The Importance Of Intertextuality In Literary Journalism

This adds a visual dimension to literary journalism and enables it not only to recount events to the readers or audience but to bring them there. The literary journalist, thus, “attempts to reconstruct the experience as it might have unfolded” through the use of “literary techniques to convey information and to provide background not usually possible in most magazine and newspaper reporting” (Hellmann, Fables of Fact 25). Motivated in part by their inner desire to be novelists as well as journalists, literary journalists attempt to achieve the Horatian pragmatic formula of literary writing, that is, to dulce et utile – “amuse and inform” – to justify their literary journalistic writings. In other words, literary journalism should aim to provide

There is a common consensus among them that a meaningful world can always be projected not through a process of mythos-making but rather through the operation of various versions of the same story in a certain text or the interaction of the text itself with other texts within it. Intertextuality has particularly permeated the theoretical framework of literary journalism. Julia Kristeva, Mikhail Bakhtin and Roland Barthes are among the major critics who seek to give a thorough definition of the term, “intertextuality.” According to Kristeva, “Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of inter-subjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double” (66, Original italics). It is obvious that this definition aptly recapitulates the main characteristics of intertextuality. First, any text relates in a way or another to other texts constituting a mosaic. Second, any text enthralls other texts within itself in a process that results in a metamorphosis of the text itself to a new form. Third, this metamorphosis of the text creates a sense of doubling and infinitude that denies originality. Every text is an intertext in another text. Therefore, intertextuality can be regarded as “the most important tool” of deconstructing the dialogic role connecting the text with its author. Through intertextuality, “creativity and productivity are transferred to the text” and the authorial subjectivity and power over the narrative decline (Pfister 212). Thus, intertextuality has accentuated its usefulness and significance in challenging the “author-text relationship” and replacing it with “one between reader and text” (Hutcheon, Poetics 126). In brief, intertextuality assumes that any text derives its meaning and significance from the prior texts and discourses