ABSTRACT
This renewed interest in intertextuality has followed what might be seen as an original failure of the concept to serve as the basis for a unified theory of cultural production. Initial gestures in this direction suffered either from the temptation to think culture systemically, as an apparatus which processes and distributes information (e.g. Uspenskij et al., 1973), or from a theorization of ‘interdiscursivity’ which, despite (or because of) its conceptual rigor, proved difficult to deploy in local analyses (e.g. Pêcheux, 1975). The notion of intertextuality has found its fullest development in focused practices of textual analysis, where, like many other concepts developed within the mouvance of French semiology, it has been bound up with the characterization of artistic subversion and textual rupture. The attempt to read texts against a background of intertextual networks and fields has most often involved regarding the latter as a complex of hegemonic rules or generative principles in relation to which the text under analysis is either complicit or transgressive.
