Barth, John. "Do I Repeat Myself? The Problem of the 'Already-Said.'" THE ATLANTIC (August 2011).

Full disclosure: my remarks on this subject have quite possibly been made by me before, in other contexts. When the eminent Italian critic and novelist Umberto Eco visited Johns Hopkins some decades ago, he spoke of the problem, for contemporary writers, of the “already said”: the circumstance that because Homer, for example, spoke so memorably in The Odyssey of the “wine-dark sea” and of “rosy-fingered Dawn,” nearly 3,000 years’ worth of poets and storytellers have had to find other images for sea and sunrise—a task that must become increasingly difficult as the repertory of possibilities is exhausted.

Indeed, Homer may have had an easier time than we comparative latecomers to literature have, but we need to remember that literature didn’t begin with Homer—not even written literature, not to mention the millennia-old oral tradition that preceded writing. Once upon a time, perusing a book about the Egyptian Middle Kingdom, I noted that some twelve centuries before Homer, in about 2000 B.C.E., the scribe Khakheperresenb was already voicing what I like to call Khakheperresenb’s Complaint: “Would I had phrases that are not known,” the scribe laments, “in new language that has not been used not an utterance which has grown stale, which men of old have spoken.” I used to comfort my students (and myself) with the reflection that for all we know, two or three millennia of sea and sunrise metaphors might be like the first few million stars in our galaxy—a mere drop in the bucket!—while at the same time acknowledging that Khakheperresenb’s feeling of having arrived late to the party is not to be dismissed. That feeling prompted my 1967 essay, “The Literature of Exhaustion” (more accurately, the literature of “felt exhausted possibility”): a feeling that, whether or not it turns out to be mistaken, may nevertheless be a considerable cultural datum—and perhaps even the subject of new work. We often attribute to the Romantics that impulse to “make it new,” in Ezra Pound’s famous formulation—a culture’s felt need to follow Impressionism with Post-Impressionism, Modernism with Post-Modernism—but that impulse much antedates them. In The Aeneid, for example, Virgil famously reorchestrates Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey in order to demonstrate the Romans’ worthiness to succeed the Greeks; then Dante, thirteen centuries later, resurrects Virgil to guide him through the first two-thirds of The Divine Comedy, his odyssey through the hereafter (and by so doing, to validate its author as Virgil’s worthy successor). Dark Ages are followed by Medieval, Medieval by Renaissance, Renaissance by Reformation, Baroque, Enlightenment, etc.: the costumes change, but the show goes on. . . .

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/08/do-i-repeat-myself/8572/

Griffiths, Eric. "Dante, Primo Levi and the Intertextualists." TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT May 7, 2008.

If you can make your way past the living statues and knots of wannabe writers supposing themselves to be Joyce and Hemingway deep in conversation outside Les Deux Magots, you come, next door but one, to 4 place Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where enlightenment or something like it really did strike twice. It was there on March 22, 1895, that the Lumière brothers unveiled a prototype of their Cinématographe before a select audience of technical experts and entrepreneurs. In Salle C of the same imposing edifice, a biggish room with rows of tables at which the eager sat in groups of five or so facing Professor Barthes, Julia Kristeva, concerned with “the validity of scientific method in the domain of the ‘human’ sciences”, disclosed in 1966 the term 'intertextualité.' Neither Kristeva nor the Lumières foresaw how their devices would catch on. The brothers dismissed their invention as “without any future” and turned their minds to dressings designed to heal burns. Less than a decade after her presentation, Kristeva was complaining that intertextuality had been “frequently understood in the banal sense of ‘source-criticism’ of a particular text” (La révolution du langage poétique, 1974), which was not what she had meant at all. She introduced the term while sketching out Bakhtin’s account of the irreducibly dialogical nature of utterance, quoting from his Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics: “if semantic and logical relations are to become dialogical they have to be embodied . . . they must enter another sphere of existence: they become discourse . . . and acquire an author, that’s to say some one whose utterance they are”. She glossed this “dialogical” quality as designating “language taken up in practice by an individual”. Bakhtin thought any linguistics which concentrates on language as a supra-individual system (Saussure’s langue) and on signs considered as decontextualized items inevitably neglected this quality, because dialogism arises, and contributes to how we make sense, only in a concrete, historical world containing specific agents (the realm of Saussure’s parole). For example, a Bakhtinian might say, nothing formulable as langue in the two sentences “I got some anti-depressants from the doctor this morning” and “Mary’s coming to stay for a fortnight”, nor in their formal conjunction, would justify understanding an implicit “because” between them. However, when uttered in rapid succession by an individual whom the interlocutor knows to be disposed to gloom in Mary’s presence, the “because” clearly transpires. To miss it might actually be to miss the utterance’s drift. . . .
Read the rest here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article3886607.ece.