Modernism in literature involves intertextuality

The argument

Modernist texts recognized more explicitly than those which preceded them that literature doesn’t exist within a vacuum. This might seem odd for a movement that rejected past ideals- even past movements in literature, like Romanticism, so blatantly. But Modernism was about reinvention as much as revolution. TS Eliot’s The Waste Land could be considered a case study of intertextuality in Modernism because of its sheer quantity of allusions. Stylistically, this gives the poem a frenetic quality, but it also helps root some of its imagery. Take his biblical allusions, particularly evident in the descriptions of arid desert, which shows his view of a world bereft of religion. But there’s an even greater emphasis on legendary writers such as Dante, Shakespeare, and Baudelaire. Eliot uses his references to create a coded language: in order to understand the present, he wants readers to unravel the past. It also embodies what he describes in his essay Tradition and Individual Talents as the ‘simultaneous existence’ and ‘simultaneous order’ of all texts. For a famous example of long-form intertextuality, see James Joyce’s Ulysses. It takes its name and structure from Greek myth and Homer’s The Odyssey while also referencing The Iliad, as well as Shakespeare’s Hamlet and many others. But the novel is a culmination of many literary different styles, often depicted with an ironic gaze and using parody and pastiche.French philosopher Roland Barthes suggests the meaning of the text doesn’t come from the text itself but from the reader’s understanding of it in relation to other texts, and this is no more evident than in Ulysses, which includes some infamously difficult passages that are hard to decode without knowledge of broad literary, historical and social influences. It’s ironic, given that the technique has contributed to the timelessness of works.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Intertextuality is not formal experimentation, and the argument never closes that gap. Allusion is a matter of reference and content: a poem thick with quotation can be entirely conventional in metre and syntax, and a formally radical text may allude to nothing at all. Since the position concerns experimentation with form, the argument would need to show that these borrowings altered the shape of the works — a case that can be made for Ulysses, whose stylistic parodies and pastiche are genuinely formal, but the body argues instead through what the allusions mean, using Eliot's biblical imagery to describe a world bereft of religion. Allusion is also not distinctive of Modernism. Dense reference to classical, biblical and vernacular sources is constitutive of Renaissance and Augustan writing — Milton, Dryden and Pope are built from it — so the criterion as stated cannot separate Modernism from what preceded it. What is arguably new is the unmarked, fragmentary and unattributed handling of sources, which is a formal claim the argument does not make. The material it invokes finally supports rival positions in this debate: Eliot's "simultaneous existence" of all texts is a claim about the continuing presence of the past, which belongs to the revaluation-of-the-past position, and Barthes's account of meaning residing with the reader is later theory rather than a description of Modernist technique — and one that tells for the relativism position instead.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That Modernist texts acknowledged their debts more explicitly is a claim about reference and content rather than form: dense allusion is compatible with wholly conventional structure, and formally radical writing may allude to nothing. [Rejecting P2] Allusion is not distinctive of the movement — Milton, Dryden and Pope are built from classical and biblical reference — and the examples cited support rival positions, since Eliot's "simultaneous order" concerns the past's continuing presence and Barthes's reader-centred account is later theory rather than Modernist technique.