Bakhtin, in “Discourse in the Novel,” calls attention to two fundamental characteristics of any discourse. First, that no act of enunciation is autonomous, that it has meaning only because it is uttered in the context of other utterances. Secondly, that the relations between utterances in any act of communication are dynamic, that meaning arises out of a dialogical interaction between one's word and the words of others. Although Bakhtin chose to set down his observations in a terminology which suggests that he is speaking of oral communication, he was in fact referring to the written word and, more specifically, to the way a text participates in the discursive space of a given culture. The figure of the oral dialogue is an especially apt manner in which to represent this phenomenon of discourse, where the text takes shape in reaction to other texts and in anticipation of how future texts may respond to it.

Kristeva, who introduced Bakhtin's ideas to Western readers, adapted this broad notion of the dialogical interrelationships between a text and the discursive space in which it is inscribed into a specific theory of intertextuality. She proposed that a text's dialogue with other texts was in principle identifiable, that the discoursive space that made it intelligible was to a great extent analyzable. Furthermore, Kristeva argued that an intertextual analysis provided both insight into how a given text is molded by its con-texts, and how it assimilates them in order to transgress or transform them.