Intertextuality in Robert Kroetschs Seed Catalogue Essay -- Kroetsch

Intertextuality in Robert Kroetsch's Seed Catalogue The late poet John Donne said, "No man is an island." Donne passed away in the earliest part of the seventeenth century, and yet he recognized an idea upon which much of modern philosophy and literary criticism is built. Donne said, in effect, that any individual man is nothing outside the body of mankind; Donne thereby supports a theory of cultural subjectivism. In the field of literary criticism, particularly modern and postmodern criticism, the term intertextuality refers to the phenomenon of interconnectedness that exists specifically within literature. Just as Donne believes man to be nothing outside the context of his culture, so too does modern literary criticism support the idea that a text is nothing outside of the whole body of a culture's literature. In this way, it is fair to say that no text is an island. As in any discussion of theoretical topics, it is vitally important for those involved in a discussion of intertextuality to fully understand the definition of the word before any meaningful discussion of the term or its application can occur. According to M. H. Abrams: The term intertextuality, popularized by Julie Kristeva, is used to signify the multiple ways in which one literary text is made up of other texts, by means of its open or covert citations and allusions, its repetitions and transformations of the formal and substantive features of earlier texts, or simply its unavoidable participation in the common stock of linguistic and literary conventions and procedures that are "always already" in place and constitute the discourses into which we are born. In Kristeva's formulation, accordingly, any text is in fact an "intertext"-the site of... ... virtue of their unique relationship. The metaphor of seeds may not be limited to what constitutes the seeds of a prairie town or the seeds of a poet but rather to what constitutes the seeds of a poem. Just as plants grow to maturity and create the seeds for a new generation of plants, the texts of one's life become the beginning of new texts to be created. The seeds catalogued within Seed Catalogue are texts. Works Cited Abrams, M. H. "Text and Writing (Écriture)." A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7th ed. Boston: Heinle & Heinle, 1999. Garret-Petts, W. F. "Novelist as Radical Pedagogue." College English 54.5 (1992): 554-572. Herk, Aretha van. "Robert Kroetsch Biocritical Essay." The Robert Kroetsch Papers: first accession. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1986. Kroetsch, Robert. Seed Catalogue. Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 2001.