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On the Notion of Intertextuality: The Example of the Libertine Novel
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
Extract
Iouri Lotman, taking as a starting point the idea that the rapport with the sign determines all the codes of a given culture and their systems of classification, proposes a typology of cultures. His resarch has been received with little interest in France, to the extent that some important articles in which it is described have not yet been translated. This is surprising considering the interest in Lotman's hypotheses, which give a boost and a broader outlook to semiotics which it had lost in certain scholarly minutiae. It may also be held that this indifference is normal for those whose profession is to reflect on the sign, unwilling to consider their object as a relative entity subject to the contingencies of history and culture, but also refusing to recognize the sign as a concrete force in Man's life, capable of directing his knowledge and his exchanges.
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- Copyright © 1981 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)
References
1 I am thinking especially of the text entitled “Le problème du signe et du système sémiotique dans la culture russe avant le XXe siècle,” which I read, for my nart, in Italian in Ricerche semiotiche. Nuove tendenze delle scienze umane nell'URSS, a cura di I. Lotman e B. Uspenski, Turin, Einaudi, 1973, pp. 40-63. In Analysis of the poetic text, Ann Arbor, 1976, a bibliography of the works of Lotman edited by Lazar Fleishman can be found.
2 Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines, Gallimard, 1966.
3 Op. cit. Lotman distinguishes essentially three types of cultures:
—medieval culture, of the paradigmatic type, characterized by a high degree of semioticity, where the sign is substituted for something bigger than it is itself; —classical culture, of a mixed type, at once paradigmatic and syntagmatic;
—modern culture, of the syntagmatic type, in which the sign forms a part of something bigger than itself.
4 La Oiaholie. La séduction, la renardie, l’écriture, Minuit, 1979.
5 These relationships (inclusion, exclusion, intersection) could form a picture, itself a summary of the classification of types of intertext.
6 See “Le mot, le dialogue et le roman,” in Σημɛιωτικη. Recherches pour une sèmanalyse, 1969, pp. 143-173. Let us remember that it is this study which introduces the term intertext in the reflection about literature, if not the notion itself, of which the discovery must be attributed to Bakhtine. Julia Kristeva seems to me to have put forward, in this article commenting on the intuitions of Bakhtine, all the necessary principles for a good functioning of the intertextual instrument.
Among the publications which have raised this problem, let us take note of Poetique 27, Intertextualités, Seuil, 1976.
S. Todorov has just published a very useful work on the thought of Bakhtine (M. Bakhtine, le principe dialogique, Seuil, 1981). I have unfortunately not been able to consider it in this article.
7 M. Bakhtine, Problèmes de la poetique de Dostoïevski, Lausanne, L'Age d'homme, 1970.
8 One may read it in Romanciers du XVIII siècle, Vol. II Gallimard (La Pléiade), 1965, pp. 379-402.
9 Op. cit., p. 392.
10 An abridged version of this text was presented during the second Congress of the International Association of Semiotics, Vienna, July 1979, in the framework of a working group directed by Ch. Grivel and H.G. Ruprecht.