Compound intertextuality: A Joycean device

Since its poststructuralist beginnings, the scholarly inquiry into literary intertextuality has been characterized by methodological confusion. In spite of this, a reading of Joyces Ulysses attests to the urgency of analysing and interpreting intertextual relationships. For this reason, a redefinition of the concepts and terminology of the intertextual, intertextuality and intertext is proposed in the first part of the article and applied to two examples of the annexation of the Moses saga to the text of Ulysses in the second part. In contrast to the postmodernist conception of parody, which foregrounds the critical and affirmative aspects of intertextuality, Joyces method of compound intertextuality or dual parody practices a strategy of negation, which strives towards a radical criticism of ideology. Placing intertexts within intertexts, making them nomadic and ascribing to them semantic polyvalency, Joyce deliberately dismantles conceptualized structures of meaning. Compound intertextuality castrates the intertexts, cutting off their religious, national or political identity.