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Commenting on the problems confronting the theory of literature in the 1940's, René Wellek and Austin Warren challenge the predominance of influence studies since the nineteenth century. Historicism, or the assumption that a critic can reconstruct the author's intentions, the sources for his ideas, and the contemporary audience's response to his works, overlooks the dilemma that still concerns today's semioticians: "There are simply no data in literary history which are completely neutral 'facts' " (Wellek and Warren 1956: 28). The very choice of texts to compare in investigating any literary relationship, and particularly influence, is fraught with "value judgments". Thus, to claim that author B's poetry "derives" from author A's poetry already presupposes a complex series of inferences based on a detailed knowledge of each author's oeuvre as well as an almost encyclopedic knowledge of "the commonplaces of his period" (Wellek and Warren 1956: 248). The problems are compounded when one tries to establish "parallels" between literature and the arts, or even between the humanities and the sciences, for not only do the modes of discourse and representation differ widely, but so do the implicit beliefs about truth and reality.
"Intertextuality" has been touted since the late 1960's as the panacea for many of the critical pitfalls involved in historically oriented approaches to literature and in New Criticism. As a structural analysis of texts in relation to the larger system of signifying practices or uses of signs in culture, intertextuality seems by definition to deliver us from old controversies over the psychology of individual authors and readers, the tracing of literary origins, and the relative value of imitation or originality. By shifting our attention from the triangle of author/work/tradition to that of text/discourse/culture, intertextuality replaces the evolutionary model of literary history with a structural or synchronie model of literature as sign system. The most salient effect of this strategic change is to free the literary text from psychological, sociological, and historical determinisms, opening it up to an apparently infinite play of relationships with other texts, or semiosis.
However, intertextuality is no more a value-free, innocent critical practice than historicism or New Criticism. Most of the best known theories of intertextuality to date come from the French: Barthes,...