Popular Culture Review 30.2
Analyzing the meaning of allusion in PMLA 35 years after Kristeva wrote these words , Gregory Machecek returns to her work , defining intertextuality as a discursive phenomenon akin to Kristeva ’ s transpositionality , where the condition for interaction among contemporaneous textual and cultural relations exists . In contrast , allusion is either a “ learned or indirect reference ” or a “ phraseological adaptation ”; in other words , allusion evokes a “ roundabout reference ” to an earlier text / fact or incorporates “ a short phrase reminiscent of a phrase in an earlier work of literature ” ( 526 ). Allusion connotes diachronic connection ; intertextuality connotes synchronic relationships�Kristeva ’ s “ transposition ,” the re-positioning of sign systems but without the sense of intertextuality as simple source-searching . Kristeva notes that the novel genre is an example of transposition ( 59 ).
As for transposition , the aforementioned Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is a tour de force in high postmodern fashion ; at the end , the photographic images of the rising man bring to a peak the many typographic , textual , and visual devices that flaunt the redistribution of sign systems in this ( for want of a better term ) “ novel .” Vonnegut played similar transpositional games�drawing childlike pictures , blending genres , deforming linear time�in novels such as Breakfast of Champions and Slaughterhouse-Five . Turning to The Namesake , transpositional elements of rock music ( by the Beatles and bands ) do not attain that same level of spectacular transposition . This novel neither “ sounds ” like a rock song / album / compact disc nor is structured like one�a rock sound and / or structure impossible to standardize anyway . It does , however , reveal traces of transposition insofar as at two critical moments the music of the Beatles is “ heard ” beneath the surface of reference , where both allusion and its near companion intertextuality thrive .
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