Intertextuality: The Waste Land-Eliot, Cope

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‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone’ (T. S. Eliot). Analyse and account for the use of intertextuality in at least two poems. ‘The Waste Land’ by T. S. Eliot vs ‘Waste Land Limericks’ by Wendy Cope The concept identified by Julia Kristeva in 1966 has received since, much broader meanings and applications. Today intertextuality is a versatile concept; it is used in linguistics, literary theory, all kinds of art, and even in science. It has not only revolutionised the literary world, but also came to define our modern society and culture. Intertextuality is a necessity of the modern world, a world that has behind such a rich and vast history, a world where it is not easy, if not impossible, to come up with something completely new and original, something that has not been seen, heard, written about or explored before. Nowadays it seems that the only way left for the artist, is to work with the past, build on it, reinvent it, create originality in mosaics that draw bits and threads from the most unexpected places of the past inheritance. ‘any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double’ Language cannot help but use words that could potentially call to their other previous uses, just like a text cannot help but utilise, more than less intentional, elements of other texts. Texts, whether literary or non-literary, lack any kind of independent meaning, they are intertextual. Whenever we read and try to grasp the meanings of a text, we find ourselves plunging into a web of textual relations. The searching for interpretations finds us moving between texts, as the meanings are situated somewhere in the middle. A text is never independent and unique in meaning, it
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