Intertextuality

C. Bazerman’s discussion on Intertextuality examines the actuality that no one writes or makes any kind of utterance in a self-contained bubble. Human communicative events relate to prior or current texts and have the potential to be linked to something that follows. Literally everyone borrows from other sources, by the mere fact that people use shared languages to communicate.

Intertextual reference is used for specific motivations: from referencing a text at face value or creating a commentary by using certain phrasing or language (i.e. politispeak in Yes Minister—See this example), humans make intertextual references to situate their position within broader discourses.

In Against Intertextuality (2004), W. Irwin criticizes the way in which the term has come to mean allusion or source study. Irwin doesn’t believe an author can never communicate intentionality because if that were true, instructions could never be followed. Irwin’s criticism is not so much against the basic ideas that J. Kristeva merged from M. Bakhtin and F. Saussure in the somewhat oppressive atmosphere of the Academie Francaise in the late 1960’s (Irwin, 2004), but rather the extreme severing of text and intentionality and intentional obfuscation in poststructuralist writing.

Bazerman agrees with some of this critique in his conclusion (2006): “Intertextuality is not just a matter of which other texts you refer to, but how you use them, what you use them for and ultimately how you position yourself as a writer to them to make your own statement.”

I agree that authors make active decisions in what to quote and how to frame quotes within new texts. A great deal of control, agency and intentionality still remains. If Barthes really didn’t believe in the ability to communicate intentionality and that the author is truly immaterial, then why is the article called “Death of the Author by Roland Barthes?”

Intertextuality on the Internet

In looking online for more information about intertextuality, I was surprised that most of what is on the internet on the subject are basically examples of what people categorize as intertextuality. There are examples in music, poetry, biblical studies, literature, cinema, theatre, television and on the Internet—some more scholastic than others. There is an interesting video on Youtube called Intertextuality Resource that a teacher made for his students to show them how filmmakers draw from an intertextual assumption of their audiences to add to humor.

For those interested in more scholarly discussions about intertextuality or indeed about any main issues in English Studies, one of the most useful websites is R. M. Howard’s massive bibliography of Rhetoric and Composition. On her page, she cites no less than 63 entries pertaining to intertextual issues (including the article by Bazerman’s that we read).

Bazerman cites G. Allen’s Intertextuality as the overview to own on the subject.

J. Kristeva has an official website as does W. Irwin at the King’s College in Wilks-Barre, PA. Both sites are great resources for finding what other publications these scholars have participated in.

References
Allen, G. (2000). Intertextuality. London: Routledge.

Barthes, R. (1977). Death of the author. Image – Music – Text. London: Fontana,142-148.

Bazerman, C. (2004) Intertextuality: How texts rely on other texts. What Writing Does and How It Does It. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 83-96.

Edmunds, Lowell. (2001). Intertextuality and the Reading of Roman Poetry. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/Intertextuality-Reading-Poetry-Lowell-Edmunds/dp/0801877415/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1287886624&sr=1-1#_

Gray, J. (2005). Watching With The Simpsons: Television, Parody, And Intertextuality. London: Routledge.

Gunning, T. (2004). The Intertextuality of Early Cinema: A Prologue to Fantômas. A Companion to Literature and Film. Stam, R. and Raengo, A. (Eds). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

Howard, R. M. Bibliographies for Composition and Rhetoric. Retrieved from http://wrt-howard.syr.edu/bibs.html

Irwin, W. (2004). Against intertextuality. Philosophy and Literature. 28, 227-242.

Irwin, W. William Irwin, PhD.homepage. Retrieved from http://staff.kings.edu/wtirwin/

Johnson, B. (2009). Intertextuality Resource. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6BFeVWb8vc

Kristeva, J. Julia Kristeva Official Homepage. Retrieved from http://www.kristeva.fr/

Lotterby, S. (Producer) (1988). The tangled web. Yes, Minister. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8keZbZL2ero

Nehama A. (2010). The biblical intertext in peter shaffer’s Amadeus (or, saul and david in eighteenth-century vienna). Comparative Drama. 44(1), 45-62. Retrieved from http://proxy.lib.odu.edu/login?url=http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/comparative_drama/v044/44.1.aschkenasy.html

Potts, Amy. Music Genres Intertextuality.(PowerPoint). Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/amyamz12334/music-genres-intertextuality-1985761

Pyeon, Y. (2003). You Have Not Spoken What Is Right About Me: Intertextuality and the Book of Job . Studies in Biblical Literature. 45. New York: Peter Lang,

Short. K. G.(1991). Intertextuality: Making Connections across Literature and Life. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English (81st, Seattle, WA) 11/22-27/1991.

What are latest examples of intertextuality headlines? Yahoo! Answers. Retrieved from http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100330071720AAL2t0q