An Introduction to Intertextuality as a Literary Theory: Definitions, Axioms and the Originators
The aim of this study is to provide a succinct discussion of intertextuality from a theoretical perspective. The concept of intertextuality dates back to the ancient times when the first human history and the discourses about texts began to exist. As a phenomenon it has sometimes been defined as a set of relations which a text has with other texts and/or discourses belonging to various fields and cultural domains. Yet the commencement of intertextuality as a critical theory and an approach to texts was provided by the formulations of such theorists as Ferdinand de Saussure, Mikhail Bakhtin and Roland Barthes before the term 'intertextuality' was coined by Julia Kristeva in 1966. This study, focusing on firstly, the path from 'work' to 'text' and 'intertext' both of which ultimately became synonymous, and secondly, the shifting position of the reader/interpreter becoming significant in the discipline of literary studies, aims to define intertextuality as a critical theory and state its fundamentals and axioms formulated by the mentioned originators of the intertextual theory and thus to betray the fact that intertextuality had a poststructuralist and postmodern vein at the outset. The study was motivated by both a lack of a study differing the intellectual origins/mental conceptors from the later theoreticians and the rarity of intertextuality's being dealt with as a separate literary approach, i.e. its being scrutinized mostly as a part of other critical approaches. For this reason, the study has been thought to be beneficial especially for laypersons.