Roland Barthos

When discussing intertextuality, it could be argued that a text is not only written material such as plays, novel and magazines, but everything; that there is in fact no world outside of textuality. Your very life could be called a text, a story always being written, and every novel that you read, every programme you watch and every conversation that you have is, in Piaget's words, accomodated and assimilated into text of your life. Every novel, however, is not a single paragraph in your life, "I read so-and-so, and it taught me that..."

No, when reading a work certain phrases, word choice and literary devices cause your brain to form connections to other material in your personal text, things that might not even seem relevant. The...