<\/p>
Perhaps we should not call it \u201cintertextuality,\u201d but something like intertextuality is necessary to textual meaning, even at the most basic levels. You cannot read a single sentence without bringing some knowledge of the language to bear on the text. The reader must have information from outside the text if he is going to understand anything. A text (or, better, a text\u2019s author) can mean only as a piece of discourse in a world of discourses. <\/p>\n
Move a notch from literal meaning, and the point becomes even more dramatically obvious. Understanding a simile like \u201cthe wicked are like chaff\u201d requires not only competence in English but something more. A reader must not only know the literal meaning of \u201cchaff,\u201d but must also know that chaff is light, chaff is waste, chaff is easily blown by the wind, chaff is useless, chaff is . . . . None of this is directly given in the text \u2013 and yet it is essential to the text. <\/p>\n
Another example: \u201cHe\u2019s another Churchill\u201d requires not only competence in English language, but some knowledge of modern English history. Again, information that the text does not provide is absolutely necessary for making sense of the text. <\/p>\n
All this to say that textual boundaries, however physically fixed by margins, white spaces, and book covers, are hermeneutically porous. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Perhaps we should not call it \u201cintertextuality,\u201d but something like intertextuality is necessary to textual meaning, even at the most basic levels. You cannot read a single sentence without bringing some knowledge of the language to bear on the text. The reader must have information from outside the text if he is going to understand […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hermeneutics"],"yoast_head":"\n