ABSTRACT
This chapter is the first of three devoted to the examination of twentieth-century linguistic and literary theories which, even more immediately even than the Darwinian, Nietzschean, and Freudian revolutions, paved the way for the coining of intertextuality by Julia Kristeva in 1966. When Darwin introduced his genealogical approach to the realm of the natural sciences in the nineteenth century, he was, at certain points explicitly, emulating the historical bent of much contemporary philology. Friedrich Nietzsche, who was in the 1880s to become so incisive a critic of the shibboleth of historical origins as ascertainable empirical truth, was himself a philologist by training, and, for a while, by profession, having been elected to the Chair of Classical Philology at Basel in 1869. The organic analogy, when applied to a single work, was intended to reveal how it is ‘comprised of correlated parts integrated hierarchically’.
