25112655

Introduction: Literature and the Visual Arts; Questions of Influence and Intertextuality
Author(s): Margarete Landwehr

Source: College Literature, Vol. 29, No. 3, Literature and the Visual Arts (Summer, 2002),
pp. 1-16
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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Introduction: Literature and the Visual Arts;
Questions of Influence and Intertextuality
Margarete Landwehr
A reading of the articles in this collection, Landwehr is Associate Professor

which focus on the cross-fertilization
of German at West Chester
between literary and visual works of art
University. She has published
including paintings, icons, magazine and tele
vision advertising, opera, and film, prompts articles on Heinrich von Kleist
reflections on the nature of intertextuality

and works by fin-de-siecle writers
and the need for a theoretical framework for
such as Arthur Schnitzler and
a discussion of the essays. This overview of
theories of intertextuality will include the Josef Roth.
origins of the concept of intertextuality, the
general response of American scholars to
these theorists, and the debate it sparked
regarding the difference between influence
and intertextuality. It will, as well, consider
practical applications of the theories of both
"camps," and the significant relationship
between intertextuality and postmodernist
texts. A separate section briefly outlines a tax
onomy of intertextuality proposed by Gerard
Genette, which provides categories and use
ful terms for understanding and discussing
some of the myriad intertextual relationships.
2 College Literature 29.3 (Summer 2002)
The serviceable concepts and vocabulary provided in this section will be

applied, finally, to the essays in this volume in terms of influence and inter
textuality.
Origins: Bakhtin, Kristeva, and Barthes
The term intertextuality, generally understood to connote the structur

al relations between two or more texts, became popular in the late 1960s as
an alternative strategy to studying literary texts that would serve as an anti
dote to historically oriented approaches.The historicist assumes that a schol
ar can uncover an authors intentions, the sources of his/her ideas, and
responses of contemporary readers. Key terms of this approach are "influ
ence" and "inspiration." The concept of influence privileges an earlier text
(or artist) over a later one for which it acts as a source. Conversely, inspira
tion regards the later text (or artist) as an innovative improvement over the
previous one. As early as the 1940s, however, Rene Wellek and Austin Warren
questioned the predominance of nineteenth-century influence studies by
pointing out a dilemma in the historical investigation of a text: "There are
simply no data in literary history which are completely neutral Tacts'"
(Morgan 1985, l).1 Thus, choice of texts and studies of influence were rid
dled with "value judgments." This shift from historicism with its tracing of
literary origins and sources of influence, to intertextuality marked, as Thai's
Morgan notes, a dramatically different approach to literary studies:
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 synchronic model of literature as a 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. (Morgan 1985, 1)
Although Julia Kristeva coined the term intertextuality, Mikhail Bakhtin,

whose ideas she popularized, is regarded as having initiated the concept. In
Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, originally published in 1929, Bakhtin criticizes
historicist literary criticism and its views that the novel consists of a homog
enous representation of reality, expresses an author's opinions, or reveals his
or her psychology. Instead, he proposes the concept of the "polyphonic"
novel, which includes a variety of idiolects employed by characters as well as
extra-literary texts such as newspaper articles or anecdotes and, consequent
ly, offers a multiplicity of ways of viewing "reality." A polyphonic novel dif
fers from a realist work by its "carnivalistic" stance, which parodically
dethrones dominant ideologies or institutions. Thus, the polyphonic novel
demonstrates the 'Jolly relativity of every system" (Morgan, 1985, 11; empha
Margarete Landwehr 3
sis in original). As Morgan points out, Bakhtin s notion of the carnivalization

of Uterature constitutes a theory of intertextuality
Julia Kristeva introduces the term "intertextualite" in 1966 while
explaining Bakhtin s notion of dialogism and carnivalization:
Bakhtin was one of the first to replace the static hewing of texts with a
model where literary structure does not simply exist but is generated in
relation to another structure. What allows a dynamic dimension to struc
turalism is his conception of the 'literary word' as an intersection of textual sur
faces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writ
ings: that of the writer, the addressee (or the character) and the contempo
rary or earlier cultural context. (Kristeva 1986, 35-36; emphasis in original)
Building upon Bakhtin s theory, Kristeva substitutes the term "text" for
Bakhtin's "word" and points out that the "horizontal" axis of
subject/addressee and the "vertical" axis of text/context bring to light the
important discovery that "each word (text) is an intersection of words (texts)
where at least one other word (text) can be read" (1986, 37). Bakhtin con
sidered "writing as a reacting of the anterior literary corpus and the text as
an absorption of and reply to another text" (39). Consequently, this translin
guistic science enables readers to understand intertextual relationships: the
word (or text) occupies "the status of mediator, linking structural models to
cultural (historical) environment" (37; her emphasis). Employing Bakhtin's
intertextual concept of dialogism, Kristeva outlines a new approach to poet
ic texts in which notions such as authorship, causality, and finality are abol
ished.Thus, she regards any text as constructed from "a mosaic of quotations"
and concludes that "the notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjec
tivity" (37; emphasis in original).
In "Death of the Author," written two years later in 1968, Roland
Barthes introduces similar ideas when he states that writing constitutes the
destruction of every voice and of every point of origin. Abolishing the
notion of an author, which he regards as a product of Renaissance human
ism and capitalism, and of origins, Barthes claims that the text does not con
sist of a line of words "releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message'
of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of
writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quo
tations drawn from the innumberable centres of culture" (1977, 146). Thus,
both Kristeva and Barthes replace the concept of an author that "fathers" a
text with that of intertextuality, a mosaic or an impersonal blending or inter
secting of various texts. Both Barthes and Kristeva, then, distinguish inter
textuality from the traditional notion of influence, a principle of causality, of
origins, that is associated with a prior methodology, in which the meaning of
a text is traced back to the author s intention.
American Theorists: Reviving Influence and Intentionality
Whereas Barthes and Kristeva refuse to allow the concepts of "author"

or "sources" to overlap with that of anonymous intertextuality, American
theorists, as Jay Clayton and Eric Rothstein note, have questioned the firm
boundaries between influence and intertextuality and even perceive these
boundaries as virtually nonexistent. Susan Stanford Friedman, for example,
points out that Kristeva s use of Bakhtin to define her concept of intertextu
ality itself depicts the principles of influence and, conversely, observes that
"the discourse of intertextuality was already implicit in the study of literary
influences as a methodology" (1991, 155). In particular, Friedman notes that
scholars of American intertextual criticism generally ignore the "death of the
author" and discusses the contributions of Jonathan Culler (1981) and
Harold Bloom (1973, 1975) in the debate of intertextuality vs. influence.
Culler claims that the concept of intertextuality can be situated in a spec
trum ranging from the anonymous, infinite intertexuality of Barthes to the
finite, dyadic intertextuality of Bloom. (Culler has noted that Bloom's defi
nition of influence often resembles that of intertextuality, "Influence, as I
conceive it, means that there are no texts, but only relationships between
texts" [Bloom 1975, 3].) Culler observes that Bloom reintroduces the idea of
"the person," the confrontation of authors with their precursors in an
Oedipal rivalry as opposed to Barthes's anonymous textual codes, and sub
mits a definition of intertextuality that straddles both extremes. Culler situ
ates a text in "a prior body of discourse?other projects and thoughts which
it implicitly or explicitly takes up, prolongs, cites, refutes, transforms"
(Friedman 1991, 156).
Similarly, Friedman supports a redefinition of intertextuality that allows
for the concept of agency. She employs the American feminist Nancy K.
Miller's method of "arachnology," a type of gynocriticism, as a useful model.
Miller's methodology blends Barthes's notion of the text as a "web" with
American feminists' stress on the importance of the author. Miller's arach
nology acknowledges a text as a weaving of other cultural and historical
texts, but refuses to accept Barthes's notion of anonymity and advocates "the
author" as a concept central to feminist criticism. In place of "anonymous
textuality" Miller proposes "a political intertextuality" that remains necessar
ily a form of negotiation with the dominant social text" (Friedman 1991,
158-59).
The art historian Michael Baxandall adds another twist to the influence
vs. intertextuality debate and implicitly supports the notion of agency when
he argues that the line of intentionality runs from the later to the earlier
artist. This viewpoint turns the theory of influence on its head and resembles
traditional theories of inspiration as it portrays the successor not as a passive
recipient of the predecessor's ideas or techniques, but rather an active agent

who reshapes the precursor's material:
"Influence" is a curse of art criticism primarily because of its wrong-head
ed grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who the patient: it
seems to reverse the active/passive relation which the historical actor expe
riences and the inferential beholder will wish to take into account. If one
says that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did some
thing to Y rather than Y did something to X. But in the consideration of
good pictures and painters the second is always the more lively reality. . . .
If we think ofY rather than X as the agent, the vocabulary is much richer
and more attractively diversified: draw on, resort to avail oneself of, appro
priate from, have recourse to, adapt, misunderstand, refer to, pick up, take
on, engage with, react to, quote, . . . copy, address, paraphrase, absorb, make
a variation on, revive, continue, remodel, ape, emulate, travesty, parody. . . .
Most of these relations cannot be stated the other way around?in terms of
X acting onY rather thanY acting on X. (Baxandall 1985, 58-59)
Baxandall's concept of intentionality and the means with which an artist
consciously transforms a predecessor's material brings forth the question of
motive, which, in turn, leads one to ask if varying degrees of awareness might
contribute to one distinction between influence and intertextuality (Clayton
1991, 30).There are various obstacles, however, in a practical application of
the concept of intentionality. Notions of agency and intentionality, of course,
risk reinstating traditional psychologistic concepts of artistic production at
the cost of understating culturalist explanations. Moreover, the trail to deter
mining intentionality can be rife with potential obstacles and pitfalls. While
the influence of previously written works on later ones can be quite obvi
ous, such as in the case of parody or pastiche, it is conceivable that authors
may inadvertently appropriate ideas, plots, or motifs from works they read
years earlier. Conversely, an artist can deliberately employ/subvert cultural
texts/codes as, for example, when parodying a certain genre or writing style.
On the other hand, these codes may be so "embedded" in the artist's
Weltanschauung or so enmeshed in his/her idiolect that the writer unwit
tingly employs them. Despite the barriers to discerning or verifying an
author's intention or awareness of appropriating specific sources or cultural
texts, the concepts of agency, influence, and intentionality are serviceable
ones particularly when the influence of a previous work or artist is obvious
and/or verifiable and significant in comprehending the subsequent one.
The difficulty in abolishing the concept of agency especially when
attempting to analyze a literary or artistic work becomes evident when one
peruses the essays of scholars who have attempted to elaborate and system
atize various elements/aspects either of influence or of intertextuality The
concept of an author is explictly present, of course, in the former, but also
implicitly alluded to in the latter. Those who describe texts in terms of inter
textuality and cultural codes employ terms that suggest agency and allude to
notions of sources and influence. A brief discussion of two models, each from
one camp, will illustrate this point.
In "Influence vs. Intertextuality," Ulla Musarra-Schroeder argues for the
rehabilitation of the concept of influence and sketches out three types of
influence. First, an artist or writer may be influenced by philosophical, psy
chological, sociological, or scientific ideas from individual thinkers or their
works. Second, an influence can consist of formal, stylistic, structural, or
compositional principles. The model text could represent a certain genre or
style or contain particular structural devices that the successor appropriates.
Third, she restricts the concept of influence to include "only those phenom
ena which in some way have directed the process of creation of a text, the
writing process" (1996,170). This process of influence "may manifest itself in
various ways in certain schemes or patterns of semantic, stylistic, composi
tional, or formal order or sometimes also in concrete inter-textemes such as
quotations or allusions" (170).
Lauro Zavala (1995) designates a text as "the weaving of meaningful
elements" and defines intertextuality as "the rules that determine the exis
tence of the net." He outlines elements for intertextual analysis including:
"discursive cartography" such as the sociolect common to text and intertext
and "intertextual strategies" such as allusion, ekphrasis, quotation, parody, pla
giarism, and pastiche as well as irony, hyperbole, metaphor, and paradox. If
sociolect suggests cultural or linguistic codes, then intertextual strategies such
as ekphrasis and parody assume an author, who deliberately borrows from
and transforms previous texts.Thus, when actually analyzing a concrete text,
theorists of both camps clearly articulate the need to assume an agency and
sources for that text as well as cultural and social intertexts.
Intertextuality and Postmodernism
No historical overview of intertextuality would be complete without a

discussion, however brief, of the significant relationship between intertextual
ity and postmodernism. In his valuable survey of theories of intertextuality,
Graham Allen discusses Linda Hutcheon's observation that double-codedness
constitutes a central feature of postmodern literature. This double-codedness
questions available modes of representation in culture while acknowledging
that it still must apply these modes. Hutcheon states that post-modernism is
contradictory since it "works within the very systems it attempts to subvert"
and is, thus, double-coded (Allen 2000, 189). Juxtaposing the nostalgia she
perceives in modernism's intertextual use of past forms with the irony often
used in postmodern works when utilizing similar forms, she notes:
When Eliot recalled Dante or Virgil in The Waste Land, one sensed a kind
of wishful call to continuity beneath the fragmented echoing. It is precise
ly this that is contested in postmodern parody where it is often ironic dis
continuity that is revealed at the heart of continuity, difference at the heart
of similarity. . . . Parody is a perfect postmodern form, in some sense, for it
paradoxically both incorporates and challenges that which it parodies. It
also forces a reconsideration of origin or originality that is compatible with
other postmodern interrogations of liberal humanist assumptions.
(Hutcheon 1988,11)
Parody constitutes not merely a postmodernist form of intertextuality,
but also functions as a self-reflexive strategy that foregrounds the mode of
representation itself. Postmodernist works simultaneously acknowledge their
dependence on established forms of representation, what Barthes calls
"doxa," and disturb or even subvert these forms, "paradoxa" (Allen 2000,
190). This radical questioning of the forms of representation and, conse
quently, modes of knowledge within a culture, through parody foregrounds,
as Hutcheon states, "the poUtics of representation" (Allen 2000, 190). Thus,
such parody, which impUes a type of self-reflexivity, "points in two directions
at once, towards the events being represented in the narrative and toward the
act of narration itself (191). Thus postmodern fiction depends on intertextu
al practice, which has an intended destabiUzing effect within such fiction,
because it focuses attention on and manipulates the tension between fact and
fiction, between the constructed and the real (193).
Genette's Taxonomy of Intertextuality and Interarts Relations
Of the major French theorists, only the structuralist Gerard Genette

sketches out a detailed taxonomy of intertextuality in a trilogy of works
(1992,1997a, 1997b).2 As Graham AUen observes, "the essential thrust of the
structuralist project seems to be toward the intertextual, in that it denies the
existence of unitary objects and emphasizes their systematic and relational
nature, be they literary texts or other artworks" (2000, 96). In this trilogy,
Genette produces a theory of "transtextuality," which AUen explains as
"intertextuality from the viewpoint of structural poetics" (98). Perceiving lit
erature as essentiaUy "transtextual," or a second-degree construct created out
of shards of other texts, Genette maps out ways in which relationships
between texts can be systematicaUy interpreted and subdivides transtextuali
ty into five categories.3 Significantly, he rejects the idea that aU types of
"transtextuality" must be implicit, deeply interwoven into a text's fabric.
Genette's first category, "intertextuality" which he defines as "a relation
ship of copresence between two texts or among several texts" and as "the
actual presence of one text within another" is not the same concept
employed by Kristeva (1997a, 1-2). Genette's redefining intertextuality into

three subcategories?quotation, aUusion (the most "impUcit"), and plagia
rism?offers a pragmatic and easily identifiable relationship between texts.
"Metatextuality" such as Uterary criticism and poetics, indicates that one text
serves as commentary on another.
The focus of Palimpsests, "hypertextuaUty," is defined by Genette as "any
relationship uniting a text B (which I shaU caU the 'hypertext') to an earlier
text A (I shaU, of course, caU it the 'hypotext') upon which it is grafted in a
manner that is not that of commentary" (5). (The Oxford English Dictionary
defines "palimpsest" as "a parchment, etc. which has been written upon
twice, the original writing having been rubbed out.") AUen points out that
"palimpsests suggest layers of writing and Genette's use of the term is to indi
cate literature's existence in 'the second degree,' its non-original rewriting of
what has already been written" (2000, 108). Particularly in this category,
Genette is concerned with intended and self-conscious relations between
texts, especiaUy in terms of specific genres, "I mean a category of texts which
whoUy encompass certain canonical (though minor) genres such as pastiche,
parody, travesty, and which also touches upon other genres?probably aU
genres" (AUen 2000, 108). Genette devotes the bulk of his study on ways in
which hypertextual transformations such as self expurgations, excisions,
reductions, or amplifications are created out of particular hypotexts. As
Morgan has observed, Genette's definition of hypertextuaUty resembles the
traditional notions of influence and sources and does not advance the debate
concerning the verification of sources and determination of intentionality
(1985, 31). Despite such flaws, Genette's taxonomy offers useful terms in dis
cussing and analyzing intertextual relationships.
Although Genette's taxonomy of transtextuality deals with literary texts,
it can also be employed to analyze interarts relations. Towards the end of
Palimpsests, he claims that his literary taxonomy can be applied to the prac
tices of art in the second degree or "hyperesthetics." (Although Genette, like
the eighteenth-century German playwright and drama theorist Lessing,
claims that each type of art has its own rules.) As wiU be demonstrated,
Genette's terminology enables one to characterize and systematize some of
the relationships between the arts.
The Theories of Culler and Genette: Applications
If Genette's terms enable one to classify the nature of inter-textual rela

tions, CuUer offers a broader scope: his schema of influence and intertextu
ality as opposite ends of a spectrum clearly provides one pragmatic and flex
ible framework for discussing these two opposing, but (apparently) not
mutually exclusive views. Influence (and Genette's hyptertextuality) refers to
a finite, dyadic intertextuality and suggests specific source (s) for a text and
authorial intention. The anonymous, infinite intertextuality of Barthes and
Kristeva, on the other hand, encompasses the cultural, historical, or political
discourses, codes, or texts that an artist may deliberately employ or that
implicitly exist within a work.
The two introductory essays on Plath s poems serve as prime examples
of the two extreme ends of Culler's spectrum. In "Sylvia Plath's
Transformations of Modernist Paintings," Sherry Lutz Zivley traces how par
ticular paintings serve as sources for a dozen of Plath s poems, a clear case of
influence/inspiration. The term intertextuality, however, seems more appro
priate in Marsha Bryant's discussion of Plath s revisions of common concepts
of fifties consumerism and advertising's ideal images of domestic life in
"Plath, Domesticity and the Art of Advertising." The latter illustrates the
intermingling of cultural codes with individual discourse. In particular, Plath
weaves into the fabric of her poems the discourse of American consumer
culture from mainstream images in popular women's magazines and in tele
vision advertising that depict secular myths regarding the housewife's role.
Bryant states that the rhetoric, images, and mythologies of American adver
tising helped to shape Plath s own ambivalent construction of domesticity
and female agency, which go beyond the stance of parody and satire. Her
poems depict domestic woman's complex position in a consumer culture and
both reinforce and question 1950s social codes regarding gender roles and
power in relationships.
Zivley s article also examines the influence of images on Plath s poetry.
Whereas Bryant discusses how Plath reworks the codes of consumer culture
in advertising, Zivley traces the sources of Plath s poems back to particular
modernist paintings and examines the various ways the poet transforms these
art works into poems. At times when a painting would spark a vital insight
into her own life, Plath would conflate memories of a painting with emo
tionally charged personal experiences. (She admitted that art was "her deep
est source of inspiration.") Plath s descriptive or indirect references to specif
ic paintings fit neatly into Genette's subcategory of allusion, but, more inter
esting is the inspiration the paintings provoke in Plath in the form of "emo
tional recognition of parallel visual and emotional analogies between art
works and her own social, familial, and emotional experiences." Ekphrastic
poems such as Plath s and John Keats s famous "Ode on a Grecian Urn" are
inspired by images or objects, which usually trigger strong emotions or pro
found insights in the poet. Jean Hagstrum defines ekphrasis succinctly as
"giving voice and language to the otherwise mute object" (1958, 18). The
mood or idea that an artwork inspires in the poet (and reader) is more sig
nificant, of course, than any accurate poetic description of the object.
Jennifer Cushman also explores how images, in this case, Russian icons,
inspired poems in "Beyond Ekphrasis: Logos and Eikon in Rilke's poetry."
Cushman borrows Amy Golahny's definition of ekphrasis as a "text that
expresses the poet-reader-viewer reaction to actual or imagined works of
art" which widens the ekphrasis debate into the speculative realms of writer
intent and reader-response (1996,13).4 In her discussion of the inspiration of
Russian icons on Rilke's works, she links theories of ekphrasis with that of
Orthodox icon theology. If the former deals with the potential for art to
impact life directly, then the latter views "the function of the icon to make
the scriptural word palpable, to occasion a change in perception, and ulti
mately the behavior of the believer." In particular, the icon serves as a "win
dow between the earthly and celestial worlds" that conveys divine light and
transforms the viewer; its colors in particular were to convey this spiritual
presence. Similarly, RUke, who considered the poet as a priest/artist, felt it
was the artist's duty to bring the spiritual into corporeal existence. In his
famous "Duineser Elegies" and "Life of Maria" ("Marienleben"), Rilke
invokes the holiness of the angels and the Madonna sometimes through use
of color. Cushman concludes that Rilke's poems do not merely describe the
icons ekphrasticaUy; rather, he constructs the poem to reproduce the experi
ence of contemplating an icon by inspiring in the reader contemplation and
revelation. The intertextual relationship between the Russian icons that
inspired Rilke and his poems seems too strong to reduce it to a mere "aUu
sion," one of Genette's categories of intertextuality.
If iconic representations of Mary inspired Rilke's poems, then the
Biblical description of the Annunciation scene in which the angel Gabriel
announces to Mary that she wiU become the mother of God inspired a
plethora of paintings, the theme of Susan van Rohr Scaff's essay "The Virgin
Annunciate in Italian Art of the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance." One can
frame the changing depictions of the Madonna in terms of shifting codes.
Medieval portrayals of Mary reflect the cult of adoration that surrounded the
Madonna in the Middle Ages in which she was regarded as a veritable god
dess of popular worship. Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation, on the
other hand, reinterpret Mary as both the chaste virgin of the Bible and as a
descendant of Eve, a paragon of feminine beauty, even, in some cases, an
object of erotic desire. The variety of reinterpretations of the Annunciation
scene support Kristeva's valuable contribution to the debate on intertextual
ity that "no intertextual citation is ever innocent or direct, but always trans
formed, distorted, displaced, condensed, or edited in some way in order to
suit the speaking subject's value system" (Morgan 1985, 22). In this case, the
transformation of Mary's role in the Annunciation scene from demure vir

gin, to alluring young woman not only reflects the painter's incorporation of
his society's codes concerning her human and spiritual identity, but also his
society's stance towards religion. Her increasingly physical attractiveness in
the later Renaissance depictions reveals that society's increasingly secular val
ues, its shift in focus from the spiritual to the human.
Similarly, in "Art, Literature and the Harlem Renaissance: The Messages
of God's Trombones'9 Anne Carroll demonstrates how African-Americans'
reinterpretation of Biblical scenes in their poetry and the visual arts marks a
shift away from conventional codes of the dominant culture to an emphasis
on their own culture. In God's Trombones, a collection of poems by James
Weldon Johnson with illustrations by Aaron Douglas, both artists emphasize
the importance of blacks in Biblical history by drawing attention to and
redressing the traditional omission of African-Americans from these narra
tives. Carroll discusses how African-Americans of the Harlem Renaissance
attempted to subvert the artistic conventions of mainstream American soci
ety in their art as depicted in Johnson's poetic and Douglas's visual represen
tations of black preachers' sermons. Their artistic revisions of established
Biblical myths along with the subversion of traditional aesthetic codes can be
formulated in terms of the conflicting values and discourses of a dominant
majority and a subordinate minority. Carroll also examines the interactions
between the visual and the written texts. She analyzes how the illustrations
serve as a visual counterpoint to the poems and reinforce certain aspects of
their message. Douglas's pictures underline meanings only suggested in the
poetry and complement the poems' attempt to challenge established repre
sentations of African-Americans. Because the illustrations serve as commen
tary on the poems, one could argue that they have a "metatextual" (Genette's
term) relationship to the poetry. Moreover, the juxtaposition of poem and
illustration underscores the various ways in which each medium represents
the sermons. Carroll states that Johnson's poetic innovations demonstrate his
manipulation of formal elements of poetry to reflect aspects of the preach
ers' delivery, while the illustrations suggest movement and vitality by arrest
ing figures in motion.
The distinctive ways in which each medium reinterprets an idea or a
scene prompt a brief discussion of the debate on the fundamental differences
(and similarities) of literature and the visual arts, a distinction made by
Aristotle and a central concern of any study of interarts relations. In modern
times, it was the influential Enlightenment theatre critic and theorist
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing who established essentialist categories between
poetry and the visual arts in his seminal essay "Laokoon," which refers both
to a famous Hellenistic sculpture as well as to Virgil's work. Lessing associat
ed temporaUty with literature and spatiality with painting and sculpture.

Moreover, he privileged literature over art when he argued that the artist,
unlike the writer, could only portray a single moment in time and then from
only one point of view. As Bryan Wolf points out, conventional associations
of the visual with nonverbal immediacy consign the visual arts to the "myth
of presentness," Lessing's spatiality, whereas the modern world associates rhet
oric, which implies a manipulation of "facts" or words in order to influence,
exclusively with language (1990, 185). Wolf agrees with Tom MitcheU who
states that "there is no essential difference between poetry and painting" and
argues that "painting is no less rhetorical or ideological in its structure than
literature" (1986, 184). Wolf cites Emerson's assertion that the sister arts of
painting and literature are united in a common rhetorical structure and that
aU forms of knowledge are sociaUy mediated in order to suggest a tradition
distinct from Lessing's, one that is "concerned not to distinguish painting
from literature but to reunify them under the common banner of represen
tation" (1990,198-99). He states that no act of perception can ever be inno
cent or original, that "the key to the interpretive process does not lie in the
nature of the object interpreted" and that "painting and Uterature alike must
be engaged as rhetorical constructs" (191). His assertion that both a poem
and a painting are "part of a circuit of meanings, a signifying system" reflects
the influence of Kristeva and Barthes and incorporates a study of interart
relations into the earlier discussion of intertextualty
The last two essays deal with a particular type of intertextuality, Genette's
"hypertextuaUty," which refers to any relationship uniting one text to an ear
lier one and which suggests the concepts of influence and sources. In
"Modernity's Revision of the Dancing Daughter: The Salome Narrative of
Wilde and Strauss," Carmen TrammeU Skaggs examines Wilde's appropria
tion of the Bibilical Salome legend as weU as Richard Strauss s transforma
tion of Wilde's text into the Ubretto for his opera. Jeffrey Adams analyzes
Orson WeUes's film adaptation of Franz Kafka's novel in" Orson WeUes's The
Trial: Film Noir and the Kafkaesque." Both articles discuss how social dis
courses?political/social ideology or cinematic codes?respectively, influ
enced Strauss's and WeUes's reinterpretation of anterior texts. anti-Semitism,
orientalist views, and the cult of decadence colored either Wilde's dramatic
or Strauss's musical versions of the Salome figure. WeUes deliberately appro
priates the style and codes of expressionist film and film noir in his cinemat
ic interpretation of the Kafkaesque.
In her discussion of Wilde's and Strauss's texts, Skaggs seeks to demon
strate how each "individual interpreter reacts and responds to the cultural
and artistic ideologies of his own time." The Decadent writer and homosex
ual WUde develops the themes of orientalism and counter-cultural ethics in
his reworking of the Salome and John the Baptist love story of thwarted
desire and perverse revenge in order to present a social critique of gender
ideologies and notions of sexuality. Strauss, who attended a performance of
Wilde's Salome in Max Reinhardt's "Kleines Theatre" in Berlin, reacts to
nineteenth-century German culture by reinterpreting Wilde's perverse sex
ual themes and by caricaturing Jews in an anti-Semitic reinterpretation of
orientalism. Just as the changing values that accompanied the transition from
the Middle Ages to the Renaissance influenced depictions of the Madonna,
so too, the sexual and racial codes of fin-de-siecle England and Wilhelmine
Germany inspired different portrayals of Salome. If Wilde challenges sexual
and gender ideologies, then Strauss depicts in his opera the prevailing racism
of his society.
In his visual reinterpretation of Kafka's expressionist novel The Trial,
Welles employs the cinematic idiom of German Expressionist film (which
influenced the film noir style) especially such mise-en-scene techniques as a
claustrophobic set design, oblique camera angles, and a chiaroscuro of light
and shadow. Welles replicates Kafka's violations of the conventions of literary
realism in his novel with his expressionist/film noir style, which subverts
established codes of cinematic realism to achieve a destabilizing effect on the
audience. Just as Rilke attempts to reproduce the spiritual experience of
Russian icons in his poetry, so, too,Welles replicates the Kafkaesque mood of
claustrophobic paranoia, of uncertainty and anxiety, of emotional entrapment
and guilt, and of disorientation through his appropriation of the film noir
style. Welles s imaginative portrayal of Kafka's text on the screen illustrates
Baxandall's observation that the successor is not a passive recipient of a pre
decessor's ideas, techniques, or themes, but, rather, is an active agent who
reworks the precursor's material to produce a masterpiece in its own right.
Conclusion
The study of interarts relations has become an acknowledged branch of

Comparative Literature in the United States, and elsewhere with societies,
journals, and conferences devoted to the study of interarts relations
(Weisstein 1993, l).5 Moreover, a new notion of intertextuality ignores the
boundaries between art and non-art (Morgan 1985, 34). Recent studies of
the semiotics of culture have focused on the intertextuality between aesthet
ic and social texts. An intertextual, interdisciplinary study of related domains
of knowledge marks a radical departure from Lessing's division of the arts
into distinct categories and from the sharply defined boundaries among dis
ciplines instituted with the medieval universities and offers a creative
approach to the study of literature and the arts.
Notes
1 Morgan Thai's provides a cogent and succinct overview of the development of

the theory and practice of intertextuaHty. He focuses on European and some
American theorists including Bakhtin, Kristeva, Frye, Bloom, de Saussure, Levi
Strauss, Derrida, Barthes, Riffaterre, and Genette. His article also contains a thor
oughly researched bibliography. Key ideas of my preliminary discussion of histori
cism vs. intertextuality and of Bakhtin are culled from his detailed study. An updat
ed book-length history of intertextuality is Graham Allen's (2000) which contains
chapters on Sausurre, Bakhtin, Kristeva; Barthes; Genette and Riffaterre; Bloom,
feminism and postcolonialism; and postmodernism. Space limits restrict my discus
sion to a few key scholars.
2 I am indebted to AUen's succinct summary of these three voluminous works
(2000). The first two volumes were originaUy published in 1979 and 1982, respec
tively, the original publication date of the third was not available.
3 I wiU consider the three that are relevant to a discussion of this issue's essays,
which are aU discussed in Palimpsests. The other two are "architextuality" and "para
textuality".The former term refers to a reader's generic, modal, thematic, and figu
rative expectations about texts and his/her reception of a work (AUen 2000,102-03).
For example, the reader may expect that a certain work wiU imitate such generic
models as tragedy, comedy, the reaUst novel, or the lyric. "Paratextuality," refers to
those elements that lie on the "threshold" of the text. This threshold consists of a
"peritext" including titles, chapter titles, prefaces, dedications, inscriptions, notes, and
epigraphs, and an "epitext" that includes elements "outside" of the text such as inter
views, publicity announcements, critical reviews, and editorial discussions (103-07).
4 For an exceUent discussion of ekphrasis see Heffernan (1991) and Yacobi
(2000).
5 Journals that promote studies of interarts relations include Word and Image and
Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature.
Works Cited
AUen, Graham. 2000. Intertextuality. NewYork: Routledge.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1973. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Trans. R. W. Rotsel. Ann
Arbor: Ardis.
Barthes, Roland. 1977. "The Death of the Author." In Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans.
Stephen Heath. NewYork: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
BaxandaU, Michael. 1985. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures.
New Haven:Yale University Press.
Bloom, Harold. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence. NewYork: Oxford University Press.
-. 1975. A Map of Misreading. NewYork: Oxford University Press.
Clayton, Jay, and Eric Rothstein. 1991. "Figures in the Corpus: Theories of Influence
and Intertextuality." In Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History. Madison:
The University ofWisconsin Press.
CuUer, Jonathan. 1981. "Presupposition and Intertextuality" In The Pursuit of Signs:
Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction. Ithaca: CorneU University Press.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. 1991."Weavings: Intertextuality and the (Re)Birth of the

Author." In Influence and Intertextuality in Literary History, ed. Jay Clayton and
Eric Rothstein. Madison: University ofWisconsin Press.
Genette, Gerard. 1992. The Architext: an introduction. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
-. 1997a. Palimpsests:Literature in the Second Decree.Trans. Channa Newman and
Claude Dabinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
-. 1997b. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation.Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Golahny, Amy. 1996. The Eye of the Poet: Studies in the Reciprocity of the Visual and
Literary Arts from the Renaissance to the Present. Lewisburg: Bucknell University
Press.
Hagstrumjean. 1958. Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorealism and English Poetry
from Dryden to Gray. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Heffernan, James A. W. "Ekphrasis and Representation." New Literary History 22
(1991): 297-316.
Hutcheon, Linda. 1991. "The Politics of Postmodern Parody." In Intertextuality, ed.
Heinrich Plett. New York: Walter de Gruyter.
-. 1989. The Politics of Postmodernism. NewYork: Routledge.
-. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York:
Routledge.
Kristeva, Julia. 1986. "Word, Dialogue and Novel." In The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril
Moi. NewYork: Columbia University Press.
Miller, Nancy K. 1986a. "Arachnologies: The Woman, the Text, and the Critic." In
The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller. New York: Columbia University
Press.
-. 1986b. "Changing the Subject: Authorship, Writing and the Reader." In
Feminist Studies?Critical Studies, ed. Teresa de Laurentis. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Mitchell, W. J. T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Morgan, Thais E. "Is There an Intertext in this Text?: Literary and Interdisciplinary
Approaches to Intertextuality." American Journal of Semiotics. 3 (1985): 1-40.
Musarra-Schroeder, Ulla. 1996. "Influence vs. Intertextuality." In The Search for a New
Alphabet: Literary Studies in a Changing World, ed.Harald Hendrix, Joost Kloek,
Sophie Levie,Will van Peer. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Weisstein, Ulrich. 1993. "Literature and the (Visual) Arts: Intertextuality and Mutual
Illumination." In Intertextuality: German Literature and Visual Art from the
Renaissance to the Twentieth Century. Columbia: Camden House.
Wellek, Rene, and Austin Warren. 1956. Theory of Literature. Rev. Ed. NewYork:
Harcourt and Brace.
Wolf, Bryan. "Confessions of a Closet Ekphrastic: Literature, Painting, and Other
Unnatural Relations." Yale Journal of Criticism 3 (1990): 181-203.
Yacobi, Tamar. "Interart Narrative: (Un)reliability and Ekphrasis." Poetics Today 21
(2000): 712-749.
Zavala, Lauro. 1995. "A Model for Intertextual Analysis." In Semiotics 1995, eds. C.W.
Spinks and John Deely Frankfurt am Main/New York: Peter Lang.

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Introduction: Literature and the Visual Arts; Questions of Influence and Intertextuality

Author(s): Margarete Landwehr

Questions of Influence and Intertextuality

A reading of the articles in this collection, Landwehr is Associate Professor

reflections on the nature of intertextuality

The serviceable concepts and vocabulary provided in this section will be

Origins: Bakhtin, Kristeva, and Barthes

The term intertextuality, generally understood to connote the structur

Although Julia Kristeva coined the term intertextuality, Mikhail Bakhtin,

sis in original). As Morgan points out, Bakhtin s notion of the carnivalization

American Theorists: Reviving Influence and Intentionality

Whereas Barthes and Kristeva refuse to allow the concepts of "author"

recipient of the predecessor's ideas or techniques, but rather an active agent

Intertextuality and Postmodernism

No historical overview of intertextuality would be complete without a

Genette's Taxonomy of Intertextuality and Interarts Relations

Of the major French theorists, only the structuralist Gerard Genette

employed by Kristeva (1997a, 1-2). Genette's redefining intertextuality into

The Theories of Culler and Genette: Applications

If Genette's terms enable one to classify the nature of inter-textual rela

transformation of Mary's role in the Annunciation scene from demure vir

ed temporaUty with literature and spatiality with painting and sculpture.

The study of interarts relations has become an acknowledged branch of

1 Morgan Thai's provides a cogent and succinct overview of the development of

AUen, Graham. 2000. Intertextuality. NewYork: Routledge.

Friedman, Susan Stanford. 1991."Weavings: Intertextuality and the (Re)Birth of the

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