Gérard Genette: Transtextual Relations

Intertextuality is one of the most commonly used and misused terms in contemporary literary research. Although it is in the late 1960s that Julia Kristeva coined the word"intertextuality", this new term even could find its possible origin back to Socratic dialogues. Like a red line, the term intertextuality links so many shining and brilliant names such as Ferdinand de Saussure, M.M.Bakhtin, Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Michael Riffaterre, Harold Bloom and others. Each of them gives a unique and innovative understanding of this word from his/her own stand.Compared with other theorists, it seems that French structuralist Gérard Genette is not so avant-guard and radical, while he demonstrates a rather detail and practical interpretation of intertextualily from a structuralistic perspective, which in fact indicates a new direction of this paradoxical term.In his three related works: The Architext (1992), Palimpsests (1997), and Paratexts (1997), Genette uses a new term transtextuality instead of commonly used term intertextuality to emphasize the difference in his own interpretation from the viewpoint of structuralistic poetics. He further divides this term into 5 sub-terms, i.e, paratextuality (relates to all the elements which stand on the"threshold"of a text), metatextuality (unites a given text to another of which it speaks without necessarily citing it, sometimes even without naming it), architextuality (the entire set of general or transcendent categories from which emerges each singular text), intertextuality (no longer concerned with the semiotic process of cultural and textual signification, while reduced to issues of quotation, plagiarism and allusion), hypertextuality (unites a text B/the hypertext to an earlier text A/the hypotext).Since intertextuality is a keyword in literary and cultural studies, while in China the introduction of intertextuality is mainly put on books of theorists like Julia Kristeva, M.M.Bakhtin and Roland Barthes, other important theorists'interpretations have not got enough attention in the literary research field. In order to help Chinese readers understand Gérard Genette's transtextuality easily, this thesis has given lots of interesting examples from both western and Chinese literary classics. It is believed that it will help Chinese literary researchers get a better understanding and knowledge of the term intertextuality.