A Critical Analysis of Intertextuality with the Reference to Farhad Sorabjee’s Play Hard Places

The term intertextuality can be defined as a network of texts. Here, one text is connected with another. By and large, intertextuality means the influence of a previous text in forming a current or new text. According to Julia Kristiva (1980), no text stands by itself; the text may be connected in the form of content or style with another text. Ahmadian and Yazdani (2013) defined intertextuality as the cycles of the chain of text that are connected to and have influences on the present text. Therefore, people said intertextuality is nothing but the history of the text. The text itself is like a structure or building, which is made up of several ingredients in order to give a proper shape to a building. While writing a text, the writer has to maintain linguist Halliday and Hasan’s concept of ‘coherence’, ‘cohesion’ and ‘cohesiveness’ in the text. Intertextuality helps the readers to understand the text. Without prior knowledge, it is quite difficult to grasp the proper content. In a wider sense, having this prior knowledge is also a kind of intertextuality. Furthermore, Roland Barthes famously defined text as a “tissue of quotations,” emphasizing that meaning stems from both authorial intent and the reader’s prior background (Barthes, 1967). Understanding these connections at both macro and micro levels helps unlock deeper thematic interpretations. Thus, in this paper, the study would like to shed some light on intertextuality in Farhad Sorabjee’s play Hard Places (2004) and will also discuss the importance of intertextuality in reading drama or play.