Used book – Intertextuality in the Contemporary Anglophone Novel: "A Myriad of Literary Impressions", Emilie Walezak, Jocelyn Dupont, Collectif

Over forty years have passed since Julia Kristeva introduced the term "intertextuality" into the French language. This critical concept, inspired by Bakhtin, has given rise to a multiplicity of uses and theories. Some have favored the dialogic and interdiscursive meaning of the term, some its operative nature, while others have seen it as the very locus of literariness. Intertextuality has also been instrumentalized by the structuralist school to serve the triumph of the reader consecrated by the death of the author. Although criticized, debased, and mistreated, intertextuality, even if it is without foundation, is not groundless. Proof of this is its fruitful dynamism in the contemporary Anglophone literary scene of recent decades. Numerous authors such as Peter Ackroyd, Martin Amis, A. S. Byatt, Brian Castro, J. M. Coetzee, Mark Crick, Paul Di Filippo, David Lodge, Patrick McGrath, Vikram Seth, Graham Swift, Louise Welsh, and Jeanette Winterson, whose texts are highlighted in this work, attest to the vitality of writing under influence. Divided between the anxiety of the dissemination of discourses and symbolic anchoring in a plurality of voices, these writers have appropriated the intertextual phenomenon. Thus, intertextuality becomes a key concept allowing for an examination of the contemporary novel and, conversely, the contemporary novel seems to impose a new critical reflection on this notion. Beyond the intertextual work of assimilation and transformation, is there not a specificity of contemporary intertextuality that goes beyond the manipulations of modernist authors like Joyce or Eliot, whose writing predates the advent of the concept by several decades? Does the assumed intertextuality of the contemporary text not force a "refunctionalization," thereby leading to a radical transformation of the literary relationship? The role of the reader within this relationship also deserves to be re-examined. Should the latter still be seen as the primary locus for the actualization of intertexts? In parallel, is the intertext only at the service of dissemination, or should it be considered as a modality of the author-function? It is to all these questions that the authors of the various studies gathered in this collection endeavor to respond.