ABSTRACT
This chapter returns to Kristeva’s early work on intertextuality in ‘The Bounded Text’ (1968) to show that her focus was on ideology and subjectivity, particularly the way that literature contributes to the ‘bourgeois social text’. The chapter argues that there are two conceptions of intertextuality: the first involves the common practice of seeking allusions and quotations; the second involves the typology of a text and its contribution to a bourgeois subjectivity. This second type of intertextuality plays a role in the post-human conception of the subject that Kristeva arguably borrows (with alterations) from Lacan. This conception views the subject as formed in advance by language, although Kristeva veers from Lacan in her insistence that poetic language (Revolution in Poetic Language) can develop despite the control of the symbolic, creating a new kind of literature and subjectivity. The chapter argues that the open intertextuality of works like Foss’s Baroque Variations does not lead to a new subjectivity. Turning to earlier modernism, the chapter looks particularly at Ravel’s Violin Sonata No. 2, to argue that a new kind of subjectivity attempts to form itself in the open typology of its topics and conventions.
