Intertextuality and National Literatures in the Context of Comparative Literature Research
Intertextuality and National Literatures in the Context of Comparative Literature Research

Summary/Abstract: 20th-century literary theory discovered another possible way for world literature to exist and include all national literatures and cultures: the concepts of ‘intertextuality’ and / or ‘multimediality’ mean that contacts between cultural texts work as a network and this network includes national literatures, i.e. intertextuality and / or multimediality creates world literature. All European cultures have common sources from Ancient Greece and Rome and the Bible, which means that translations have played a very important role in European culture. Authors who use other literary works also interpret them and this gives new meaning to their works. The term ‘dialogue’, in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense, plays a crucial role in the intertextual process. If we speak of influences, dialogue is not the crucial phenomenon on the contrary; influence is a more hierarchical phenomenon. It seems that intertextuality, especially postmodern intertextuality, avoids hierarchical communication, instead working with the dialogical relationship between the author, text and reader. Intertextuality and/ or multimediality have a great potential to connect different texts and literatures in the world. The dialogical relationships between different texts and authors are significant because the postmodernist era destroyed hierarchies, or at least tried to destroy them. This means that all literatures, including small languages and literatures, have the possibility of being world literature, offering the opportunity for comparative literary research. The paper analyzes several poets and poems from different small countries. The Irish poet W.B. Yeats was an innovator in Irish poetry and drama.

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