ABSTRACT
The essential thrust of the structuralist project seems to be towards the intertextual, in that it denies the existence of unitary objects and emphasizes their systematic and relational nature, be they literary texts or other art works. Structuralists retain a belief in criticism's ability to locate, describe and thus stabilize a text's significance, even if that significance concerns an intertextual relation between a text and other texts. Jonathan Culler, in his Structuralist Poetics, reminds us that poetics is essentially a theory of reading and thus has a very long history, going back particularly to Aristotle's Poetics. The desire to establish a viable and stable poetics of theme, genre and mode depends, as GErard Genette argues, on the notion of architexts, basic, unchanging building blocks which underpin the entire literary system. Textual transcendence, or transtextuality, is, according to Genette, precisely what poetics has been attempting to describe via the confused and misleading tools so far discussed.
