Intertextuality and its Functions in Literary Discourse

In this paper we summarize all contemporary views on the problems of ‘intertextuality’, ‘dialogic structures’ and ‘other voices’ in literary discourse and at the same time we try to generate our own systematic understanding ofthe notions under consideration. First of all we distinguish between author’s and reader’s (researcher’s) intertextuality. From a reader’s point ofview intertextuality is an orientation towards more deep understanding ofa literary text or solving of some text’s semantic anomalies by establishing versatile relations with other texts that are correlated with a given text on the basis ofsemantic and verbal memory. In this aspect we study a story of T.Tolstaja „Limpopo” which is full of allusions and reminiscences from A.Pushkin, B.Pasternak, M.Cvetaeva and children’s writer K.Chukovsky. These semantical relations based on recollection of already existing texts of other authors help to understand the poetic message of Tolstajan story. From an author’s point of view intertextuality is a way of genesis of his own text and postulating of his own „I” by a complex system of oppositions, identifications and camouflage with texts of other writers or other poetical „I”. Similarly, when this system of oppositions and identifications functions in the confines ofthe idiolect of a definite writer we can speak about autointertextuality. From this point ofview we study the latest novels ofV.Narbikova („The foreground of the first person. And ofthe second”, „Whisper ofnoise”, and travel”) and try to point out main peculiarities ofher postmodernist’s manner. Analyzing texts of different modernist and postmodernist writers we determine the following functions ofintertextuality: (1) intertext permits to adduce in a new text some idea or concrete form ofpresenting ofthis idea objectified before its existence as a whole; thus (2) intertextuality has constructive, text generating function that (3) bears relation to metalinguistic and metatextual reflection. At the same time we distinguish between 4 kinds of intertexts: 1) that which serves as an impulse ofthe creation of a new text; 2) the text which reveals the poetic message of a later text; 3) the structure which forms rhythmic and sound congruence oftwo texts; 4) the text which is treated polemically by the author