Intertextuality: Letter from a Birmingham Jail

Why are we learning this?

As the French say, the more it changes, the more it’s the same thing. In studying the letter you will reflect on the extent to which people permanently change their views about political and social issues, especially in the face of literally earth-shaking world events. Immediately after the terror murders in Paris in January 2015 at the office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and the kosher market Hypercacher, the historian Jeffrey Herf, wrote this in his blog:

“I remember well that in the few months following the 9/11 American intellectual world, especially that if liberals and left-leaning people, was in a state of welcome confusion. The familiar denunciations of American “imperialism” and the habits of sympathy for “national liberation movements” that had emerged in the protest against the war in Vietnam in the 1960s did not fit the realities of September 11, 2002…Sadly, the new thinking did not last long, or rather, it was supplanted by experts who told stories about a ”moderate” Muslim Brotherhood and about the need to avoid inflaming Muslims with public discussions of Islamism. Many decades of investment in the cultural capital of conventional habits of left and right were proving too powerful to overcome.”

The idea that when we read a work of literature we are seeking to find a meaning which lies inside the work seems completely common-sense. Literary texts possess meaning; readers extract that meaning from them. We call the process of extracting meaning from texts reading or interpretation. Despite their apparent obviousness, such ideas have been radically challenged in contemporary literary and cultural theory. Works of literature, after all, are built from systems, codes and traditions established by previous works of literature. The systems, codes and traditions of other art forms and of culture in general are also crucial to the meaning of a work of literature. Texts, whether they be literary or non-literary, are viewed by modern theorists as lacking in any kind of independent meaning. They are what theorists now call intertextual. The act of reading, theorists claim, plunges us into a network of textual relations. To interpret a text, to discover its meaning, or meanings, is to trace those relations. Reading thus becomes a process of reading between texts. Meaning becomes something which exists between a text and all the other texts to which it refers and relates, moving out from the independent text into a network of textual relations. The text becomes the intertext.