Julia Kristeva 's concept of revolutionized literary theory by shifting the focus from a text's "influence" to its existence within a vast web of other texts. 📄 Key Concepts & Origins
This article serves three purposes. First, to explain Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality in detail. Second, to trace its intellectual origins and evolution. Third, to guide you toward legitimate PDF sources (both legal and academic) where you can read Kristeva’s original work, including Word, Dialogue and Novel (1966) and The Bounded Text (1966–67).
Kristeva’s model provides a structured way to map how meaning is generated across two major axes: The Horizontal Axis (Subject-Addressee): This connects the author and the reader. The Vertical Axis (Text-Context):
The "meaning" of a text is found in its intersection with other discourses.
Kristeva was among the first to introduce Bakhtin to the West. From him, she borrowed the idea of the dialogic (the notion that every utterance responds to previous utterances and anticipates future ones). However, Kristeva radicalized Bakhtin by shifting from spoken dialogue to written text, coining “intertextuality” to replace “dialogism.”