Rebecca SC French 602F2576 MA in German Studies - Rhodes ...

This recalls the main idea in Roland Barthes‟ famous 1967 essay “The Death of the Author”,
which describes how “[…] a text is not a line of words releasing […] the „message‟ of the
Author […,] but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original,
blend and clash” (Barthes 1987: 146). This idea, also expressed as the decentering of the
subject (or author), went on to become a main feature of poststructuralism, along with the
notions of primacy of theory and the fundamental importance of the reader. (Jones, R.: online)
Another definition of intertextuality as a background of “one or more texts which the reader must
know in order to understand a work of literature in terms of its overall significance” (Riffaterre
in Norton & Still 1990: 56), suggests that a text‟s meaning is to be found in its differences with
and resemblances to other texts. (Van Boheemen in Bal 1981: 122) Bakhtin himself made the
point quite strongly in his view that a text “lives only by coming into contact with another text”
(Bakhtin in Bauman 2004: 4).
Stevie Bolduc, in a fascinating paper on intertextuality as encountered in Thomas Mann‟s Tristan
and Wagner‟s Tristan und Isolde, explores Ducrot and Todorov‟s notion that intertextuality as a
tool must apply and include meanings both prior to and following the reader‟s encounter with a
text at a specific point in time. Reminiscent of the poststructuralist view on the importance of
the reader, Ducrot and Todorov describe the essential reader-writer relation, in which “two
productivities […] intersect, creating a new space with their intersection.” (Bolduc 1983: 82)
This “new space” becomes the locus of limitless interpretations, particularly once we are aware
of literary elements that can be explored – the name of a character or his life circumstances, the
setting of a novel, a style of writing or a genre.
Thus, what started out as a “form of protest against established cultural and social values” and
went on to be used by “even conservative literary scholars to exhibit their alleged modernity”
(Plett 1991: 3), intertextuality has come to be regarded as a tool possibly essential, but
undoubtedly beneficial to literary criticism and analysis.
Essential to presenting a complete picture in this research, it is good to mention the theories of
intertextuality as applied to the worlds of theatre and music. Since theatrical productions,
specifically non-musical productions for stage, are generally text-based, one would assume and
apply the same principles as those relevant to literary intertextuality. Similar structural and
material relations would apply – genres such as parody or satire, tools such as allusion (whether
41