Intertextuality and its Function in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s “Gravel Heart”: Exploring Literary Influences and Dialogues

Rather than being original creators, authors play a crucial role in the creation process by compiling from existing texts. This understanding shifts the perspective on text, which is not a unilinear entity but a heterogeneous combination. It is both literary and social, as well as creative and cultural. Mikhail Bakhtin identifies the earliest forms of novel, heteroglossia and dialogism in a Socratic dialogue. This concept, which Julia Kristeva later terms intertextuality, describes the continual exchange and relationship-building between texts. Intertextuality, the communication between “several writers and a reader” within one literary text based on several texts, is a significant study area in contemporary literary studies.
This research is unique in its approach, as it intends to analyze Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel “Gravel Heart” in comparison to William Shakespeare’s drama “Measure for Measure”. The research methodology will compare the work in three aspects: personages, composition, and time and space correlation, including the nature of precedent and recipient text relationships. By incorporating literary elements, this investigation seeks to underscore the profound impact of Intertextuality on the construction of narrative meaning in “Gravel Heart” by A.Gurnah, thereby highlighting the importance of this research.
It will help to decode the essential perspective peculiarities of A.Gurnah’s novel by applying intertextual, comparative, and historical-cultural methods. Highlighting the research limitations is essential in identifying areas that require further attention, and we believe it will guide readers with the necessary instructions for future research. The outcomes of this investigation demonstrate that the phenomenon of intertextuality involves not only borrowing from others but also recreating innovative ideas based on prior literary traditions through novel techniques in A.Gurnah’s works.