Before and Beyond Intertextuality: The Interdiscursive Switch

As hypothesised by Jürgen Link, literary works depend more on interdiscursivity than on intertextual relations. Interdiscourses (re)integrate and combine specialised discourses from different social spheres such as economic, scientific and religious ones into a generative or, indeed, a reproductive system. Literature (here used in its broadest sense) largely draws on such generative systems. In this paper, I will pursue Link's line of thinking by exploring the relationship between interdiscursivity and intertextuality. Intertextuality essentially comprises a system of circulating discourses, which form chains of literary texts and other media. Yet this closed system needs discursive input from other social spheres in order to facilitate discursive circulation in the first place. The process of discursive (re)integration, typical of interdiscursivity, is therefore pivotal in feeding the intertextual system. The intertextual system can, in its turn, generate new discursive formations that are fed back into society. I will take the writer's speech in German modernism as a starting point for my enquiry into the interdiscursive roots of intertextuality. In doing so, I will show how intertextual references in speeches such as those held by Thomas Mann or Kurt Hiller can be traced back to other fields of society and to other historical periods. This will explain the interdiscursive character of these references. As a result, particular attention can be paid to the different genres and media that are interlinked in this process of discursive circulation. One example of this reproduction cycle is provided by the rhetorically employed imagery of space flight in Kurt Hiller’s speech "Demokratie?" (1926), which presents an interdiscursive appropriation of this imagery by coupling it with the field of political theory.status: publishe