Intertext as an imaginary in literary critics: on the prospects of studying intertextuality

This article is an attempt to outline a new aspect of studying intertextuality as applied to literary criticism. Literary critical reflection, including the discovery of intertextual connections, is considered as a social action. As a theoretical basis, the concept of social action by M. Weber is used (the production of intertext by the reader critic can be defined as a social action, because it is correlated with the ideology of the group from which the critic represents, and its current tasks, group identity), as well as M. Bakhtin’s idea of “participatory” thinking with “shared” responsibility (the act of literary critical interpretation and evaluation is considered as an action conditioned by a certain value position, with many addressees and significant others, intentions and expected reactions). An analysis of critical articles from the point of view of the presence of intertextual connections presented to the reader by the critic in one way or another allowed us to identify several types of production of “imaginary” intertexts: intertext “registration” (the critic’s goal is to use intertextual connections to fit the author / work into “own” or “alien’s” context, to prove ideological and aesthetic kinship with “his own”), “amputated” intertext (the goal is to neutralize the obvious reference and possible influence of the secondary, - “donor”, - text), intertext as an “alibi” (the goal is to use intertextual connections to “capture” the “alien’s” author / work, to redesignate it in “own” value coordinates). Literary criticism demonstrates that the introduced imaginary intertext is capable of both adding meanings and distorting them, but the main thing is to advance this text and meaning to the reader in the right / correct form.