Reading the Bible Intertextually

12: Literary Reading(s) of the Bible: Aspects of a Semiotic Conception of Intertextuality and Intertextual Analysis of Texts

191 gh Magdolna Orosz 12 Literary Reading(s) of the Bible Aspects of a Semiotic Conception of Intertextuality and Intertextual Analysis of Texts Conceptions of Intertextuality When Julia Kristeva employed the term “intertextuality” in an essay in 1967, she gave a name to a phenomenon that could be regarded as an overarching concept uniting various and rather different things. in literary-critical discussions in years following, there was hardly any other concept that received so great a response and precipitated so many controversies and various interpretations. Kristeva’s term brought textual relationships together in the broadest sense, which in literature and literary studies were known under such names as “citation,” “allusion ,” “innuendo,” “adoption,” “translation,” “parody,” “travesty,” and “plagiarism” and which were investigated in traditionally established subdisciplines such as motif research or history of effects. originally interpreted in terms of literary criticism, the concept gradually became an inter- and transdisciplinary concept through its use in realms that were not only literary and/or textual. “intertextuality” thus designates various phenomena of the culture/of cultures, which, in the intertextual framework, are comparable. in putting forth her conception of intertextuality, Kristeva appropriated Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of “dialogue.” on one hand, she regarded it as the “dialogue” between texts. on the other hand, she generalized it at the same time into a critical approach according to which “intertextuality” is an all-encompassing phenomenon determining all phenomena of culture. in contrast to Kristeva, Bakhtin maintained that 192 Magdolna Orosz dialogue is also expressed within a text, as he demonstrated in his analysis of the so-called “polyphonic novel.” For Bakhtin, the text stands in a “dialogical” relationship to other texts so that the “boundaries of text and context” can be crossed: “Every word (every sign) of the text exceeds its boundaries. it is inadmissible to limit the analysis (of recognition and understanding) to a given text alone. Every understanding is a correlation of a given text with other texts and the reinterpretation in a new context (in mine, in the present, in the future).”1 this theory is not wholly “intertextual ” in either the present sense or Kristeva’s sense, for according to Bakhtin’s conception, dialogue within a text (text type) is closely bound up with other outside texts (voices). Moreover, that which is understood as dialogical above all is that which rigid literary traditions opposed.2 Kristeva takes over Bakhtin’s critical, antiauthoritarian attitude, but she generalizes and broadens the Bakhtinian concept of “dialogue” by not limiting it to certain genres or authors but rather by maintaining that “dialogicality” is a characteristic of every text, for “any text is constructed of a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.”3 Furthermore, with Kristeva, the concept of text also becomes a phenomenon encompassing all other forms of cultural (or social) praxis,4 a phenomenon that, by definition, is regarded as a “translinguistic” means that orders language in a new way in its own “space” so that language is set in relationship to earlier or contemporary “utterances” (énoncés); in other words, it is “intertextualized.”5 the “other text” is broadened to the totality of literary texts (even to the entire culture), for “the word in the text is oriented toward an anterior or synchronic literary corpus. . . .”6 the existence of texts in this “contextual” space in the widest sense—continuing with Bakhtin’s plea for the inclusion of the context7—Kristeva designates as “intertextuality.”8 since that time, her coining of the concept has precipitated differing interpretations and applications thereof. Kristeva herself attempted to use her concept in a text-analytical fashion . she analyzed antoine de la sale’s novel Jehan de Saintré,9 which, following Bakhtin, she considered “dialogical” and described as “the books in the book” (“les livres dans le livre”), which make the novel “a double space” (“un espace double”).10 Her approach, however—in many ways similar to that of the group Tel Quel, Jacques Derrida, or roland Barthes—is oriented in a heavily philosophical direction and refrains from detailed textual analysis.11 this attitude can be regarded as a deficiency for literary textual analysis, for “[t]he universal categories, which they [the representatives of an unlimited conception of text and intertextuality] prefer, are of slight heuristic value for the praxis of analysis.”12 Literary Reading(s) of the Bible 193 the other “direction” of intertextual research, which rightly incorporates disparate approaches...