What is Transtextuality? Understanding the Meaning of the Words We Read

Author: Lesley Lanir

How do you read texts? Are you sure your interpretation and understanding of what you are reading is only coming from the text in front of you or is some of the meaning being transferred from elsewhere? The idea of transtextuality suggests that it is.

French literary critique Gerard Genette (1930) took the idea of Bakhtin and Kristeva’s concept of intertextuality — that texts are not the original product of one author — one step further. Genette’s work Palimpsests proposes and defines ‘transtextuality’ as a more comprehensive term that determines “all that which puts one text in relation, whether manifest or secret, with other texts.” In other words, Genette’s theory of transtextuality describes the numerous ways a later text prompts readers to read or remember an earlier one. He puts forward five types of transtextual relations.

Intertextuality

Genette takes the original idea of intertextuality and reduces it to the “co-presence of two or more texts” in the form of quotation, plagiarism, and allusion; providing a more practical relationship between specific linguistic and literary elements of individual texts.

Paratextuality

Paratextuality refers to all other messages and commentaries which surround the text, and can affect the interpretation of a text. The paratext has a more pragmatic role; it guides the readers to…