Phenomenon of Intertextuality as a result of Author’s Creativity
(by the example of the works of V. Woolf)

Olga Filatova (Tambov, Russia) [BIO]

Email: foachka@mail.ru

 

ABSTRACT:

“Intertextuality” can simply refer to how authors quote or allude to earlier sources in writing their own texts. This poststructuralist concept, which was coined by the French philosopher Julia Kristeva and later developed by the literary theorist Roland Barthes, also embraces a larger philosophy of how language works. This philosophy specifically critiques the structuralist claim that individual texts are "discrete, closed-off entities," and instead argues that any particular text can only be read within the context of prior texts and larger cultural discourses that give it meaning [1,2]. In other words, each text becomes itself in relation to other ones and that it plays upon other texts thanks to the specific features of the author’s representation and to his ability for creativity.

The paper deals with the fact that main intertextual parallels of famous modernist writer V. Woolf mainly deals with the antiquity and classical associations generally took place on the level of figurativeness. For example, analyzing the novel “Between the Acts” readers can mention an intertextual parallel with Greek drama: pilgrims constantly moving between the columns of birches and singing some song associate with the theatre of an ancient Greeks (“For helper issuing swiftly from the bushes, carrying hurdles, had enclosed the Queen’s throne with screen papered to represent the walls. They had strewn the ground with rushes and the pilgrims who had continued their march and their chant in the background, now gathered round the figure of Eliza on her soap-box as if to form the audience at a play”) [3].

Therefore, we may say that because of the author’s creative way of thinking and original way of insertion pieces of the original text into the new one, its enrichment with the new connotations, the readers can interpret and assimilate it in a new way.

---

Literature
1. Bahtin M.M. To methodology of the humanities // Bahtin M.M. Aesthetics of
philological sciences. Moscow 1979.
2. Julia Kristeva // French semiotics: from structuralism to poststructuralist,
Moscow 2000.
3. V. Woolf: “Between the Acts”- Lnd:1941.