What Is Intertextuality

A working definition

Intertextuality is the idea that no text stands entirely alone. Every text you read is shaped by, responds to, and borrows from other texts. When a writer picks up a pen (or opens a laptop), they carry with them a lifetime of reading, listening, and watching. Those earlier texts leave fingerprints on the new one. Readers, too, bring their own libraries of prior texts, so meaning is produced in the space between texts rather than sealed inside any single one.

The term was coined by the theorist Julia Kristeva in the late 1960s, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's idea that language is always "dialogic" — every utterance answers utterances that came before and anticipates replies to come. For the IB Language and Literature course, you do not need to master the theory in depth,