A case study of the novel Siddhartha from the perspective of intertextuality

Abstract

This article argues for intertextuality as a critical and analytic method for reading literary texts. To develop this argument first a critique on structuralism and deconstruction has been presented. Secondly, it has been pointed out that both these theories are not adequate because both of them take their departure from a linguistic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure which is not sufficient to understand the nature of text, author and the society in which they take place. It has been argued on the contrary that the idea of dialogicality proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin does seem helping us better to resolve the issues which cannot be tackled by both structuralism and deconstruction. The idea of dialogicality gives birth to intertextuality which, as a suggestion, should be adopted for literary and critical practices. In the end part of this article a case study of the novel Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, a German writer, has been presented to make the idea of intertextuality clear and forceful.