I’m teaching a new course this term on what’s commonly known as intertextuality—the web of relations among texts (books, poems, stories, essays, what have you) and the ways in which they comment on, parody, undermine, and otherwise mess with each other. We began with a few theorists, among them the French structuralist Gérard Genette, whose book Palimpsests attempts to name and distinguish various ways of thinking about intertextuality.
By way of illustration, Genette proposes Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid on the one hand, and Homer’s Odyssey and Joyce’s Ulysses on the other. In Genette’s phraseology, both the Aeneid and Ulysses are hypertexts, but their relationships to the hypotext (the Odyssey) differ substantially. To bring the comparison down to size, he suggests an old French saying, “Le temps est un grand maître,” or “Time is a great master.”…