Intertextuality: old debates in new contexts

In the face of its rivals – “interdisciplinarity”, “intermediality”, “interdiscursivity” – and of the explosion of virtual, visual, and post-colonial forms of cultural expression, “intertextuality” holds a more tenuous critical position today than it enjoyed in the 1970s and 1980s. Is the word merely a shorthand for “connection”, the specificities of which are redundant since the nature of the texts being connected assures them? Is the nodal term “text” in “intertextuality” a major reason for its shift from centre to margin in critical debate and terminology, and hence replacement by the vocabularies of virtual media? Or does “intertextuality” remain useful for unpacking ever more complex twenty-first-century “semiotic encounters” in their trans-nation of texts and images? This essay seeks to address these questions by also exploring an additional dynamic (“window”) to the four which structured my Intertextuality: debates and contexts (2003)