Interetextuality

The concept of intertextuality was expressed through the work of Russion literary scholar, Mikhail Bakhtin. While articulating Mikhail’s earlier work on ’dialogism’, juliet Kristeva coined The notion of interetextuality to describe the idea that “Any text that is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another”. It basically means that a text is deliberately structured around the recognizable narrative and characters of another text. If you think about it the WORLD surround by the concept of ‘Intertextuality’, it’s sometimes more of a subconscious act of taking ideas from another source. Take music and movies for instance , music that was made over 20 to 30 years ago is now being used again just by remixing the orginal form. Movies on the other hand, are being remade in a manner that the audience of today can relate to it.. I’m not trying to refer Intertextuality as a negative term, though it does have certain drawbacks.

While I was researching on this particular subject, I came across two types of interetextuality:

Ekphrasis- Ekphrasis was defined by Tom Mitchel, Grant Scott and James Hefferman as "the verbal representation of visual representation" . What both the authors mean is that ekphrasis comes into being when a writer describes a visual objects like paintings or sculpturse through a verbal media such as in a novel, poem, or other writings.

Iconotext- This brings us to the second category of intertextuality called iconotext. It is the use of(by way of reference or allusion, in an explicit or implicit way) an image in a text or vice versa. Some think it’s a work of art made up of visual and verbal signs in which text and images form a whole (or union that can not be dissolved and some see it as a Work of arts in which writing and the plastic element present themselves in an inseparable totality. Iconotext can also exist in such works in which one medium is only implied e.g. the reference to a painting in a fictional text. Examples can be found in most newspapers, where articles sometimes carry pictures. It can also be seen in novels in which pictures are used in various parts of the novel to give image to the writing.


SO that’s were I end my discussion people!! I hope this piece of information was as useful to you as it is for me.