Gérard Genette’s Palimpsestos establishes a foundational grammar for understanding literature not as isolated textual singularity, but as a field of transtextual relations in which every work is marked by visible or latent connections to others. The excerpt’s central proposition is taxonomic yet profoundly interpretative: textuality is constituted by forms of transcendence that exceed the individual text. Genette distinguishes five relations—intertextuality, as copresence through citation, plagiarism or allusion; paratextuality, as the threshold formed by titles, prefaces, notes and other framing devices; metatextuality, as commentary; architextuality, as generic belonging; and hypertextuality, the privileged object of Palimpsestos. The latter designates any relation by which a text B, the hypertext, derives from a prior text A, the hypotext, without simply commenting on it. His case synthesis turns on The Odyssey: Joyce’s Ulysses transforms Homer by relocating its action to twentieth-century Dublin, whereas Virgil’s Aeneid imitates Homer more indirectly by extracting an epic model and applying it to another narrative. This distinction between transformation and imitation gives Genette’s theory its analytic precision. The conclusion is that literature is fundamentally palimpsestic: every work may evoke another, yet some texts declare this dependence massively, contractually and structurally, making derivation not a defect of originality but the very engine of literary invention.