Abstract
Like many of the more startling ideas developed by literary theorists, the thesis that a work owes its origin to, and primarily refers to, other works has its roots in common sense.
a text ... is a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from innumerable centres of culture.1
influence as I conceive it means that there are no texts but only relationships between texts.2
The meaning of a work lies in its telling itself, its speaking of its own existence.3
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Notes
Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, in Image — Music — Text, selected and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana; Glasgow: Collins, 1977) p. 146.
Tzvetan Todorov, quoted in Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (London: Methuen, 1977) p. 100.
Jonathan Culler, Barthes (London: Fontana, Modern Masters; Glasgow: Collins, 1983) p. 81.
E. D. Hirsch, Jr, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967) p. 74.
Jonathan Culler in Structuralist Poetics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975) p. 136
Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (London: Methuen, 1970).
Frank Lentricchia, After the New Criticism (London: Methuen, 1980).
I. A. Richard, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1925). See, for example, p. 267
Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1947).
Todorov, quoted in Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (London: Methuen, 1977).
Michael Boyd, The Reflexive Novel: Fiction as Critique (Toronto: Lewisburg Bucknell University Press, 1983)
W. M. T. Nowottny, ‘Formal Elements in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Sonnets I–VI’, Essays in Criticism, vol. II (January 1952) pp. 76–84.
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978).
Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice (London: Methuen, 1980) p. 45.
Michael Riffaterre, ‘Intertextual Representation: On Mimesis as Interpretive Discourse’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 11 (1984) pp. 141–62.
See, for example, Frederick Copleston, Mediaeval Philosophy, Part II, Albert the Great to Duns Scotus (New York: Doubleday, 1962)
Joseph Weizenbaum’s famous ELIZA programme is discussed in his Computer Powers and Human Reason (San Francisco: Freeman, 1976).
This example is also discussed in R. C. Tallis, ‘The Realistic Novel versus the Cinema’, Critical Quarterly, vol. 27, no. 2 (1985) pp. 57–65.
Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1974) p. 10.
Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983) p. 125.
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© 1995 Raymond Tallis
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Tallis, R. (1995). Literature as Textual Intercourse. In: Not Saussure. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23963-4_3
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