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William Irwin

AGAINST INTERTEXTUALITY

I
n allusion is an intended indirect reference that calls for associations that go beyond mere substitution of a referent.1 It is surprising how little has been published by philosophers of literature on allusion, given its prominence as a literary device and key to appreciation throughout literary history.2 From a theoretical standpoint, allusion is closely linked with, and must be accounted for by, theory of interpretation, and is particularly crucial to any discussion of intentionalist and anti-intentionalist theories.3 Why such neglect of this topic? Could it be that allusion is dead, dpass? If so, what killed allusion? And what festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent to replace it? As some would tell the story, allusion died along with the author.4 It is now nave and reactionary to speak of allusion, as it has been displaced by intertextuality. But what is intertextuality? While there has been little published on allusion by philosophers of literature there has not been a single article published by this group of latecomers that directly addresses the topic of intertextuality. Before criticizing this notion as articulated by Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes, we must look at the Weltanschaung of late 1960s Paris to understand what motivates intertextuality. Having unraveled intertextuality as it was intended by its auctors, we will conclude by reconsidering the viability of the term intertextuality.

II
The term intertextuality was coined by Julia Kristeva in 1966, and since that time has come to have almost as many meanings as users, from
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those faithful to Kristevas original vision to those who simply use it as a stylish way of talking about allusion and inuence.5 Let us begin, however, by spelling out what the term originally meant for Kristeva and her mentor/colleague, Roland Barthes. Kristeva developed the notion of intertextuality as a synthesis of what she found useful in the already inuential structuralist linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and the relatively unknown (to Western Europe) literary theory of Mikael Bakhtin. From Saussure, Kristeva takes the theory of the sign, with its two components, the signier and the signied. From Bakhtin, Kristeva takes the idea that language is dialogical; it always, despite the intentions of speakers and authors, expresses a plurality of meanings, as it is characterized by heteroglossia, a plurality of voices behind each word. Kristevas synthesis of Saussures structuralism and Bakhtins dialogism, then, points to the post-structuralist position that there is no transcendental signied, no signied behind the signier. Signiers do not refer to anything beyond, to anything outside the system of signiers. Signs are merely signiers individuated by their differences from one another, referring only to other signiers. When we attempt to communicate through speech or writing we produce an instance of language, a parole, which is part of the greater system of language, a langue, which we cannot escape. The parole only points to other parole within the langue, never to anything outside the langue. We are left, as Kristeva sees it, with the free play of signiers, their meaning grounded nowhere, except temporarily in the reader, unleashing the signiers to be relationally combined in innite ways. Kristeva is rst and primarily concerned with giving a descriptive, ontological account of the composition of texts. As she says, 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 intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double.6 Saussure argued that all instances of parole are constructed out of the already existing langue; any possible parole is already implicitly present within the system that is the langue, to be actualized through a process of differentiation. As Kristeva notes, though, there is more than just the langue. In literature there are character types, themes, plot lines, and earlier stories. All of these come into play in the system that weaves the text, the mosaic of quotations. In fact, it is not just langue and literature, but the social worldthe social textthat provides fabric for the textual tapestry. As for her Tel Quel colleague Derrida, so too for

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Kristeva, there is nothing outside the text.7 Society and history are not elements external to textuality, to be brought to bear in interpretation. Rather, society and history are themselves texts, and so are already and unavoidably inside the textual system. Perhaps the notion that social and historical phenomena are texts is not such a difcult pill to swallow. Historians and lay people alike speak of such things as their interpretations of the French Revolution or the Clinton presidency. If a text is just an object of interpretation, such things can and should be recognized as texts. It is not just eminent and lofty socio-historical matters that Kristeva would have us take as part of the textual system, however. Rather, as Manfred Pster says, for Kristeva, everythingor, at least, every cultural formationcounts as a text within this general semiotics of culture.8 Everything is a text; not just revolutions and administrations, but professional wrestling and detergent are texts to be interpretedas, in fact, they are by Barthes. Still, even this is not too disconcerting when taken in the proper spirit. Certainly an adept interpreter can garner interesting insights about the drama and symbolism of professional wrestling and the marketing ploys that determine the color of our detergent. This is not all that Kristeva has in mind, however. There is no separation of the social text and the literary text, but rather the two must be woven together to produce the tapestry. As Graham Allen captures Kristevas point, we must give up the notion that texts present a unied meaning and begin to view them as the combination and compilation of sections of the social text. As such, texts have no unity or unied meaning on their own, they are thoroughly connected to on-going cultural and social processes (p. 37). Is intertextuality an ontological description or a mode of interpretation? Kristeva believes she has given a universal ontological account of the relations between and among texts. It is not a matter of whim or will, but a metaphysical fact that all texts derive their meaning only through their relations to other texts. As Pster says, Kristevas concept of intertextuality is descriptive rather than programmatic. . . . According to her theory all texts are intertextual, not only modernist or postmodernist texts, and her concept, therefore, aims at characterizing the ontological status of texts in general (p. 210). Naturally, this ontological account of intertextuality gives birth to a mode of interpretation, sanctioned by Kristeva, known also as intertextuality. At its best, intertextual interpretation is a liberating, empowering tool for social change. At its worst, intertextuality becomes fashionable jargon for traditional notions such as allusion and source study. So disgruntled by

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such misuse of the term intertextuality was Kristeva, that she later abandoned it in favor of transposition.9 Roland Barthes, rather than Julia Kristeva, provides us with the most important speculations on the mode of intertextual interpretation.10 In 1968 Barthes proclaimed the death of the author11 based on the intertextual insight that texts derive their meanings, not from some author creating de novo and ex nihilo, but only through their relations to other texts. Meaning results from the play of texts, as they are generated by the langue and the culture. The death of the author results in the liberation of the reader, as Barthess theory of the text insists strongly on the (productive) equivalence of writing and reading.12 Barthes replaces the notion of the author with what he calls the scriptor (scripteur). The scriptor is much like a scribe, taking dictation on what she may or may not understand and which she certainly does not authorize with meaning. The intertextual reader/interpreter then is free and unfettered in tracing the relations between texts; there is no authorial intention to defer to, since the will of the author is not capable of xing meaning. Once the scriptor has made the marks on the page, the text ies off on wings of its own to become the plaything of readers. The freedom of the reader is concomitant with a certain pleasure, a plasir du texte, and this pleasure is seemingly unlimited given that, as Barthes says, by degrees, a text can come into contact with any other system: the inter-text is subject to no law but the innitude of its reprises.13 The pleasure of intertextual play is not even held in check by the laws of logic. Indeed, Kristeva believes her ontology of intertextuality shows that non-contradiction is not the bedrock universal law the West has taken it to be. As Allen makes clear, against the law of non-contradiction, Kristeva asserts, the dialogic word or utterance is double-voiced, heteroglot, and possesses a meaning (A) at the same moment that it possesses an alternative meaning or meanings (not-A) (p. 43).

III
Why did Barthes and Kristeva make such radical claims? In terms they would abhor, what were the intentions and motivations of the intertextualists? Four major elements motivated them: the oppression of the French Academy, post holocaust pessimism, mistrust of communication, and Marxist principles.

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In The Death of the Author, Barthes gives us a curious locution, Author God. As Clara Claiborne Park says, To be able to associate authors with God, let alone with his institutional hypostases, you have to be French.14 Cardinal Richelieu was motivated by a desire to ensure the purity of the French language in his founding of the Acadmie Francaise; the language was to remain pure and uniform to facilitate communication within France and its colonies. While history has not looked kindly upon colonization, one apparently favorable effect of the French Academy is the clarity of the French language. Traditionally the humanities prized clarity in writing, but, remarkably, nontraditional French humanists such as Barthes, Kristeva, Foucault, and Derrida resented and attacked clarity in writing. In post-holocaust Europe the value of the humanities had come into question by those who taught them. It seemed the dream of the Enlightenment, social progress through education, was dead. Scientic and technological progress marched on, and so humanists began to look for a scientic foundation for their discipline. Many found that foundation in the burgeoning eld of linguistics, rst in the rediscovery of the work of Saussure and later with the introduction of Bakhtin via Kristeva (see Mai, p. 33). The dream of social progress and change was not to remain dead for long. Change for the better had not been effected by clarity and communication, but rather had been subverted by them. Suspicion of those in power fueled the re of change, and communication aided by clarity in speech and writing was declared a weapon wielded by the power elite for the purpose of building consensus. Clear and apparently straightforward communication was misrepresentative of complex ideas and in the hands of the wrong people was only used to further conceal the truth and pull the wool over the collective eyes of the people. Here Kristevas intertextuality becomes a politically charged theory. As Allen says, notions of a stable relationship between signier and signied [were seen] as the principal way in which dominant ideology maintains its power and represses revolutionary, or at least unorthodox, thought (p. 32). For Kristeva signiers and signieds are unavoidably unstable because there is no transcendental signied. The power establishment acted and spoke as if signiers such as justice, truth, and equality were backed by transcendental signieds of which they had knowledge (see Allen, p. 33). To subvert nefariously clear communication, Kristeva and Barthes present intertextual interpretation with its free play of signiers. But how does a theory of textual

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interpretation bear on social change? The answer is found in the new conception of the text, which includes the social text. As Hans-Peter Mai says, This text is no longer the object with which textual criticism used to deal. Actually it is no object at all; it is, as a way of writing (criture), a productive (and subversive) process (p. 37). The text of economic reality was among the most important targets of attack on the revolutionary agenda of the intertextualists. Capitalism was justied by precisely the kind of false and misleading clear communication that the intertextualists opposed. Marxist principles in part justied intertextual criticism and the death of the author, as the denial of stable meaning was an attack on the commodication of thought and writing (Allen, p. 33). The author is a modern notion, the product of capitalism, a gure who illegitimately controls meaning as the capitalist controls the means of production. As Allen says, communication and meaning, in other words, present knowledge and intellectual work as a product, a commodiable and exchangeable object of value. Most people . . . believe that knowledge, if it exists, can be clearly communicated, and because of this it can be bought and sold in books, in educational courses, and so on (p. 33). Intertextuality dees the capitalist paradigm by presenting the text not as a product ready for consumption, but as a growing, evolving, never-ending process.

IV
Among the rst things one notices in reading the texts of Kristeva and Barthes is the obscurity of their jargon-lled writing. Unfortunately throughout the twentieth century, jargon, so necessary to the sciences, so unnecessarily infected the humanities. It would be unfair to simply cite passages in translation and out of context to make the point, but Barthess and Kristevas lack of clarity is not a bone of contention but a badge of honor to them. They compose their texts with the intention of making communication difcult. They do not write in a confusing way because they are themselves confused. Rather, they see communication itself as an evil, used by the power elite to forge consensus for its conservative capitalist agenda. In late 1960s Paris, and in some times and places since, there may well have been a kernel of truth in this cynical view. Still, while communication may be the tool of the power elite, it is not theirs exclusively. Communication through clear language is an instrumental, not an intrinsic, good or evil. As Mark Bauerlein notes in discussing the abolitionists use of clear writing in

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effectively opposing slavery, any successful anti-establishment movement must ultimately depend on clear communication to spread its message.15 While works of literature, such as Ulyses and The Sound and the Fury, may require unclear writing to effectively convey complex emotions and states of mind, works of literary criticism require rigorous argument in clear prose to effectively convey complex thoughts and ideas. Literary art has some license that other writing does not. Outside the realm of literature, resorting to unclear language to subvert communication could at best be a temporary and short-lived way to draw attention to a awed or evil, but clearly communicated, message of the power elite. Despite its noble aims, problems result from the use of unclear prose. In perpetuating the use of unclear language and practices designed to subvert communication one excludes the vast majority of people. Even those who do attempt to enter and engage the discourse are likely to misunderstand what they read. And just as we can argue that there is an ethics operative in interpreting (such that we do not misrepresent the author), so too we can argue there is an ethics in writing, such that we do not write in a way that is easily misunderstood, without good reason for writing in such a way. The intertextuality of Kristeva and Barthes is unapologetically political in its motivations and implications, seeking to redistribute power. The method of reading that intertextuality provides is meant as a model for political and social action and change. Based on Kristevas intertextual insight that texts derive their meaning only through relations to other texts, Barthes declares the death of the author and the birth of the reader. What the author intended matters not at all, since not an author, but only other texts, can supply meaning. The reader, then, can and should revel in the pleasure of the text, making associations and noting relations with other literary and social texts. Power shifts from the author, who becomes a scriptor, to the reader, who is given hedonistic sanction for unfettered freedom in reading. There is a logical inconsistency, though, in the transfer of power. Agency in meaning is not really eliminated, as the ontology of intertextuality would demand. Rather, agency is preserved and displaced. The reader now becomes as powerful as the author was. To be consistent with the theory of intertextuality, in declaring the author a scriptor, Barthes should declare the reader a lector.16 Intertextuality looks for the system or matrix of language to speak through the text in a way similar to that in which the ancients looked for muses to speak

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through the poet. The reader can no more create meaning than the author can; the reader is just a vessel or empty space in which language speaks. All the reader can do is discover relations among texts, since that is all meaning really is according to intertextuality. The intertextual severing of the text from its author is motivated by reader liberation and is backed by an ontology that suggests that texts in no way belong to their authors. The author cannot create a text ex nihilo, but must draw on the langue to offer a parole that is already implicitly there. As Donald Keefer notes, this is analogous to a person planting a tree. The person is, in some sense, just an instrument putting the seed in the ground. Our planter no more invented the seed he plants than an author invented the language she writes. In a sense, then, the tree that grows from the seed is not his. But is this really the case? While it makes eminently good sense to take stock in our small place and role in creation, the tree I plant on the land I own is my tree. As Keefer says, Apple trees predate the planting of an apple orchard, but that does not mean that the trees I plant are not my trees. I may impose rules regarding the picking of those apples or not.17 The point is that authors may or may not impose rules on how their texts are to be read. Actually, the right of an author is more limited than this. The author may not dictate how her text is to be read, but only what intended meaning may be attributed to her. As it is unethical to steal from a persons apple tree, so too it is unethical to misrepresent a persons intended meaning, whether it is the meaning of a conversational utterance or the meaning of a literary text.18 One criticism Barthes and Kristeva would surely raise against this analogy is that it is a product of capitalism. Justice dictates that the apple tree and the text can belong to no one; they are there for all. Barthes and Kristeva, in accord with Marxist principles, oppose the author as acting as the capitalist, supplying meaning to the consumers readers. Theirs is a strained analogy, however. It is equivalent to saying you dont have to use Coca-Cola for its intended purpose, imbibing it. You can take a bath in it. Here it is helpful to recall the distinction between meaning and signicance, introduced by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.19 Hirsch argues there is an important distinction to be noted between what an author intends, a texts meaning, and that intended meaning as it relates to the interests of readers, a texts signicance. According to Hirschs intentionalism, the author does indeed supply meaning, but this does not really restrict the reader, who can read the text however she likes as long as she does not represent her idiosyncratic reading as

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the authors intention. Of course, the Coca-Cola Company sells its soft drink with the intention that consumers will drink it. This we might loosely say is the meaning of the soft drink. Still, there is no obligation on the part of the consumer to actually drink it. One can bathe in the soda if one chooses, or perhaps even use it as an ingredient in a homemade bomb. These we might loosely say are potential signicances of the soft drink. Further, one does no ethical wrong to the Coca-Cola Company with such bathing or bomb making, unless one attributes to the company the intention that their product be used in such ways. We should further notice that the distinction between meaning and signicance shows that, malgr Kristeva, textual meaning does not violate the law of non-contradiction. A text cannot have meaning x and meaning x at the same time, though it can have meaning x and signicance x at the same time. The ontology of intertextuality claims that there is no transcendental signied, that the signier points only to other signiers, that texts refer only to other texts. Arthur Danto aptly calls this intertextual approach to literature the Referential Fallacy.20 While it is not clear on what basis this intertextual claim is made, except perhaps the antilogocentric assertion that language can never capture reality, let us grant the point for the sake of argument. If there is no transcendental signied behind the signier, does this imply that signiers refer only to other signiers? No, for if this were truly the case we would never be able to put down our dictionaries. But successful communication is indeed possible both in ordinary discourse and literature. When I make the request, please bring me that blue pen and my friend brings it to me, I can be sure that communication has succeeded.21 The referent of any given signier can be xed through ordinary/conventional use or utterers intention. The nonexistence of a transcendental signied does not logically imply that signiers refer only to other signiers. With its political agenda, the theory of intertextuality is servant to praxis. The motivation in claiming that texts refer only to other texts, is to take the power of determining meaning away from the author and give it to the reader. As we saw above, this move is not logically justied, given the ontology of intertextuality. The reader can no more be an agent of producing meaning than can the author. Leaving this important criticism aside, however, let us see what the practice of intertextual reading/interpreting amounts to. The central element of intertextual interpretation is to note and make connections between and among texts. Every text is potentially the intertext of every other text, and so

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reading becomes an innite process. Whereas the traditional notions of allusion and source study direct us to the intentions of the authors under consideration, intertextual theory declares those intentions unnecessary, unavailable, and irrelevant. There is a wonderfully democratic spirit to this mode of interpretation in which the average reader is under no obligation to defer to the canonical writer. Still, the theory and practice go too far when, for some, they assume the relations between and among texts actually change canonical texts. Whereas it is enlightening, perhaps even necessary, to make connections to Hamlet when reading The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the relations between the two texts do nothing to change the text of Hamlet. Even if Borgess ctional Pierre Menard were to successfully rewrite Don Quixote, this relation would do nothing to essentially change Cervantess Don Quixote. Still less can a reader, in noting relations among and between texts, essentially change texts. Historical events can, perhaps, change essentially with the passing of time, as when a shooting at noon becomes a killing at midnight, or when the Russian Revolution becomes the beginning of a failed experiment.22 But texts generally do not change essentially through the writing of new texts, and still less through the interpretation of readers. When the reader takes the place of the author the text potentially becomes a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Even if we were to grant some legitimacy to this mode of interpretation, what value would there be in it? There does not seem to be any criterion by which to judge such intertextual readings, except the hedonistic pleasure of the text. This actually is not a terribly unfamiliar criterion, but rather is akin to what analytic philosophers of the New Critical stripe referred to as the readings ability to produce an aesthetic experience. Still, such pleasure of the text is notoriously subjective, and I am likely to nd more pleasure in my own reading than that offered by someone else. What we are left with, then, are rather banal and idiosyncratic interpretations. As Clayton and Rothstein say, This theory makes for a criticism more stimulating than informative, providing of course that the critic has a stimulating mind.23 Intertextual speculations quickly degenerate into the dj lu, pseudointellectual cocktail talk of the type, This reminds me of that and so on. We can hear the voices as in the room women come and go talking of Michelangelo.24 Intertextual interpretation might be worthy of attention because of its novelty, but even this is not clear. Perhaps it is, as Heinrich F. Plett

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considers, just old wine in new bottles.25 While we cannot settle the issue of intertextualitys novelty here, we can note the history of which it is a part. Since the dawn of literature authors have referred and alluded to other texts. There may be more such intertextuality in late twentieth century literature, but this is partly because authors are sensitive to the notion of intertextuality and deliberately and intentionally build such references into their texts. Practice has largely followed theory. Umberto Eco, in particular comes to mind, with, for example, his legion of intertextual connections to the libraries and labyrinths of Borges in The Name of the Rose. Readers are right to make such connections, not just because an ideal reader would, but because they are intentionally placed there by Eco. One element of intertextuality that would be a good candidate for novelty is the social text, but this element is dubious. With intertextuality, the recognition that the genius captures the spirit of the age, characteristic of Romanticism, is replaced by a shallow and nave democracy in the plurality of voices expressed through the author. The author is not special, but one among many voicesall of which share credit for what the author/scriptor/scribe has recorded. The excess of this position is nowhere so clear as in the social text. In reading American literature we could take baseball and its supreme icon, Babe Ruth, as a social text. Babe Ruth in some way captured the spirit of the age, but Ruths credit for hitting those homeruns and winning those World Series is diminished. The precursors, whose batting stances Ruth may have imitated share credit for them, as do Ruths teammates, manager, owner, opponents, fans, the stock market, newspapers, radio, etc. Perhaps, though, the main point is that Ruth and company can and should be taken as texts to be interpreted and related to other texts, literary and non-literary. The problem, though, is that the importance of baseball in general, and Babe Ruth in particular, is marginal at best to the interpretation of American literature. Drawing relations between baseball and literature may generate a plasir du texte for some, but there is no necessary or essential connection between the phenomena.

V
Given the illogic and distinctly French motivation of intertextuality, why has it found such a welcome reception in America? Part of the attraction for students is that theorists such as Barthes and Kristeva put forward ideas in a rebellious tone and with exotic French terminology

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and personae. Ambiguity has long been a celebrated quality in the study of English and American literature, and interpretive pluralism has reigned supreme since the rise of the New Criticism. By contrast, such ambiguity and pluralism were revolutionary prizes to be won in French literature and criticism. As Park so aptly says, the transatlantic breezes started blowing just as the New began to seem old hat. Barthes was afrming, with supremely French intelligence, the pieties of English 101 (pp. 38990). Ironically it was the quite different post war experience of Americans that made them receptive to imported French theory. Americans experienced euphoria and a renewed sense of individualism in the post war era, making the reader liberation espoused by French theory all the more attractive to them, particularly by the time of its arrival on American shores in the turbulent late 1960s.26 But professors of English and other modern languages should certainly have been more astute than the students to whom they taught French theory. Whereas naivete explains student enthusiasm for intertextuality, a more self-serving, if unwitting, motivation may explain the professorial French embrace. English and American literature (and other modern language literature) has had to justify its place in the college curriculum since the time of its relatively recent arrival. Study of Greek and Latin literature demanded the rigor of translation and the knowledge of classical culture in addition to the appreciation of literature. What could the study of literature in English offer by comparison? Not much, just the study of an arguably lesser literature in a familiar language and culture. Was this, then, a subject deserving of a place in the college curriculum? And what would motivate students to study English and American literature rather than classical literature, except that the former was less demanding? Valerie Ross answers that Modern literature faculty also began to realize that if their pedagogical aimmental disciplinewas no different from that of classicists, the primary incentive for students to enroll in modern courses was that these were notably easier.27 Ironically, modern languages have long since won the battle, and departments of classics have been diminished, if not deleted. What could professors offer in teaching the literature of students own culture and native tongue? Why couldnt students just as well read this literature on their own? In the early decades of the academic study of English, what professors could offer was greater knowledge of the language and culture, but most importantly far greater knowledge of authors biographies and intentions. To a certain extent this is still true

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today, and with less literate students it is needed all the more. With the proliferation of biographies of literary gures easily accessible to all, including students, and with an excessive tendency on the part of professors that can only be described as biographicalism, as exemplied by John Livingston Lowess The Road to Xanadu, what modern language professors offered was at the same time too readily available and too esoteric. Any student could learn relevant literary biography through reading rather than lecture, and at the same time professors were losing sight of the text itself in the chase for obscure biographical information that may or may not elucidate the intention behind the poem, play, or novel in question. The stage was set for the New Criticism with its emphasis on interpretive pluralism and the text itself. And just as the New Criticism was beginning to look hackneyed it was re-suited in ne French garb courtesy of Foucault, Barthes, Kristeva, Derrida, and company. While a freshman can see that the emperor has no clothes, professors of modern languages re-confronted by the question of justication that greeted the birth of their discipline, gladly donned Parisian apparel. The need, and even requirement, for professors of literature to say something new and unique has led to the proliferation of readings and meanings, called for and justied by intertextuality.28 The result is that the critic and professor of literature takes his work as seriously, and thinks it as important as, literature itself, often conceiving criticism as on par with, and being a type of, literature.29 This self-importance may actually betray an underlying insecurity regarding the importance and justication of the study of literature. From a feminist perspective Ross asserts, Feelings of discomfort may, for the male subject, be indigenous to the study of literature in a patriarchal culture; the work is by its nature derivative, its origins always elsewhere and its concerns and conventionsaffect, sociodomestic existence and relations, conduct historically more feminine than masculine (p. 156).

VI
Intertextuality is not a univocal term and concept, but rather is au courant for describing practices and approaches that bear greater and lesser resemblance to the original. Can the theory and practice be justied? Is the term warranted? The problem faced by even the more sober and moderate theories and practices of intertextuality, such as those of Bloom and Riffaterre, is the same problem faced by the New

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Critics and all others who attempt to focus on the text itself apart from the author, namely, treating the text as if it were not a text. As I have argued elsewhere, to treat a text as if its meaning were essentially independent of authorial intent is to treat the text as if it were not a text at all, but merely an entity like a monkeys randomly and accidentally typed Hamlet. The truth is that we could not make use of such a text at all without making certain basic assumptions about the author and what he or she intended, for example that she was presenting a work of ction in English (see II, pp. 3132). Authorial intention is unavoidable; intertextual connections are not somehow magically made between inanimate texts but are the products of authorial design.30 To think otherwise is to commit the Referential Fallacy.

VII
Just as reports of the death of the author have been greatly exaggerated, so the death of allusion is not warranted. Given the problems with theories of intertextuality, the use of the term intertextuality is dubious, as it implies that language and texts operate independently of human agency. While, in a sense, allusions are inter-textual phenomena, they are more properly and precisely described as authorial-textual phenomena. Unintended connections between texts are, as I have argued elsewhere, better called accidental associations (WA, pp. 29496). The term intertextuality is at best a rhetorical ourish intended to impress, at worst it is the signier of an illogical position. And so intertextuality is a term that should be shaved off by Duttons Razor, the principle that jargon that does not illuminate or elucidate but rather mysties and obscures should be stricken from the lexicon of sincere and intelligent humanists. Kings College, Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania

For helpful comments and criticisms I wish to thank Gregory Bassham, Jorge J. E. Gracia, Jason Holt, Megan Lloyd, and audiences at the University of Manitoba and a meeting of the American Society for Aesthetics. 1. This denition is argued for in my What Is an Allusion? Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (2001): 28797; hereafter abbreviated WA.

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2. Oddly, the ancient Greeks and Romans had no equivalent term. See Joseph Pucci, The Full-Knowing Reader: Allusion and the Power of the Reader in the Western Literary Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. xvixvii. 3. See Gran Hermern, Allusions and Intentions, in Intention and Interpretation, ed. Gary Iseminger (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), pp. 20320. Michael Leddy, The Limits of Allusion, British Journal of Aesthetics 32 (1992): 11022; Stephanie Ross, Art and Allusion, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 40 (1981): 5970. 4. By contrast, Mary Orr attempts to rehabilitate allusion and other shadowland terms, in Intertextuality: Debates and Practices (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), pp. 13940. 5. Orr is at pains to make clear that intertextuality is not a univocal term, indicating a single concept and practice, pp. 619. 6. Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 66. See Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 39 (italics in the original). 7. See Hans-Peter Mai, Bypassing Intertextuality: Hermeneutics, Textual Practice, Hypertext, in Intertextuality, ed. Heinrich F. Plett (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991), p. 40. 8. Manfred Pster, How Postmodern is Intertextuality? in Intertextuality, ed. Heinrich F. Plett (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991), p. 212. 9. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 5960. See Allen, p. 53. 10. Orr disagrees and argues that Kristevas intertextuality was both purloined and suppressed by male canonical intertextualists, see pp. 2124. 11. Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, in The Death and Resurrection of the Author?, ed. William Irwin (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002), pp. 37; La mort de lauteur, Manteia 5 (1968): 1217. 12. Roland Barthes, Theory of the Text, in Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 42. See Mai, p. 42. 13. Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 211.

14. Clara Claiborne Park, Author! Author! Reconstructing Roland Barthes, The Hudson Review 43 (1990): 378. 15. Mark Bauerlein, Bad Writings Back, Philosophy and Literature 28 (2004): 190. 16. I owe this point and this use of the term lector to Tilottama Rajan, Intertextuality and the Subject of Reading/Writing, in Inuence and Intertextuality in Literary History, eds. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 70. 17. Donald Keefer, Reports of the Death of the Author, Philosophy and Literature 19 (1995): 81. 18. William Irwin, Intentionalist Interpretation: A Philosophical Explanation and Defense (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), pp. 5054, 11718; hereafter abbreviated II.

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19. See E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 68, 23, 218, and The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 48, 7980; II, pp. 4650. 20. Philosophy as/and/of Literature, in Literature and the Question of Philosophy, ed. Anthony J. Cascardi (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 1011. 21. For a similar discussion on breaking the Hermeneutic circle see Jorge J. E. Gracia, A Theory of Textuality: The Logic and Epistemology (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), pp. 18993. 22. See David Weberman, The Nonxity of the Historical Past, The Review of Metaphysics 50 (1997): 74968. On the shooting and murder example see Judith Jarvis Thomson, The Time of a Killing, Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971): 11532, and Jonathan Bennett, Shooting, Killing, and Dying, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2 (1973): 31523. 23. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein, Figures in the Corpus: Theories of Inuence and Intertextuality, in Inuence and Intertextuality in Literary History, eds. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 23. 24. In contrast see William Irwin, The Aesthetics of Allusion, The Journal of Value Inquiry 36 (2002): 52132. 25. Heinrich F. Plett, Intertextualities, in Intertextuality, ed. Heinrich F. Plett (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991), p. 5. 26. See Susan Stanford Friedman, Weavings: Intertextuality and the (Re)Birth of the Author, in Inuence and Intertextuality in Literary History, eds. Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 157. 27. Valerie Ross, Too Close to Home: Repressing Biography, Instituting Authority, in Contesting the Subject, ed. William Epstein (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1991), p. 144. 28. See John M. Ellis, Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 20810. 29. See Ellis, pp. 21415.

30. Some marginal structuralist intertextualists maintain that the references must be intended by the author. See Pster, p. 210.