Kristeva, Julia is generally credited with the invention of the term, but the concept can also be found in the work of Barthes, Roland and Jakobson, Roman. Derived from a synthesis of Bakhtin, Mikhailâs concept of dialogism and Freud, Sigmundâs notion of dreamwork, intertextuality is a theory of meaning and meaning-production. It holds that all texts (in the expanded sense of the term post-structuralism theory maintains) are composed of other (pre-existing) texts (in the ordinary sense of the word) held together in a state of constant interaction. It means that there are no original texts, no complete texts and no singular texts: all texts exist in a state of partiality and inter-dependency with other texts. This is not simply a fact of language, according to Kristeva, but its necessary pre-condition. Every writer is first of all a reader, Kristeva argues, so their works are created from textual resources theyâve digested in a lifetime of reading; by the same token, readers are like writers, they build up a picture of what they read by associating it with everything theyâve read before. Meaning is therefore always âin betweenâ.