Status Updates From Intertextuality (New Critic...

Barthes and his two kinds of reader makes me think how everyone (for example Lewis) has it's own two kinds of readers.

Kristeva’s contribution is to focus far more than Bakhtin does on the changes and transpositions this involves for the subject who speaks or writes. Kristeva argues that it is in Modernist texts that this transpositional aspect begins to be self-consciously exploited

The subject position which any speaker or writer takes up is largely dependent upon the context in which that subject speaks or writes. Bakhtin’s notion of speech genres is recognizable here.

Such explicitly intertextual forms of literature, Kristeva and Barthes argue, foreground the fact that they are not original works written by unique authors of great genius, but rather that they are the product of split subjects.

Kristeva’s work on intertextuality focuses
heavily on late nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury
avant-garde writing. Barthes argues that explicitly intertextual
writing comes to the fore in twentieth-century Modernism and
avant-garde movements.

This means, for Kristeva, that the
intertextual dimensions of a text cannot be studied as mere
‘sources’ or ‘influences’ stemming from what traditionally has
been styled ‘background’ or ‘context’ (ibid: 36–7).

Bakhtin and Kristeva share, however, an insistence that texts
cannot be separated from the larger cultural or social textuality
out of which they are constructed. All texts, therefore, contain
within them the ideological structures and struggles expressed
in society through discourse.

Whilst Bakhtin’s work centres on actual human subjects employing language in specific social situations, Kristeva’s way of expressing these points seems to evade human subjects in favour of the more abstract terms, text and textuality

In this sense, the text is not an individual, isolated object
but, rather, a compilation of cultural textuality. Individual text
and the cultural text are made from the same textual material
and cannot be separated from each other

Authors do not create their texts from their own original minds, but rather compile them from preexistent texts, so that, as Kristeva writes, a text is ‘a permutation of texts, an intertextuality in the space of a given text’, in which ‘several utterances, taken from other texts, intersect and
36 neutralize one another’ (ibid: 36).

In ‘The Bounded Text’ Kristeva is concerned with establishing the manner in which a text is constructed out of already existent discourse.

These ‘languages’ of heteroglossia intersect each other
in a variety of ways, forming new typifying ‘languages’.
(ibid.: 291)

Bakhtin writes:
at any given moment of its historical existence, language is heteroglot
from top to bottom: it represents the co-existence of socio-ideological
contradictions between the present and the past, between differing
epochs of the past, between different socio-ideological groups in the
present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given a
bodily form.