Abstract: As two very important concepts of literary theory, “intertextuality” and “palimpsestuousness,” are often taken as synonyms, for what is in common between them is that they both look for the relationship between one text and others. However, the two concepts are different in one crucial aspect: while intertextuality concerns itself more about the meaning(s) of a text that is derived from or influenced by its pre-texts, palimpsestuousness pays more attention to the meaning(s) generated from its interaction with some previously unrelated texts that accidentally encounter each other in one textual space. It is this difference that allows palimpsestuousness to shed some new light on the study of diasporic literature and pull it through the bottleneck it is facing. An analysis of “Turtle Soup”, a short poem written by the Chinese American poet, Marilyn Chin, may illustrate that what we need to explore in literary studies is a sort of “familiar strangeness,” namely, not only searching for the familiar traditions from the perspective of intertexuality, but also the new meanings generated from the unprepared encounter between unrelated texts based on palimpsestuousness. Literary studies should always free itself from the familiar and fossilized research approaches, retain its capacity for denormalization, and ensure a mutual reinforcement and perfection between the newly-discovered “similarity” and “difference”. It is only through the encounter with the unfamiliar other (either disciplinary or cultural) can literary texts sustain their everlasting vitality.

Key words: intertextuality, palimpsestuousness, Marilyn Chin, "Turtle Soup"