History Of Intertextuality

Employment of Intertextuality in Saturday and A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters Postmodernism is a late twentieth century movement in architecture, arts and criticism that represents a departure from modernism . Postmodernist literature -seen as a reaction against Enlightenment thinking and Modernist approaches to literature- is characterised by key concepts like metafiction, hybridity, the death of grand narratives and intertextuality. Intertextuality, a term coined by Julia Kristeva to describe the relationship of a text with other texts, is an aspect of the concept of originality. One of the major ideas behind postmodernism is that every story has already been told and it is impossible to be a hundred per cent original anymore. But intertextuality cannot, of course, be reduced to a problem of sources and influences. For Kristeva, intertextuality is far more than references to literary texts that have come before, it is “indissoluble and is a part of the intrinsic link in any story, which is the link between the culture the storyteller belongs to and the story being told.” (Padwicki, 14) So, intertextuality refers to the literary text not only as an intersection of other literary texts but also as an intersection of literature, history and the culture in which it is written. McEwan’s Saturday and Barnes’ History are the very works in which we can find examples for two different aspects of intertextuality and therefore, in this paper I will talk about the employment