Researchers into physiology, cybernetics, epistemology, linguistics and semiology over the past thirty years concur in positing at the basis of the development of creative thought – in the arts and even the sciences – mechanisms that are dialogic in nature. The concept of dialogue which they use, of course, is above all a meta-phorical one. In the case of the literary work in particular, each text is seen as originating from a type of dialogue instituted between the poet and his predecessors, the novelist and the characters he wants to represent or, more generally, between the language of the writer and the language of the world in which he lives.

From this perspective, intertextuality, that is to say the close formal interdependence between a text and one or more of its antecedents (‘relation de coprésence entre deuxou plusieurs textes’, as Gérard Genette has succinctly defined it), can indeed be seen as a fundamental nodal point of expression through which any literary ‘dialogue’ takes shape or, indeed, even as its principal vehicle. It is to a formidable scholar, Mikhail M. Bakhtin, that we owe the formulation and first use of the concept of intertextuality – according to which every text is constructed like an actual mosaic of the ‘words of others’, of more or less direct and explicit citations – together with the injunction to view dialogism as characterising many literary forms: that of the novel, in the first instance.

I have spoken of intertextuality as vehicle of the dialogue, and this is without doubt Bakhtin's position.