Building on the Woolfian Text: Intertextuality, Instrument or Philosophy?

Abstract

For a quite extended period of time now, the theoretical pool targeting literature and the forces involved in the emergence of texts have been characterized by an excessive and obsessive use of theories revolving mainly around notions which inevitably bring under the scope issues of postmodernism and intertextuality. This phenomenon represents a natural response in the globalized and technologized world of the present day, where the socio-political discourses are articulated in a constant process of cultural recycling. Therefore, most studies operate under the assertion that postmodernism, understood as being governed by a philosophy of repetition, symbolizes a context in which intertextuality, the instrument, is at work; however, the very metaphysics of repetition enables, within theoretical frames, a certain synonymy between the two notions. Reflecting on these ideas, when meaningful texts (illustrated in this particular case by the Woolfian text) enter the process of repetition, the question pops: is intertextuality an instrument, or a philosophy, or both? Consequently, the present paper is oriented towards providing possible answers for the question formulated.