Since Kristeva invented the term in the late 1960s, intertextuality has become a dominant concern in Latin literature, despite the fact that Latinists often use the term in a narrow sense. A brief history of intertextuality enables this chapter to model different understandings of intertextuality across different genres and periods. Consideration begins with a passage of Virgil long recognised as a calque of Homer, and moves to other maximal cases of intertextuality in Plautus and Terence. Awareness of the dynamics and ideological power of intertextuality enables fuller consideration of the metaphors with which such passages as these comment on their situation in wider networks of text. The importance of historical context is discussed through several phenomena prevalent in late antiquity, namely cento poetry, compilation and typological interpretation. Developments across these periods in the technology of text focus attention on the cognitive and material dimensions of memory. The chapter closes by putting intertextual memory in Latin literature into dialogue with emerging methods of reading enabled by digital corpora, search algorithms, hypertext and linked data.

This chapter examines Roberto Bolaño’s relation to the Tel Quel group in Paris by offering a close reading of his short story “Labyrynth.” Though few Latin Americans participated in Tel Quel, Bolaño was fascinated by the group’s ability to create an influential literary movement. The chapter provides an overview of Tel Quel’s lack of interest in Latin American writers and explores Bolaño’s commentary on each of the members, including Philippe Sollers and Julia Kristeva. The chapter also discusses Bolaño’s fascination with other literary groups around the world, including Octavio Paz’s circle in Mexico City, which appears in a key scene in The Savage Detectives.

Much of the difficulty encountered by Mahler’s compositions during his lifetime can be attributed to their referential qualities: references, allusions, quotations, or borrowings from the widest varieties of music, from popular (“lowbrow”) military marches or ländlers to cultivated (“highbrow”) compositions such as Brahms’s, Tchaikovsky’s, or Wagner’s. That this propensity embodied modernist impulses has become increasingly clear in the intervening century, as the problematized nature of originality across the various arts ca. 1900 has received critical attention. A closer look at the history and evolving meaning of the term “intertextuality” here advances that process, by highlighting the differences between older formalist interpretive traditions and “translinguistic” practices, which recognize that (in the words of Julia Kristeva) “any text constitutes itself as a mosaic of quotations, any text is an absorption and transformation of another text.” Paradoxically, tactics for discovering new and relevant intertexts illuminate constructions of meaning that are unique to Mahler’s works.

This chapter begins by describing some of the main lines of influence on Coetzee, including major literary figures, philosophical and theological traditions, and a range of South African writers and thinkers. It distinguishes the psychoanalytic and philosophical registers in which the concept of intertextuality has been discussed by such figures as Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, as well as (more implicitly) by writers including Fyodor Dostoevsky and Samuel Beckett. Most broadly, it develops an argument that Coetzee was not simply influenced by this way of thinking about the nature and value of literature. Instead, his fiction can be understood as a complex engagement with both the imaginative power and the moral problems that it generates.

In chapter IV, on the future of humanity, I address questions prompted by the humanity of Jesus as part of post-Shoah discourse, such as Emil Fackenheim’s question whether Jesus could have been a “Muselman”, the notion of natality in conversation with Hannah Arendt and Julia Kristeva and the memory of Jesus’ circumcision.