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Intertextuality and the Cultural Text in Recent SemioticsAuthor(s): Leonard OrrReviewed work(s):Source: College English, Vol. 48, No. 8 (Dec., 1986), pp. 811-823Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/376732 .

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Leonard Orr

Intertextuality and the Cultural Text in Recent Semiotics

In Robert Scholes' popular but reductive Structuralism in Literature and Semi- otics and Interpretation, the reader is given a dated and strictly French semiotics based on work published by Gerard Genette, Tzvetan Todorov, and Roland Barthes in the 1960s. Using this early arcane material, Scholes writes (Semiotics 90):

Here is a version of the story of "Eveline": 1 2 3 4 5

XA + XB - X - C + YaX + (X= A+X -B XC) predX - 6 7 8 9

(XbY)predX + XA! -- XnotbY -- (XB + X - C)! imp

In whatever sense this may be said to be a version of Joyce's "Eveline," it is not a version most critics would find adequate. When this formula is interpreted using Scholes' key, it yields little more than a partial plot summary of the three- page story, together with a few general character descriptors. Yet plot is rarely a major problem in understanding the stories in Dubliners. This treatment ignores all of the stylistic elements, the interrelations between this story and the other works in Dubliners, social and historical elements, allusions, and much else. To present this formula as one of the achievements of semiotics in an introduction for literary critics is clearly to do no great service for semiotics.

Scholes and critics who have followed his example make semiotics seem useful for generating "readings" such as this and little else. They make it seem to represent a new aestheticism, dealing with literary texts as autonomous objects. John Hall, for example, in The Sociology of Literature, believes that Julia Kristeva's notion of intertextuality "argues simply that literature is best read as a comment on other texts, rather than on society" (16). Scholes believes that Juri Lotman and Michael Riffaterre "share with the New Critics a sense of the poetic text as largely self-referential rather than [as] oriented to a worldly context" (Semiotics 12) and that the word work in semiotics "implies a closed and self-sufficient entity" (149). Such misreading of semiotics by one of its defenders and popularizers can charitably be attributed to a sort of nostalgia for Formalism

Leonard Orr teaches critical methods and the history of criticism at the University of Notre Dame. He is the editor of De-Structing the Novel: Essays in Applied Postmodern Hermeneutics; his Semiotic and Structuralist Analyses of Fiction will be published this year.

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by a lapsed New Critic-a way of quickly assimilating contemporary critical jar- gon and domesticating Continental methods by showing how similar it is to traditional Anglo-American criticism. But this reading ignores the bulk of work published by Soviet, Italian, and Israeli semioticians over the past fifteen years.

These critics follow a definition of semiotics based on Charles Peirce and Benjamin Whorf rather than on Saussure. For example, Ju. K. Lekomcev defines semiotics as "the science of signs transmitting information inside some social group; it is the science of communicative sign systems" (39). Cultural semioticians have worked with many different semiotic systems, including tourism, architecture, film, and etiquette; these offer different but simultaneous frames and terms to analyze sign communication and codes, and grant no particular sign system, including language and literature, a privileged place (see MacCannell 289, Eco 3-31). Cultural semiotics has broadened the meanings of the terms "text," "language," and "reading" to include almost everything perceived as partaking of a sign-relationship understood in terms of intersubjective communication. Boris Uspenskij has noted that, from the point of view of cultural semiotics, some "language, understood in a broad semiotic sense rather than a nar- row linguistic sense, determines perception of both real and possible facts in the corresponding historical-cultural context" (107).

The important difference between the sort of semiotics described by Uspenskij and the sort practiced by Scholes is that to Uspenskij the object of study is not an individual and perhaps eccentric response to signs in the culture (such as literary texts), but is instead the response of specific cultural groups within a specific historical-cultural setting. In the cultural system language "pro- vides the collective with a presumption of communicability" (Lotman and Uspensky 229). While cultural semioticians agree with Saussure's notion of the arbitrariness of the sign, a sign is only meaningful within a cultural system. Lot- man argues that "all the material for the history of culture can be considered from two points of view: as determinate, meaningful information, and as a system of social codes that allow people to express this information with determinate signs so as to make it part of the patrimony of a human collectivity" ("Dif- ferent Cultures" 1215). The transmission of this information, loss and change of meaning, change in textual status, and the historical basis for such changes, is the major interest of cultural semiotics.

According to Nomi Tamir-Ghez and other Israeli semioticians, semiotic interpretation (and semantic processing generally) always involves three levels: 1) the senses or designations of words and the sentences they compose based upon our knowledge of the language; 2) a field of reference, based upon our knowledge of the world (that is, all of the significance of the words beyond the lexicon and syntax, such as cultural significations and the discourse's internal field of reference); 3) regulating principles which represent the attitudes of the speaker. "What distinguishes the literary text from other texts is ... that it creates an In- ternal F[ield of] R[eference] (IFR) (we cannot go beyond the text to verify whether the characters really exist, whether they really loved each other and so on)." But the literary text also refers to external fields of reference such as historical events. "Hence literary statements are true statements referring to an



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IFR" (Tamir-Ghez 242). Similarly Juri Lotman considers poetry and art to be a "binding of cultural and linguistic possibilities. The artistic text is typified ... by the intensity, the number, and the system of connections that materialize among its elements" (Qtd. in Rewar, "Cybernetics" 289).

Culture is made of a web of semiosis, a thick tapestry of interwoven sign systems. This web is not perfectly smooth and continuous, however, and cultural semiotics finds its way into the sign system of a culture through the discon- tinuous, the breaks and gaps, the unexpected, the ambivalent. Following Lot- man, cultural semioticians find at least three different forms of ambivalent texts:

(a) texts which have survived many literary periods, have functioned differently in each, and were consequently read differently during each period; (b) texts, which, from the historical point of view changed their status in the polysystem, that is, were pushed from the periphery to center and vice versa, or from adult to children's literature, etc.; (c) texts which can potentially be realized in two different ways by the same reader, at the same time. (Shavit 76)

This way of defining culture seems to go back to Levi-Strauss' essay "Social Structure," first published in 1952, in which he states that what is called a "'culture' is a fragment of humanity which . . . presents significant discon- tinuities in relation to the rest of humanity" (295). Thus the cultural text is one read against the backdrop of its immediate consumers and producers and within a historical context. It draws the semiotician's attention because it stands apart from a given cultural episteme, to borrow a term from Michel Foucault. "The episteme can ... be defined as a metasemiotics of culture, that is, as the attitude adopted by a socio-cultural community with respect to its own signs" (Qtd. in Greimas and Courtes 105). The episteme is not the culture itself, but the interpretation of a given culture by the social group that produces it; the episteme stands in relation to the culture as Peirce's interpretant stands in relation to sign. The culture itself, in order to be definable as a culture, must stand apart from all that is non-culture and must be fairly homogeneous in its self- projection. Lotman and Uspenskij note that "to fulfill its social function, culture has to appear as a structure subject to unified constructive principles. . . . There comes a moment when it becomes conscious of itself, when it creates a model of itself. This model defines the unified, the artificially schematized image that is raised to the level of a structural unity." In the moment of self-consciousness (and note, this is not exactly the same as "self-awareness"), a social group within the culture builds an image of itself; this image is then turned back onto the culture to subdue and regularize it. "When imposed onto the reality of this or that culture, it exerts a powerful regulating influence, preordaining the construction of culture, introducing order, and eliminating contradiction" (227).

The cultural text thus formed stands in further interpretive relationship to the episteme, making the chain of perception and interpretation something like Real World-Cultural Episteme-Cultural Text. According to Itamar Even-Zohar, "the more established the culture, the more codified its various repertories and the more ready-made and detached from the real world its models." The text, then, may not be related to the "real world" at all, but the real world is instead replaced by "possible worlds, i.e., prefabricated selections from the repertory



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available to the culture" ("Constraints" 66). This is true for any cultural texts, whether documents, historical narratives, diaries, artworks, or literary texts. What is often taken by historians or students of literature as the real world of a past culture is actually the representation of a conventional model that forms a society's projection of itself and is accepted as "real" by the society.

No literary text is written in a vacuum. Besides the general culture surrounding the text and the author's own horizon (i.e., his experiences, prejudices, use of the language system, "worldview," and so on), there are, perhaps more im- portantly, other texts, especially literary texts. "Every text, being itself the intertext of another text," writes Roland Barthes, "belongs to the intertextual, which must not be confused with a text's origins: the search for the 'sources of' and 'influence upon' a work is to satisfy the myth of filiation" (77). Source or an- alogue studies have long been a mainstay of literary scholarship, the most gran- diose example in English literature being perhaps John Livingston Lowe's 1927 study of Coleridge's sources, The Road to Xanadu. In semiotics, however, critics are not interested in pointing out for its own sake that, for example, the image of the alligator in a certain notebook entry by Coleridge was derived from Bartram's Travels. They are interested in cases where textual boundaries or frames are broken or made to overlap, and where textual information is resemanticized or nontextual information is "textualized."

Katherine Young points out that boundaries "are positional; they enclose, or in the case of narrative, open and close, an alternate realm of experience" (279). In cultural semiotics, everything that can be conceived or described is part of some "text" understood within the terms of cultural text already described. Thus Susan Stewart is correct in noting that "the concept of intertextuality can be employed without ascribing any intrinsic 'reality' to any of its dimensions" (48). Intertextuality is a confrontation between discourse from different frames, the confrontation effectively transforms the borders between the conflicting dis- cursive universes. Unlike traditional source study, the author's reading does not enter into the analysis in cultural semiotics since all that matters is "the transposition of one or more systems of signs into another, accompanied by a new ar- ticulation of the enunciative and denotative position" (Roudiez qtd. in Kristeva Desire 15). In other words, the focus is on readers, rather than authors, especially successive and definable specific groups or types of readers within a certain cultural context. Such profoundly hidden sources as those of Coleridge's poetry are not effectively intertextual since the transposition of a different sign system is not made for readers, even if there is a transposition of signs known to the author. The most common sort of intertextuality is allusion. Traditional source study deals with latent or passive allusions unknown to readers while cultural semiotics deals with textual allusions activated by different groups of readers. Cul- tural semioticians are interested in the way intertextual crossings may create an atmosphere or alter the way we read texts even where there is no specific allusion made (or where an allusion is assumed although in the original text the allusion could not have been made, as when Kafka's The Trial, written in 1910-11, is assumed by later readers to allude to the Gestapo). According to Kristeva's notion of intertextuality, the "dual orientation of the text" is first toward the language system of a certain society or group and then "toward the social process




in which, as discourse, it participates. The text is constantly becoming the ground upon which the epistemological, social, and political reworkings of an entire era are put into play" (Feral 273).

Almost all of the major systematizers of cultural semiotics, such as Peirce, Eco, and Barthes, foresaw the possibility of unlimited semiosis. The text, Barthes writes, is "completely woven with quotations, references, and echoes. These are cultural languages . . . past or present, that traverse the text from one end to the other in a vast stereophony" (77). And Lucien Dallenbach has related intertextuality to the device of mise-en-abyme, the placing into the abyss of an object, text, or author reflecting an endless series of reflections. Susan Stewart also notes that "[t]he ongoingness of tradition-of social process-makes a 'fi- nite' province of meaning impossible, for the boundaries of universes of discourse are constantly merging into one another and reemerging as transformed fields of meaning" (48). Intertextuality is seen as a sort of dialogue with the to- tality of previous or synchronic texts (Kristeva, Le Texte 67-69; La Revolution 59-60).

These notions have certain dangers for the interpreter, at least for the prac- tical critic or the teacher of literature, for there is a certain endlessness to the in- terplay of numerous sign systems changing through time, with different cultures' varying responses, all seen in juxtaposition. This may be overwhelming or, one hopes, it may make almost any text much richer for class and critic.

Novelistic utterances carry over into the fiction world the cultural assumptions (or confront cultural assumptions) that are extra-novelistic. According to Kristeva, this confrontation or assumption of attitudes reveals the ideologeme, i.e., the culture's unifying functional set of assumptions or ideologies. Thus "the functions defined according to the extra-novelistic textual set . . . take on value within the novelistic textual set" (Desire 37). Verbal art, argue Soviet semioticians, displays an "alternation of standardized units and elements that do not enter into the alphabet of the code."

On the one hand, documentary sequences are used in feature films, a device carried over into the artistic prose of Dos Passos, while concrete objects find a similar ap- plication in current painting and sculpture. On the other hand, writers like Joyce and Eliot use standardized citations, including those in different languages and chronologies, and a long cultural tradition in other forms of art offers analogous variations on standard themes. (Zaliznjak, et al. 52)

Similarly, Israeli semiotic polysystem theory takes as a given that any literary polysystem is non-isolatable in history and it is necessary to describe and analyze the inevitable interliterary contacts. Among Even-Zohar's principles of such contacts, we find that "a Source-Literature (the one whose norms are appropriated by the Target Literature) is selected by prestige and dominance" and that "when selecting an item to be appropriated, the target literature may filter out some of its components, and it does not necessarily keep its original function" (Tamir-Ghez 244).

Sources of a literary text, allusions, quotations, references, epigraph, and so on, result in a retextualizing, the creation of an essentially new text out of the old since the old text is resemanticized or changed in function through its place- ment in the new text, the text that surrounds it, and because of the difference in



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the reading community coming upon the text in a new context. Lotman and Piatigorsky note that the "function of a text is defined as its social role, its ca- pacity to serve certain demands of the community which creates the text. Thus, function is the mutual relationship among the system, its realization, and the ad- dressee of the text" (233).

The use of intertextuality, especially when we are examining intertextual contacts from different cultural texts, is extremely complicated. Levi-Strauss has written that "culture does not consist exclusively of forms of communication of its own, like language, but also (and perhaps mostly) of rules stating how the 'games of communication' should be played on both natural and cultural levels" (296). These rules for the games of communication change through time; the cultural semiotician may examine a culture by taking a synchronic cross-section or by examining one particular cultural feature diachronically, just as we use these terms in linguistics (Uspenskij 107). It is necessary to establish a meta-semiotic system, called "culture," that describes the semantic universe, axiologies, signi- fying practices, and ideologies of the specific social-semiotic community. This is such a large and complex project that "research is usually limited to those con- structions . . . which constitute the description of epistemes. In such cases epistemes are viewed either as hierarchies of semiotic systems or as connotative meta-semiotic systems" (Greimas and Courtes 66). From this understanding Lotman and Uspensky define culture as the "non-hereditary memory of the community, a memory expressing itself in a system of constraints and prescrip- tions" (213; see also Godzich 392). While it is complex enough to consider the epistemes of a given culture either diachronically or synchronically, the com- plexity is increased in literary works because although the fictional text partakes of the epistemes and "real-world" items that "may be 'there' in the outside world, in terms of reference to them in verbal utterance they constitute items of cultural repertory, the repertory of realia or, in short . . . realemes" (Even- Zohar "Constraints" 67). The more established realemes are, the more predict- able they become and the more devoid they are of real-world information, even while they are increasingly informative about the culture's epistemes (Even- Zohar 70). At the same time, among the realemes we have a gradually built up fictional world the characters and events of which support each other's reality. Eventually, the change in time and place make the fictional presentation of the realemes more "real" to us than the historical reality. Madame Bovary has greater reality for us than the alleged "real life source," Delphine Couturier, or, perhaps, any other woman in mid-nineteenth-century France. Leopold and Mol- ly Bloom have more "reality" than the couple that actually lived at 7 Eccles Street in 1904.

If we go beyond Kristeva's suggestions of intertextuality, we may find with almost any standard work of the "canon" elaborate intertextual enchainment that works diachronically and synchronically and includes realemes and fiction. For example, we may start with Shakespeare's Hamlet and go to his sources, perhaps Kyd, Belleforest, and Saxo Grammaticus; then we have Shakespeare's Hamlet as a play in successive periods and countries; Shakespeare the real person; Shakespeare as a biographical subject; Shakespeare's son Hamnet; Shake- speare as a character in Joyce's Ulysses; Shakespeare and Hamlet allusions and




the Hamlet-Hamnet theory of Stephen Dedalus; Hamlet allusions in Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," Millhauser's Edwin Mullhouse, and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49; Eliot's essay "Hamlet and His Problems"; readings of Hamlet by Freud, Ernest Jones, Jacques Lacan; Hamlet as basis of Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; Joyce as a real person; Joyce as a biographical subject; Joyce as character in Stoppard's Travesties and Flann O'Brien's The Dalkey Archive; Joyce's Ulysses as Source-Text for O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds; all of Joyce's works as sources for Raymond Queneau's We Always Treat Women Too Well; Freud as real person; Freud as biographical subject; Freud as character in D. M. Thomas' The White Hotel, Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Anthony Burgess' The End of the World News, and so on.

Each of these intertextual contacts resemanticizes the elements all along the chain, and the order in which an individual reader enchains the items carries the semantic burden. That is, if one first reads Freud, Ernest Jones, and Lacan on Hamlet and then reads the Hamlet-Hamnet theory of Stephen Dedalus in Ulys- ses, Stephen's "Oedipal conflict" will be made apparent, and then the tendency would be to carry this over to Joyce himself as a biographical subject or author of the Letters. If one first reads about Freud as a character in Thomas' The White Hotel, one would probably find Freud's and Jones' reading of Hamlet to be obviously wrong, as self-projections rather than accurate presentations of Shakespeare. If someone reads the Hamlet-based Courier's Tragedy in Pyn- chon's The Crying of Lot 49 and then reads Hamlet for the first time, Hamlet might seem a farce or poor melodrama rather than a tragedy, and then Rosen- crantz and Guildenstern Are Dead would seem to be rather in keeping with the expectations raised by the farcical Hamlet and not terribly original. (In The Courier's Tragedy Angelo, the "evil Duke of Squamuglia, has perhaps ten years before the play's opening murdered the good Duke of adjoining Faggio, by poi- soning the feet on an image of Saint Narcissus ... which feet the Duke was in the habit of kissing every Sunday at Mass." The kingdom has been usurped by the evil, illegitimate son Pasquale who plans to murder the hero and rightful heir to the throne, Niccolo, by tricking him into crawling into a cannon during a game of hide-and-seek [Pynchon 45]. David Cowart has found that The Courier's Tragedy is intertextually related to works by Webster, Kyd, Tourneur, and Ford, as well as other works by Shakespeare [102-03].)

In any intertextual chain, such as the Hamlet chain described above, and at each level in the chain, a textual distortion takes place, often actual changes, other times perceptual changes caused by the intertextual reference taken out of its original context and juxtaposed against the contemporary text. In Act 1, scene 1 of Hamlet, Horatio says of the Ghost:

So frown'd he once, when, in an angry parle, He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.

Stephen Dedalus says of Shakespeare, "Not for nothing was he a butcher's son wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting in his palm" (Joyce 187). Hamlet's "To be or not to be" is used intertextually by the two-year-old title character of Millhauser's Edwin Mullhouse who notes, "A bee a noppity: assa question!"



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This same two-year old, who has been listening to his English professor father read aloud, also declares that "It wuzza besta time, it wuzza wussa time, it wuzza age a whiz, it wuzza age a foo!" and "Wanna opril wishes sure as soda!" (Millhauser 47).

The intertextual Hamlet is both a literary artifact, like the work containing the reference, and a sign with shared and conventional cultural associations. The cultural semiotician can study the changes for this sign system from one genera- tion to another as it appears in different representations (not merely literary, but in pictures, styles of acting, films, as a metaphor for behavior, and so on). The distortion of the intertext is what is of greatest interest because it indicates gaps or borders of culture. It is a sign of cultural discontinuity, for example, that in Melville's 1852 novel Pierre there is parody of and intertextual reference to such then-popular novelists as Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth. Today only scholars of this period of American literature know any of Mrs. Southworth's novels, but in 1852 her book The Curse of Clifton was a bestseller (interestingly enough, one of Mrs. Southworth's many bestselling novels was entitled Ishmael [Hart 96-97]). Southworth's novels have lost their intertextual value since we do not see the reference and therefore do not resemanticize a previously read text. On the other hand, we still find intertextual value in the references to Hamlet and other works still in the canon, such as Dante's Inferno. All of Book IX of Pierre concerns the powerful effect exerted on Pierre by Dante and Hamlet, and the om- niscient narrator offers an interpretation of Hamlet that captures at least one mid-nineteenth-century understanding of that text:

If among the deeper significances of its pervading indefiniteness, which significances are widely hidden from all but the rarest adepts, the pregnant tragedy of Hamlet convey any one particular moral at all fitted to the ordinary uses of man, it is this:-that all meditation is worthless, unless it prompt to action; that it is not for man to stand shilly-shallying amid the conflicting invasions of surrounding im- pulses; that in the earliest instant of conviction, the roused man must strike, and, if possible, with the precision and the force of the lightning-bolt.

Examples such as this, in which literary works are read by characters in fictional works, might be called functional intertexts since these works change or explain the characters' beliefs and actions (again, Hamlet is used in this way by Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses). But this combines different semiotic systems and assimilates them, the systems of the Hamlet-world and the systems of the Pierre-world or Ulysses-world. Lotman and Uspensky's work of the 1970s focused in this area of "historic semiotic" studies of culture; these studies "consider such questions as the interrelation of different semiotic systems (different arts) in a given cultural period, the interrelation of literature and behavior pat- terns, [and] the interrelation of types of consciousness (codes) in a given historical period" (Shukman 202). Walter Rewar, among others, notes that Lotman's cultural text model is not complex or dynamic enough. According to Rewar, "Morphostasis and morphogenesis can provide models that are particularly rele- vant. Morphostasis answers to complex interactions between a text and its en- vironment that maintain and preserve a given organization. Morphogenesis is the more radical concept: it sets in motion processes that elaborate new forms"




("Cybernetics" 289). In the case of Melville, the widely-read and praised works, such as Typee, Omoo, and The Piazza Tales (including, surprisingly, "Bartleby the Scrivener") seem to have succeeded because they are morphostatic texts, microtexts not in semiotic cultural conflict with the socio-cultural macrotext. Works that failed to win the culture's approval, such as Mardi, Moby-Dick, and Pierre, are morphogenetic texts. The cultural consensus now places a higher regard on Moby-Dick than on Typee and Omoo because of a recent compatibility of sign systems of various sorts with the sign systems of Moby-Dick. As Lotman argues,

An important quality of cultural texts is their semantic mobility: the same text may give different information to its various 'users.' . . . [T]he entire hierarchy of codes which constitute this or that type of culture can be deciphered with the help of an identical structure of code, or of the structure of codes of another kind, intersecting only partially with the one used by the creators of the text, or else completely ex- traneous to it. Thus, the modern reader of a medieval religious text deciphers its semantic by using, obviously, codes different from those used by the creators of the text. Furthermore, he changes the type of text. ("Different Cultures" 1216)

Scholes' semiotics has little in common with the cultural semiotics of Lotman and Uspensky or the polysystem of Even-Zohar. To him, intertextual contact is a means of examining the cultural extratext. "The extratext," Shukman writes, "may be the literary tradition in which the author is writing (or against which he is reacting), his real historical situation, his ideology; it may also be the expectations, situation and foreknowledge of the reader" (196). Such a semiotic theory has connections with, or can draw from, receptions-aesthetics, Gadamerian hermeneutics, and other schools of criticism. Literary critics will privilege the literary text as a microtext within a specific cultural macrotext.

This approach has great implications for the classroom study of literature. Texts are immediately shown to be more profoundly integrated into their origi- nating society, and the study of the types of changes in reception of texts, of genres used and their place in a hierarchy, of cultural codes, and so on, demon- strates the importance of literary study. Cultural semiotics is necessarily broad and interdisciplinary, and it includes, but moves far beyond, simply formalist ap- proaches, that may seem trivial to students. The class is constantly led to extra- textual concerns and points of discussion through analysis of specific literary texts.

Recommended Reading There are two excellent recent anthologies in paperback; the Innis is more oriented towards philosophy and linguistics, while the Blonsky is extremely lively and interdisciplinary: Innis, Robert, ed. Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology. Bloomington: Indiana

UP, 1985.

Blonsky, Marshall, ed. On Signs. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1985.

Two older, traditional textbooks that touch on many aspects of this essay are:



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Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975. Especially chps. 7 & 9.

Hawkes, Terence. Structuralism and Semiotics. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977.

More advanced, but clear and persuasive, is: Elam, Keir. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Methuen, 1980.

A standard, but dense, explanation of the key terms and concepts of semiotics is: Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976.

A more approachable text by Eco is: Eco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts.

Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979.

Reader-response criticism is obviously close to the concerns of this essay; two convenient anthologies, with annotated bibliographies, are: Suleiman, Susan R., and Inge Crosman, eds. The Reader in the Text: Essays on

Audience and Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.

Tompkins, Jane P., ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post- Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.

Also useful is: Holub, Robert C. Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction. London: Methuen,

1984.

A major text specifically employing cultural semiotics is: Nakhimovsky, Alexander D., and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky, eds. The Semiot-

ics of Russian Cultural History. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.

On the topic of intertextuality, see the "Works Cited" to this essay and Ameri- can Journal of Semiotics, 3, 4(1985). Semiotica and Poetics Today have fre- quently published essays dealing with cultural semiotics and intertextuality.

Works Cited

Bailey, R. W., et al., eds. The Sign: Semiotics Around the World, rev. ed. Ann Arbor, MI: Slavic, 1980.

Barthes, Roland. "From Work to Text." Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ed. Josu6 V. Harari. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979. 73-81.

Bertalanffy, Ludwig von. "Cultures as Systems: Toward a Critique of Historical Reason." Phenomenology, Structuralism, Semiology. Ed. Harry R. Gar- vin. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1976. 151-61.

Cowart, David. Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion. Carbondale: Southern Il- linois UP, 1980.




Dallenbach, Lucien. "Intertexte et autotexte." Poetique 27 (1976): 282-96.

Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976.

Even-Zohar, Itamar. "Polysystem Theory." Poetics Today 1 (1979): 287-310. - . "Constraints of Realeme Insertability in Narrative." Poetics Today, 1

(1980): 65-74.

Feral, J. "Kristevian Semiotics: Towards a Semanalysis." Bailey 271-79.

Godzich, Wlad. "The Construction of Meaning." New Literary History 9 (1978): 389-97.

Greimas, A. J., and J. Courtes. Semiotics and Language: An Analytical Diction- ary. Trans. Larry Crist, et al. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1982.

Grossberg, Lawrence. "Experience, Signification, and Reality: The Boundaries of Cultural Semiotics." Semiotica 41 (1982): 73-106.

Hall, John. The Sociology of Language. London: Longman, 1979.

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