Intertextuality

[11] As philosopher William Irwin wrote, the term "has come to have almost as many meanings as users, from those faithful to Julia Kristeva's original vision to those who simply use it as a stylish way of talking about allusion and influence".

[12] Julia Kristeva coined the term "intertextuality" (intertextualité)[13] in an attempt to synthesize Ferdinand de Saussure's semiotics: his study of how signs derive their meaning from the structure of a text (Bakhtin's dialogism); his theory suggests a continual dialogue with other works of literature and other authors; and his examination of the multiple meanings, or "heteroglossia", of texts (especially novels) or individual words.

This interconnected body extends to later poems and paintings that refer to Biblical narratives, just as other texts build networks around Greek and Roman Classical history and mythology.

Some postmodern theorists[15] like to talk about the relationship between "intertextuality" and "hypertextuality" (not to be confused with hypertext, another semiotic term coined by Gérard Genette); intertextuality makes each text a "living hell of hell on earth"[16] 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.

[25] According to Oddo, precontextualization is a form of anticipatory intertextuality wherein "a text introduces and predicts elements of a symbolic event that is yet to unfold".

[22]: 78  For example, Oddo contends, American journalists anticipated and previewed Colin Powell's U.N. address, drawing his future discourse into the normative present.

[26] This means it is most closely linked to both obligatory and accidental intertextuality, as the 'allusion' made relies on the listener or viewer knowing about the original source.

When making use of intertextuality, usually a small excerpt of a hypotext assists in the understanding of the new hypertext's original themes, characters, or contexts.

[32] Students often find it difficult to learn how to combine referencing and relying on others' words with marking their novel perspective and contribution.

On the basis of the corpus, or subsections thereof, the actors in cooperative work create intertext between relevant (complementary) texts in a particular situation, for a particular purpose.

[37][38] Modern practices of scientific citation, however, have only developed since the late eighteenth century[39] and vary across fields, in part influenced by disciplines’ epistemologies.