Intertextuality Today

The cultural environment of is so much more conclusively a new media environment, that a reassessment of the role of intertextuality is clearly required. Intertextuality as a theory and an interpretive practice has played a significant role in the development of adaptation studies as a new academic discipline. Intertextuality, it would seem, is an obvious core theoretical framework and yet, in its poststructuralist forms, a major threat to the establishment of a viable discipline of adaptation studies. Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens are no longer simply the objects of study in the contemporary academic classroom, their cultural value and changing ideological significance can also more easily and rewardingly be studied through analysis of their frequent transmedia adaptations. There is no doubt that the emergence of adaptation as a major field of critical and theoretical debate is partly a consequence of a technological age in which the majority of people in the West, at least, live within a multi-media environment.