What, after all, is a rereading? By definition it follows an earlier reading since what has not been read cannot be reread. But though rereading presupposes an initial reading, it also precludes it since what has once been reread can no longer be read but only reread another time. Thus, whereas an initial reading terminates when it reaches the end of a text, rereading is an inherently interminable process.

Rereading, moreover, inverts an initial order of priority. Sections of a text that in an initial reading are read before others are, in rereading, read after them. The sections that in an initial reading are read only after others have, in rereading, been read before.

What applies to a single text applies also to a body of texts. For us as readers such texts exist simultaneously and may be read in any order in which we choose to read them. When we read them in the order in which they were written, we read the later work after the earlier. When we reread the same texts, we read the earlier work after the later. Indeed, the very distinction between earlier and later texts may be said to be the product of rereading since, strictly speaking, a given text becomes prior to another only in retrospect.

When earlier texts are read in the light of later texts, they are read in a context other than the original, and therefore rereading may also be described as a process of recontextualization. In this process a text develops a new and complex set of relations with later texts.