conclusions ... Gendercannot be understood – what? ... trodden on? ... no, "made to mean" ....

Okay, gender cannot be "made to mean" anything definite, just as intertextualities cannot be traced in some accuracy that will never warp, bend, be endlessly rewritten, be dreamed again ...

No conglomeration of intertextualities can even be mapped for long, as they are always in states of process, flux and motion. Can you visit the same place twice anyway, no matter how accurate the directory you are using to get there? Everything is shifting. The light will be different ... the weather. You will have new thoughts, emotions, hormones, viruses ... Video or computer graphics might represent/metaphorise these (inter)textual processes far more effectively than the comparatively limited medium of black or coloured words on paper. Undoubtedly multi-media electronic journal articles will greatly facilitate discussions about intertextuality, especially explorations of readerly intertextual productions that result from reading/viewing intertextually and inter-imagically across textual media.

Accompanying every debate about intertextualities, however, even those produced in multi-media formats, there will always be a vast repository of other intertextualities over which assemblers of physical (inter)texts have no control: the unknown myriad virtual-intertextual-collages stored within every reader/viewer. Every reader's various notions of identity (and the ways in which those entities are evolving alongside the 'new technology (inter)textual revolution') will inevitably affect the assemblage of her/his intertextual realities.

And as it is said of the child in 'Imaginative Reading V', so it might be said of every reader ...

 

 
 

Diane Caney, 2000
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