Co-presence between texts

Intertextuality. According to Genette's rather restricted definition intertextuality is "a relationship of co-presence between two texts or among several texts."

This includes, as Eskelinen put it, the practices of quotation, allusion and plagiarism. In principle, it is just a matter of recognition. But in these days just because you read it doesn’t mean it is there and vice versa. The invisible, hidden, and inaccessible parts of the text will deny the reader the comfort of knowing for certain what exactly is there in the text. To make matters more complicated it’s not only the dialectic between visible and invisible parts of the text that counts, but also the relations between what’s visible now and what, if anything, will be visible later. Also the threshold between what’s inside and what’s outside the text is getting blurrier, as it’s so easy to supplement and replace the original text from the outside (as certain famous software agents have already shown).

In some ways, all this may lead to the decreasing importance of intertextuality in dynamically ergodic works, or at least to more drastic ways of foregrounding intertextuality. In any case we’d be better prepared to understand the widely varying degrees of co-presence at work.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -Enter Hypertextopia-PHONEREADER Library -- Jean-Philippe Pastor