Intertextuality

Term Kristeva coined in an essay on Bakhtin, written in 1966, published in Critique in 1967 and reprinted in Sēmeiōtikē (1969). Every text is built as a mosaic of quotations and absorbs and transforms other texts, so that its meaning arises where textual surfaces cross rather than from one author's intention. She offered it in place of intersubjectivity, as a dialogue among texts. The word passed into general literary theory. When it came to be used for the mere study of sources, Kristeva preferred to speak of transposition, the passage of one sign system into another.