Sign Systems Studies

Volume 30, Issue 2, 2002

Mikhail Gasparov
Pages 645-651

Intertextual analysis today

Mikhail L. Gasparov. Intertextual analysis today. The paper provides a discussion about recent results and perspectives of intertextual analysis — the method that has been a contemporary with Tartu-Moscow school. The connections between the classical philological methods and intertextual analysis are described, together with specifying the concept of intertext and emphasizing the need for the correctness of a researcher, because such an analysis always carries a danger of overinterpretation. Several examples are used to illustrate how the imagination of a researcher can create arbitrary allusions that are not based on the original text and are usually misleading. As a result, the text under study will not become more clear, vice versa, it turns to be less understandable.