarily relinquishing the insights gained in the analysis
of context and performance. Simultaneously, the basic assumption underlying
the theory of intertextuality is a significant corrective to contextual
studies: context is already within the text, and cannot be separated from it,
since it exists within the word. Especially in the case of archived texts,
where contextual information is generally missing, the concept of intertextuality
enables an interpretation of them despite these shortcomings by emphasizing
the connection of the individual text to the whole of folk tradition,
and to other traditions as well. In effect, the conception of context as
23 Thus, “the word (the text) is an intersection of words (of texts) where one reads at least
one other word (text)”, for “all text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations, all text is the
absorption and transformation of another text. Instead of the notion of intersubjectivity
that of intertextuality installs itself, and poetic language can be read as at least double” (my
translation; cf. Kristeva 1980).
Intertextuality as Ideological Critique 139