Intertext : A Study of the Dialogue Between Texts

Contents: Preface. 1. Intertextuality: "The overarching practice\'. 2. Transfocalization: breaking open the old story and writing it anew. 3. Continuing the old story: sequel/afterpiece. 4. Continuing the old story: Postscript/De-Closure-ing. 5. Recycling: unit ideas: the desert Island fiction. 6. Recycling: fable and myth. 7. Rushdie\'s \'story\' of \'The sea of stories\': a metatext on intertextuality. 8. Anxiety of influence/intertext as subversion. 9. Intertextuality and/or \'originality\'/Plagiarism\'. 10. Conclusions. Bibliography. Index.

"This is not a source study or influence study but the study of the living correspondence, dialogue, interaction between text and text, author and author, author and reader, and a perpetually ongoing living process of creativity. The literary text as site for cross-currents and overlappings, inter-lappings and conflations-both structural and textual, thematic and generic--has proved to be one of the most interesting and exciting phenomena for both creative practitioners and critics- theoreticians of our times.

Seen in this light certain texts, genres, modes and paradigms have provided to be rich quarries for succeeding generations of writers, who have appropriated, adapted, recycled and reinscribed these already existing texts and each re-inscription has imparted a fresh meaning and interpretation to the same, depending on the context in which the particular author is situated.

The discussion of the ten chapters in this book take us around the world while addressing various aspects of the intertextualist practice--aesthetic, polemical, political, sociological, ethnic, etc. depending on the discourse and the idiosyncrasies of the individual authors. Even while self-consciously striking departures from the source the re-writer has got to go back to, and work on, the space of the earlier text. It is an endless process, in which past-present-future converge, conflate, interlap, overlap, giving a glimpse thereby of the wonderful interconnectivity of the world of literary texts.

To follow its operation with joy, delight, wonder and fascination has been the primary aim and the final target of the present book which constitutes readings not to prove a text\'s closure to alternatives, but to celebrate its \'ongoing interaction with other texts\'." (jacket)