Pictures Worth a Thousand Words: Metaphorical Images of Textual Interdependence

Abstract

The forty-year history of the notion of intertextuality has witnessed the proliferation of an increasing number of divergent and even contradictory approaches to the unavoidably connective nature of texts. Many of such approaches, however, display a common tendency to portray textual interdependence in visual terms, resorting to metaphorical images in their conceptualisation of the intertextual phenomenon. This article aims at studying some of the most significant of those „metaphorical images‟, or „pictures‟ that, standing for theories of textual relationality, are in themselves „worth a thousand words‟. In the course of the study, special attention will be paid to two sets of images that relate to major trends in contemporary Anglo-American criticism: tropes of artistic creativity, and figures of presence-in-absence.