Intertextuality Definition

Intertextuality is the way in which a text (of any medium) forms its meaning by its relationship to other texts (of any medium). This may include juxtaposition to another text, repetition either verbatim or in theme only of another text, anticipating a new text which may be created in response to the text, or laminating new ideas on the framework of an old text. New focus texts are created by their moment of departure from a prior text, which often requires a draw on the prior text to see, and then are often recontextualized into a new form, which allows them to become intertexts in and of themselves. The focus text and its intertexts form a puzzle of complete pieces—while each can often be understood, or at least have some meaning on their own, the fullest expression of all the texts is reached by exploring their relationships to one another.

Morph-ology: Bakhtin 1981 excerpts

Bakhtin has his own poetic, and I'm struck by the ways in which he brings in a host of other analogies in his own writing to explain what it is he's talking about; in the case of the area I'm going to explore, the issue of light refracting off a lens to explain the way meaning changes as the heteroglossia surrounding a particular text changes the way we see it. Just as light in rarefaction through a lens changes the shape, focus, and perception of an object, so does a change in the dialogue in which a particular text is situated.

I'm talking here about Bakhtin's concept of re-accentuation, which to me, both actively pursuing and studying my hobby of fan fiction is a very interesting one. Fan fiction is by its nature a heteroglossic undertaking; it is adding an interpretation to a text which already exists, or extracting bits of that text and creating a new dialogue around them. In doing so, the meaning of that text is gradually changed bit by bit as people grow to understand the situation differently. For example, in the original book, Edward the vampire likes to watch Bella sleep; when he admits this to her, she finds this hopelessly romantic. Yet if a fan fiction writer writes a so-called "alternate universe" (AU) fanfiction where Edward, instead of being a chaste, moral vampire who drinks from animals is instead a traditional bloodthirsty killer, when that writer repeats the trope of Edward watching Bella sleep, the interpretation of the new version is much more sinister. And what is more fascinating is that this new interpretation affects not only the AU, but that of the original text as well, and moves readers to understand the original book's Edward's motives as being quite creepy rather than the hopelessly romantic gesture they may have originally felt them to be.

Bakhtin argues that as texts move through different historical periods and different groups, each one adds a different meaning to it and shapes it, because the heteroglossic fabric which surrounds the text changes each time it is moved. Yet perhaps this is the test of something which is lasting; a great text continues to grow and move, morphing into other meanings and interpretations as it makes its way through the dialogic imagination of new sets of readers.

The Present Absent: Irvine 2005

What I find most interesting about Irvine's commentary is that it begins to tackle a part of intertextuality that I find many other treatments of the topic seem to gloss; that is, the meaning created by what is not there, which is often every bit as profound as the meaning created by the things that are. She identifies several types of gaps/features of gaps, which I will list for my own future reference:

-that unlike chunks of text shed light on like ones; they throw into relief the similarity of other parts of the text that otherwise might be more difficult to recognize as a like
-avoidance: the question of who sees what is being avoided (the 900-pound gorilla, as it were) and why they see it creates interesting questions about what is contained in the rest of the text
-absence: what has been excluded from the text and why
-roads not taken: why one approach was chosen.

In my own work, I find Irvine's thoughts on absence quite interesting, especially this question of unlike chunks shedding light on like ones. WK is an instance of incongruity, and perhaps part of what makes it so offensive to the people who are "being white-knighted is the simple fact that the incongruous opinion of the white-knight makes them all seem more similar, and subtly implies that they are the sheep in the herd.

A Charter, Not an Answer: Bauman 2005

In Bauman's response to the papers in LA 15, he outlines the reasons for understanding and exploring interdiscursivity (his extension of the term coined by Kristeva to explain Bahktin, which in and of itself represents a through-line of prior texts informing the current.) Bauman argues that interdiscursivity helps us to understand that all utterances are ideologically informed; they all carry with them the weight of all that has been said before and in this way, all speak back to the texts around them.

Bauman puts forth three primary reasons for us to be interested in interdiscursivity. One, it helps us transcend the limits of the bounded speech event to understand the ways in which a speech event is situated within the ideology of the groups that created it and the ways in which it responds to other speech events and speaks to new speech events which may occur in the future. Two, interdiscursivity keeps us aware that all utterances are ideologically informed, that is, that they all rely on the ideologies which their speakers and hearers bring to the table; these ideologies are based on prior interpretations of other texts, which are ideologically informed and so on and so on. And last, interdiscursivity provides a discourse-centered way of "elucidating and calibrating" the terms, modes and degrees of alignment; as Agha shows, it helps us piece together exactly how something becomes enregistered, or how someone becomes known as a particular persona.

Bauman calls Bakhtin's work "a charter, not an answer," and perhaps this is the most useful of all. Intertextuality, it seems to me, is a jumping-off point for understanding a host of phenomena, whether it be internet etiquette and behavior (my study), the creation of register (Agha 2005), alignment in a family (Tovares 2006), legal history and precedent (Raisch 2008), and many others, each as seemingly different as the next. Interdiscursivity lays the groundwork by which the workings of our communication are better understood; it gives no answers, only a map.

Sure Footing: Agha 2005

Perhaps the most useful part of Agha's article is his careful picking apart of the way that enregisterment happens, and so it is there that I'd like to focus my own thoughts, as it is also the most useful for me in my own work. He describes the following three-step process:

contrastive individuation, where by one voice is recognized as contrasting against another

biographic identification, or the "naming of voices," where the voice becomes typified

and

social characterization - assigning an individual voice to a social character.

This process in many ways is similar to Bauman's concept of entxextualization. In this, Agha essentially breaks down the process of entextualization even further, showing exactly how one instance comes to be known as a typification of a larger pheonmenon. Once a text (a voice in this case) goes through Agha's three stages, it has been entextualized as characteristic of a particular social persona, and then is free to be decontextualized and recontextualized at will.

For my own work, this makes good sense. White knighting is nothing if not a process by which one voice is isolated as not being a part of the broader conversation, and then typified as not only outside of but also an antagonist to that conversation. This process helps narrow down and identify the precise moves that are made to make that happen.

Laura's Presentation

Laura’s topic is, in terms of medium, closest to mine, and yet we’re exploring two very different phenomena. I greatly appreciated the insight from Baym with regard to repetition in the creation of internet humor and solidarity. The idea of the way that humor is an interstice in a text that is ostensibly about something else (for example, the daily show summaries) I think has a lot of value for my own research—much of what I’m looking at has a great deal to do with the ways in which individuals add their own voice to the text at hand.

I thought, too, that Laura’s request for us to reexamine Becker was a good one. Much of what happens in internet discourse is about repetition—what gets repeated and what does not, as well as what is picked up as relevant to the conversation and what stances are taken towards that information. Repetition has a lot to do with the creation of meaning on the internet.

Most interesting about Laura’s data were the ways meaning was being created out of very, very little. For example, the wall posts about Michael Moore might have been taken in a completely different way had the person not have been a conservative. I also was fascinated by the transformation of the word “Sicko” from a movie title to a possible reference to Moore himself. The ways in which single turns like that can be manipulated is a really fruitful area to look at on Facebook, and it seems like that is an area Laura is beginning to cue into in her analysis.

One of the things I wanted to know more about in Laura’s presentation was the way intertextuality functions in the socialization of these older FB users. I wasn’t completely clear on that, and I didn’t entirely get that reverse socialization out of the data we looked at (although we eschewed an entire set of data, so that may be why). I have a feeling much of this socialization happens in the responding to texts, for example, the example Laura gave of people going, “There’s a button for that” to someone who simply replies “I like this” to a post. I would be very interested to see some of that in action.

Sam's Workshop

One of the things I thought was a most interesting point brought up by Sam’s readings was the concept of “ownership” as it applies to health information. This was brought up in the Hardey reading, and yet I feel has a lot to do with what Sam is looking at in the birth control commercials. The question of who “owns” the medical information that was presented has a lot to do with how the information in the commercials is presented—do we view the speaker presenting the risks and benefits of the drug as something that an average person should have in her purview? I found that to be a very interesting question as we examined Sam’s data.

I was also particularly struck by the ways in which the data that Sam presented really did represent the “postmodern” commercial, or perhaps a mix of the modern and postmodern. Although much explicit information was given in the commercials (as was necessary per FDA standards), much information relied on other connections we could make, often intertextual ties to our understanding of women’s history, what a birth control pill pack looks like, what women’s bathing attire indexes, etc. The goal of the commercial was not entirely to sell us on the benefits of the product but rather to sell us on a particular feeling that we ought to have about the product—that it makes us freer, sexier, more modern, etc. (Incidentally, it was also very interesting given Pat’s presentation, to go back to the kinds of ideologies about manhood that his focus texts evoke.) I think the way these themes play out, in accordance with the kinds of ideas that Proctor put forth, might be a really interesting spot of exploration for Sam. I was very intrigued by the ways the two sets of commercials “talk back” to each other, and exploring the ways the talking back incorporates some of these concepts of how we’re meant to “feel’ could be very useful (for example, the correction Yaz commercial still uses the same actress in the same swanky bar instead of say, a doctor in a lab coat).

Connecting the concepts back to my own work; I think probably the most interesting piece I came across in Sam’s workshop were some of the ideas about ownership that Hardey explored. This concept of the internet making knowledge more communal, and knowledge being weighed not against its validity but against the availability of other knowledge, is one I think is particularly useful to my own work. WK to some degree deals with the question of whether one person’s reading of a particular text is valid vis a vis anothers’, and much of this has to do with the presence or absence of both opinions and the prevalence of one versus another. So I think some of the same things apply, e.g. people growing skeptical of skewed information because there simply is a lack of volume.

Pat's Workshop

Pat’s topic is quite interesting to me from the standpoint of using a really very subtle intertext. I didn’t expect to be using such a subtle intertext myself; my original thought was simply to examine message board speech precisely because the intertext is usually so overt. Yet I’ve found that what I’ve ended up looking at is very subtle.

Were I to watch Pat’s Ford commercials, I would likely not recognize the “Dirty Jobs” intertext at all, as I’ve never seen the show and certainly don’t recognize its host. Yet at the same time, I would undoubtedly recognize the ideologies of masculinity and strength and the personification of those ideologies onto a machine. I thought this was perhaps one of the more useful connections of Pat’s workshop for me; thinking about how to pick apart an intertext and to see different intertexts based on what one has experience with. In my own work, much comes from people understanding a situation in the same way, or understanding that a certain set of behaviors constitutes a white-knighting frame in the same way that Anna Trester’s improv artists could recognize a set of behaviors as a game frame. Pat’s focus texts helped me think about how an intertext could be recognized with very little, and also how people with different experiences might cue in to different intertexts.

The readings Pat chose I thought were complementary. Irvine and Gal emphasized a great deal about group formation, and very importantly, intragroup diversity. Thinking about how we might hegemonically assign characteristics to single groups is an interesting thought, especially when it comes to understanding their linguistic practice. I find these concepts to speak back to Ana’s work on linguistic metadiscourse, and wonder if that might not be a good area of exploration for her as well. I was intrigued by Actor Network Theory, and it seems that Latour and Irvine and Gal are saying a great deal of the same things about the ways networks and groups are created intrinsically and must be understood as such to understand how different pieces of their worlds can carry meaning. One spot I thought about particularly was the concept of certain features being mapped on to social qualities, a la the nylon vs. silk example that Latour gives. This could be brought to bear on some of Pat’s work—we already have many of the ideologies of what it is to be masculine, and the way they do or don’t get

The one thing I was surprised was missing from Pat’s workshop was more information about Dirty Jobs itself. There was a LOT to work with simply exploring the intertextual ties between the commercials themselves, but I found I wanted to know more about the Dirty Jobs intertext and the way in which it played into or didn’t play into the focus texts. However, I found the process of identifying the actors and intermediaries in each was a very good method of analysis for Pat’s work.
 

Corinne's Workshop

I found Corinne’s workshop to be strangely one of the more useful ones for my own work, perhaps because we are both working with such distinctly written media. The definitions that Thetela and Porter put forth for intertextuality itself I found particularly useful, especially Porter’s concept that intertextuality consists of both tierability and presupposition. Iterability of course takes us right back to Johnstone and Becker—the way a text becomes a second text by virtue of its repetition. And then there is presupposition, which to me brings back some of the ideas of an intertext anticipating other texts. Presupposition reminds us that the text is always speaking to other texts, responding to other texts, and positioning itself relative to other texts. I find this concept very useful in my own research. I was also more than a little interested in Thetela’s discussion of relational processes arising out of intertextual relationships, as I think this is something that is going on in my own data quite a bit.

One of the things I found most interesting about Corinne’s workshop was the use or lack of use of quotes. I found it fascinating to follow the trajectory of the quotes that were put forth in the original article and the ways in which they resurfaced in subsequent discussions of the same material. (I thought Corinne made a great choice in doing her model analysis on the first article and letting us navigate our way through the subsequent ones.) The discussion of when something gets quoted, even to the extent that “nonissue” was not put in quotes in a headline, I thought was a very fruitful one, and brings back many of the ideas that both Sclafani and Tannen put forth about double-voiced discourse.

I was interested as well in the way Thetela discussed the stance creation in her text, and I thought this would be a very useful area for Corinne. Obviously the ways these texts are quoted or not quoted create certain alliances between the text and the reader, encouraging the reader to side or not to side with a particular point of view. This is very prevalent in a discussion such as the one Corinne is reading, and obviously, each piece we looked at took this stance creation to a different degree.

The one part of Corinne’s workshop I would’ve liked to see more of were any sort of opposing viewpoints. Particularly with regard to what I mention above about stance creation on the part of the audience, it would be interesting to see how similar quotes are used to encourage people to take a different stance than the one originally presented by the SF Chronicle.

Marni's Presentation

I’ve always thought Marni’s question to be a very interesting one, and I was interested to see the way in which she ultimately decided to operationalize it by looking at cancer narratives. I do think that shared experience does constitute a type of prior text, especially because often shared experience often creates a distinct text within itself—I’m reminded of Tovares’s recent work on athlete narratives, when certain phrases become the norm for discussing things, like in “mile 20 is when the real race begins” is an instance of “real race” being used to describe the inner battle to finish versus the physical battle of fatigue.

Particularly interesting in Marni’s readings I thought was this use of intertextual (and intratextual in the case of Hamilton) ties in the construction of identity. The ways in which identity is co-constructed is a particular research interest of mine as I’m currently looking at audience design in the sociolinguistic interview. At the same time, Hamilton’s construction is working a little differently in that the author’s responses and interactions with the patient serve to help construct the patient’s “patient” identity, which is different from the audience and referee design theory that I’m working with.

I also find interesting Bakhtin’s notion that we are influenced by incorporating another’s words into our own discourse. This seems to me to be one of the major factors in the narratives that Marni is looking at. Although I did not get the chance to explore the narratives themselves, this question of taking on others’ words seems to me to be a prime site for understanding the ways in which intertextuality allows them to develop the identity of cancer survivors. In what ways to they adopt the “language” of cancer survival? In medical anthropology in undergrad, we often talked about how cancer is framed as a battle—the cancer battling the body and the patient battling the cancer, as though there is anything the patient can do to actually effect change on the cancer . In fact, the mere presence of all of these stories on Livestrong is to some extent an intertextual tie itself—Lance Armstrong is known for his bravery in battling his cancer and for going on to win many more races after his treatment. By positioning themselves with Livestrong, the authors of Marni’s narratives tap into the experience of Armstrong.

Most useful to me from Marni’s work is probably this idea of being influenced by the incorporation of others’ words. I believe part of WK is the taking on of a voice and a stance that others have already identified, and sometimes it is even taking on words such as “baww” or “butthurt” which shape the world of an additional interlocutor so that they understand and respond to the situation as an instance of WK instead of a different reaction they may have had otherwise.

Ana's Presentation

Notes on Ana’s Presentation (from readings and ppt)

Metalinguistic study has always been a rather fascinating topic for me, and so I was quite sorry to have missed this presentation in person. I think the ways in which people create solidarity or distance by talking about the ways they talk is fascinating—I always think back to the first time I saw the “I’m not having any Southern Babies” monologue in American Tongues.

I am also particularly interested in the ways in which Ana is relying on much of the same framework as I am in looking at the issues of en-, decon- and recontexualization of the instance of metalinguistic commentary. I have personally found this to be a good area of intertextuality for my own work, as the process a text moves through as it moves from one of these to the next is frequently highly visible.

I was particularly interested in Coupland and Jaworoski’s discussion of language as innocent, in the idea that it is somehow removed from the social process and ideologies in which it is embedded. One thing I think keeps being broken down in this course is the idea of language as being separate from the social situations from which it arises. It is used to create identities and to shape them, and to move ideas from one sphere into another. If language were “innocent,” the rekeying that Tannen talks about would be impossible; there would be no social connection for that language to be able to move from a discussion about the return of a box to a discussion about spousal support in hardship.

Although language ideologies do not manifest themselves in my own research and there is not much in the way of metalinguistic commentary, I think the ways in which Ana is engaging with the same framework as I am to uncover the sites of her explorations forms a useful juxtaposition to my own work

Notes on Nicole’s Presentation

Nicole’s work, I believe will provide some very interesting insight into what Boerema presents in his article. While Boerema looks at mission statements alone and the way they represent the founding principles of the school, I think looking at the ways the mission statements are borne out in their connections to each other and to the eventual comments that the parents make about the schools. I thought, however, that this reading gave us a very good footing with which to go on and analyze the data Nicole gave us, particularly since it all dealt with the same type of school. It allowed us to think carefully about what that school’s background might be when we looked at the data.

The Fairclough I thought also provided a really nice scaffolding for the work that Nicole is working on. Particularly useful I thought was the table she presented in her workshop, from Ch. 3 of Fairclough, which related each of the constraints in discourse (contents, relations, subjects) with its structural effects (knowledge and beliefs, social relationships, social identities). I think that this might be one of the more useful pieces for my own research, in that it provides a very concrete tie from the discourse feature to the effects it has on the world around it.

What I was most interested in within Nicole’s workshop was actually the repetition. The ways in which a single word or words appeared and reappeared I thought was one of the most interesting parts of her data. This was particularly salient when the same words were picked up in the parent and student testimonials about the school. I thought this went back to Fairclough’s thoughts on experiential values—certainly the words which are most being repeated often have a great deal to do with the ideologies about the schools that the schools administrations most want their parents and students to associate with the school (even if the school doesn’t truly embody them), and in that sense, the presence of the same words in the parent testimonials indicates a certain “taking up” of these ideologies. This would be a really interesting site to explore, and the area where I think Nicole’s work will most significantly expand on Boerema’s.

Most useful to me from Nicole’s presentation were the discussion and application of the values of the word and grammar from Fairclough. I think asking myself many of these same questions about how the text is being construed with regards to ideology, euphemism, expression and connectivity will be very useful in analyzing the way white-knighting ins entextualized in an interactional context.

Reported!: Scalafani

Probably I should’ve recognized that I would one day become a sociolinguist the morning I found myself in a heated argument with my Algebra II teacher over the Ebonics controversy. She was the authority, I was a fourteen-year-old freshman, and yet I had pretty strong opinions on the legitimacy of a language variety and its use in an educational setting—most of them stemming from my own academic success as a speaker of standard American English (SAE) and my years of being termed “articulate” (a term I only much later realized framed my African American peers as poorly-spoken).

While Scalafani unravels a number of pieces of the debate over Ebonics, beginning with the word itself and the way it was framed in headlines (c.f. “The Ebonic Plague” and its homophony with “bubonic plage”), there are two features I want to look at more closely. One is the level at which Scalafani unravels individual words used in the articles, looking at their semantic relationships with other parts of the text, as in my example of the frame created by referring to me as an “articulate” (black) student. This, I believe, will be a useful site for me, as much of the process of WK is a process of responding to and anticipating future text based on often very short stretches of discourse. Looking at the ways words presuppose the use of other words, or examining the frames evoked by the choice NOT to use other words strikes me as a fruitful area for my own research.

A second piece which I found interesting in Scalafani’s article was one which whe dies not explicate herself but rather which emerges from her own writing, and that is the evoking of the prior text of “Frost/Nixon” by her shortening of the 3rd article headline to “Ebonics/Nixon.” The shortened headline does not actually encapsulate the comparison between the Ebonics and SAE (however skewed) that appears in the text of the article and with which Scalafani enages, but rather laminates an additional layer of interpretation—“Ebonics” in this textual frame takes the place of “Frost,” the reporter who trounced Nixon in getting him to admit to the wiretapping and illegal activities surrounding the Watergate scandal. By shortening the article to “Ebonics/Nixon,” Scalafani activates this prior text and much in the same way Nixon detractors celebrated Frost for his victory over the reclusive president, invites the reader to similarly side with and celebrate Ebonics.

Body as Prior Text: Talbot

What strikes me most about the Talbot reading is the existence of gossip as a solidarity-creating feature, much in the vein of Tovares’ work on television gossip. Gossip inevitably creates a third party against whom some other set of parties are aligned and delineated—the gossipers become one group by virtue of their alignment in opposition to the one gossiped about. Tovares explores this in terms of how women discuss the women on the TV show Who Wants to Marry a Multimillionaire, in which the show itself allows the women, or a woman and her husband to align in opposition to the way the show presents itself and the women on the show. In the ads, however, first the “gossip” must be constructed, by use of features such as inclusive we and the response to “unasked” questions in the testimonials. These language features provide a site of “gossip” and thus create alignment in the group of women toward whom the ad is focused.

With regard to my own research, it is apparent as I’ve mentioned previously, that the women involved in these fic-writing communities create solidarity through their uses of language. Talbot’s work here gives me a good jumping-off point for looking at the ways in which the texts of the fic communities create “gossipees” to encourage alignment between the people who are doing the gossiping. The community of fic writers are in their own way a synthetic sisterhood, although perhaps a slightly more “real” sisterhood than the consumers of the lipstick ads in that they are able to communicate directly with each other and even meet up outside the internet. Nevertheless, the creation of community via these types of positioning moves I think will be a useful angle by which to explore the process of WK.

Raisch and readings

What was most interesting about the Raisch visit was the literal intertextuality of the focus texts she brought. We've been studying a lot about intertexts which are ehpemeral, which form themselves by the relation of the focus text to the intertexts, but in Raisch's examples, the intertexts were present on the page with the focus texts and form connections unto themselves. The same is true of hyperlinks, and I think, that while Wikipedia may not be the best scholarly source, it would certainly be an interesting focus of scholarly study on intertextuality for that reason--the co-presence of text and intertext literally there on the page.

I found very interesting the Origen reading for today, as it connects much with my own experience. The first time I saw a parallel Bible I was fascinated (a Bible with 4 or more translations in columns next to one another), because in this form, you automatically see what is different, present in one, omitted from another, etc. etc. These sorts of things bring focus to your thinking about the texts themselves and encourage you to probe more deeply the questions raised by the inclusions and omissions--in fact, if I'm writing a devotion or bible study (which I used to do for income), I always like to start by looking at the parallel bible because it immediately draws attention to certain parts of the text. I think the pieces that Raisch brought to class bring up many of the same issues--having the two texts co-present on the page makes immediately apparent what kinds of questions one should be asking about them (Why was this word chosen and not that one? Why is this marked here, but not down here?)

Orr's term of collocution is an interesting one here as well. Orr intends for ITXTY in this respect to be studying people's speech, but I think collocution also happens when you have two written texts aligned as these are. In a way, the two texts "speak together" and it is the product of their joint speech that provides meaning; either one alone is not enough.

That legal proceedings are also highly intertextual doesn't surprise me in the least, and it makes perfect sense that the law was the first discipline to make use of hypertext. Law is nothing if not an intertextual endeavor, with one trying to interpret not only what was said, but also what was meant by what was said and whether the text has a new meaning given its new context. I found the discussion of the two styles of law informative, particularly because as a non-lawyer, it does not seem to me that they are anything other than complementary. I thought Raisch's arguments in favor of students of common law and civil law understanding and interacting with the other only made perfect sense.

Collapsing the Signifier and Signified: Kristeva 1980

As a linguist whose undergraduate training is in anthropology and English literature, I’ve of course spent a good deal of time thinking about the signified/signifier distinction and the distinctions between lange and parole. Of course Bahktin’s commentary on whether or not linguistics should comment on what he refers to as “metalinguistics” seems interesting, especially since his work was concurrent with Labov’s groundbreaking work that formed the foundations of sociolinguistics. Thus for me one of the most interesting aspects of Kristeva’s work is her suggestion that the framework that Bahktin is creating ultimately collapses the distinction between signifier and signified, making both contextually dependent, and bringing to the fore the relationship between speaker and addressee, referred-to and referrer.

Also fascinating to me is Kristeva’s explication of the ways in which the speaker <> addressee relationships create the different levels of “person” we encounter in the texts of novels, first, second, third (or rather, third, first, second as she explains them) and then the ways in which a dialogical relationship between the writer and the text can create a layer at which the text questions itself. I actually find this to be more the domain of parody, and it is interesting that the writers like Norrick who have looked at parody haven’t necessarily used Kristeva’s explanations as a jumping-off point. It seems to be that parody and humor is in some ways a text looking at itself and commenting on itself; for example, in order for Tina Fey to portray Sarah Palin, she must not only create a performance which we recognize as invoking the text of “Sarah Palin,” she can only mark it as humorous parody by also drawing attention to the fact that it is parody by means of exaggeration—oftentimes of a features as nuances as simple prosody (I am reminded of a time when I saw Fey’s parody second and only later realized that her parody as created only by her intonation and pauses—the lack of semantic information and in and the circuitous nature of the answers which I originally perceived as being part of the parody it turned out were verbatim from the interview Palin had given the day before). This fourth level is one that I think is worth further probing—when does a text comment on itself, and how does it achieve this?

Remembering, Shelving, and Reincorporating: Trester

As with Tannen and Tovares, probably the most interesting thing about reading Anna Trester’s work is getting to work through the texts with her. The presence of the researcher in the discussion of the text makes the text even more polyvocal—the researcher’s voice becomes laminated on the voices of those whom she researches and thus provides an additional layer of insight into the ways these texts function.

What strikes me the most about Trester’s evaluation of Bauman and Briggs’ discussion of entextualization is this issue that often we cannot recognize the entextualization until the text has been decontextualized and recontextualized. For example, it is not until the “student athlete” says “U is offering me a freshman start,” and the homophony causes a break in the frame of the expected rules of grammar, that the text is able to be recognized and reincorporated to be used later. Similarly, when the actors enter into a game frame while doing their work backstage as actors, it often takes a line or two for the text to emerge, and it often is not recognized as the text until someone takes it up as such. For example in the game “Change the quote,” the lines “that’s not in there,” “show me,” and “play the game” are all originally responses to a single speech event. It is not until they are repeated that they become recognized as the Text. In this sense, it is really almost the reincorporating that causes the shelving of discourse.

Anna suggests that perhaps this framework is a useful one for my own research, and I agree that she is correct. However, I need to look more carefully at the ways WK is instantiated by this process of reincorporation—if it is the same backward look. Certainly there is not the same level of taking up as there is in the creation of the game frame within the improve artists’ work, but at the same time, there does seem to be some sort of shared understanding that the frame of WK has been invoked, and this causes a number of participants to respond in similar, if not identical ways.

Breaking Frames and Prior Text: Norrick

Norrick’s work reminds me a great deal of the things that Becker discusses in his exploration of repetition. In his article, Becker explores the way in which humor can arise because of access to a shared prior text, for example, the prior text of the “how many x-es does it take to do y?” joke frame. Without access to that frame, the joke is largely lost, and a statement like, “How many Ph.D.’s does it take to find a wireless button” loses much of its punch.

At the same time, Norrick marries some of the concepts introduced by Bauman and Bauman & Briggs on Performativity with the work on repetition, in looking at the ways repetition is used to create frame breaks which allow for the punchline of the joke to emerge. However, Norrick makes an important distinction between jokes and parodic allusion. While both are performative speech events a la Bauman and Briggs, Norrick points to the idea that the joke is performative in an intrusive way—their use of intertextual reference is brief and used to challenge the audience to achieve the goal of the punchline, while the allusion that creates parody invites the audience to align with the speaker, drawing them together to joke at the expense of a third party.

It is this last element that I think may be useful to my own work—the work of WK and identifying WK is to align a number of speakers against the WK-participant, once the speech event has been entextualized as a WK event. Comparing the ways these alignments function will likely be a very useful tool to me as I go forward examining how WK functions within the discourse of the internet communities I’m studying.

Never Say the Same Thing Twice: Johnstone 1994

Probably what struck me the most about Johnstone's article was this notion that we repeat verbatim to say something different, but when we want to say the same thing, we make changes. I had never really thought about it before, but it's beyond correct. Reading Johnstone, I recalled something I read in an in-flight magazine about repetition: it was an article on 11 tips for good management strategies, the first of which was repetition. The suggestion was that managers and subordinates repeat what their manager or subordinate said to them as a way of not only acknowledging what was said, but also as a way of projecting, "I'm going to act on this and hold you to what you said." I was struck by the way the repetition itself adds this layer of meaning, a la Johnstone's discussion here.

This, I think is an interesting part of intertextuality, and probably the one I am most fascinated by. Although one can focus on the ways in which the texts themselves interact and therefore produce meaning, I feel like it is the "gap" between two texts, even two identical texts, which ultimately gives a great deal of insight into the ways in which the text is to be interpreted. In the case of direct repetition, there seems to be the anticipated question of, "Why is this being repeated?" whose answer provides the meaning given by the repetition: It is being repeated to show solidarity, as a request for clarification, sometimes even as a face threat to the person to whom it is being repeated. This to me is what Dr. Tannen is referring to as "abduction" the way meaning is created "on the side" of the texts; not by anything that can be directly deduced from their content but from the way in which they interact.

In the case of internet exchanges, I think a lot of these sorts of abductive ideas surface as people respond not only to what another said, but also to what she didn't say, and to the meaning she might be creating by not saying other kinds of things. I find Johnstone's article, for that reason, to be helpful in my own framework of discussion, as the discussions on which I will focus my own research are by their natures abductive rather than deductive or inductive--the choice to quote directly vs. to paraphrase is a salient one, and after reading Johnstone, I realize it is perhaps a more salient one than I might have originally realized.

Intertextuality and Performance: Bauman Ch. 1 and 5

Performativity has always been an interest of mine, so reading these works on performance and intertexuality is very interesting. I am most intrigued again by the ways in which meaning arises from the gaps—from the ways that these texts intersect one another. For example, in the “Spotted Pup” story, it is the way in which the text genres of tall tale, personal experience narrative, and practical joke all come together that ultimately make the story itself a success, and reflect well on Ed Bell’s narrative style.

Bauman’s description of performance as a mode of communication where not only the topic is being communicated but also that the speaker him or herself is drawing attention to the fact that s/he is “on display” seems a useful distinction to me.

This calls back the acknowledgement not only of speaker-hearer participation frame a la Goffman, but also an additional layer—the breaking of the “fourth wall,” to borrow a term from theater. In performance, the audience is acknowledged not only as a hearer participant in the participation framework, but also an audience in the sense of theatre, one for whom the speech itself is designed to produce some noticeable effect. Ed Bell signifies this to his audience through metalinguistic cues, prompting them to challenge him, or acknowledging their probable skepticism of the tall tale or practical joke about which he is speaking. Cues like this tell us a great deal about the performative aspects of any given (discourse) text. I think this may be a useful line of inquiry in my own research, as there is a certain element to which any given speech act in an internet community is being performed for, by the standards of, and with cognizance of the community in which it is written.

En-, Decon-, Recon- Bauman & Briggs

How do we pinpoint a text as being emblematic of a text type or as performing a particular function in relationship to other texts? Bauman and Briggs unravel the process by which a text becomes first recognized as a text type through the process of entextualization, which acknowledges not only the form and function of a text but also its full context. That recognized text may then be taken out of its original context, or decontextualized, and then reinstated as a different text type, or recontextualized.

It seems to me that repetition often serves these functions; for example, in the Sloan data, it seems evident that decontexutalization and recontextualization are happening a great deal. For example, in the conversation that Tannen (2006) recounts about the package not being taken to the post office, it is evident that first the conversation, in the context of a wife leaving a husband and leaving a package that the mailman may or may not pick up, is entextualized as a question about a household chore and whether or not the husband will be willing to perform the chore if necessary. However, it is when the same discussion arises out of its original context that it becomes re-created as a different conversation entirely—a conversation about whether or not the husband will support the wife in the instance that her job becomes more stressful. As the same bit of text (the question about the box) is repeated, it goes through the stages that Bauman and Briggs identify, which ultimately allow it to function on the different planes that Tannen identifies.

In my own case, I think white-knighting has a great deal to do with the process of decontextualization and recontextualization. One of the hallmarks of WK is that it cannot be identified alone. Unlike flaming, where the content of the statement is enough to cause it to be entextualized as an instance of flaming, WK must be situated in response to another text in order to be recognized as WK. Exactly how it is decontextualized and recontextualized is unclear to me at this point, but I feel that this line of inquiry will allow me to uncover some of the ways this particular feature functions in the discourse of the communities I wish to study.

Making the Polyvocal Polyvocal: Tovares 2006 2007

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Tovares’ research was that like the Tannen 2010, the focus texts themselves received an additional layer of polyvocality through their representation by the researcher who wrote about them. The evaluative nature of not only the topics being discussed but also the researcher added another layer of intertext to the already polyvocalic blending of the television with the speech and evaluation of the family members. For instance, when Alla adds her own interpretation of the words, “I love you,” as repeated by a husband to his wife, her own prosody and expression mark her own stance toward the data and invite us to interpret not only the intertextual nature of the conversation as we are meant to as students, but also to be drawn into the whimsy of the nature of the conversation itself—that a husband is gently joshing his wife. Although some of the whimsy is created by the excerpt itself (by the use of the words “barefoot and pregnant” to describe what the wife stands in opposition to compared to the movie on television), more is laminated by the addition of the researcher’s voice.

The ways in which intertexutal ties allow the blending of the public and the private are something that I believe will be very useful to me in my own research. Bulletin board/forum posting is inherently both a public and a private act—it simulates private “backstage” conversation, in that frequently it can seem as though a post is only in response to a single other interlocutor, or a small group of interlocutors. Yet the message board or forum is usually open to thousands, if not millions, and thus the speech that exists there is very much “frontstage” speech, even as it masquerades as a private conversation.
This also ties back to Bakhtin and his notions of a third-party who is the recipient of some of the text, or toward whom the focus text is constructed (similar to Bell’s notion of the referee). The texts themselves take on new meaning when they are repeated for a new audience; at times, it seems it is the repetition of a line like “I love you,” and the knowledge that it is a repetition which makes it possible to recognize the playfulness of the statement. In turning a comment directed to a movie character and instead directing it towards his wife, the husband creates a moment where the wife is positioned humorously in contrast to the television wife.
In unpacking the ways that gossip and television allows the bridge between public and private to be made, Tovares provides insight not immediately apparent in Bakhtin’s exploration of dialogicality. In Tovares’ work, dialogicality has a purpose distinct from characterization or merely informing the character, but rather also plays a large role in the ways people make meanings out of the mundane everyday inputs of life. Given that the internet is a public sphere where much privacy is assumed, it seems only natural that I could use the same or a similar approach to discuss some of the ways this same gap is bridged in my own texts.

A Word about a Word: Bahktin 1984

One understands why Kristeva could spend so much of her career unraveling Bahktin. He is anything but a purely transparent writer. Also, I feel a bit lost in that my familiarity with Dostoyevsky is fairly nonexistent; a shame for a former English literature major, I suppose. Nevertheless, there are several aspects to the ways Bahktin is unraveling the concepts of dialogicality and intertextuality here that are worth further unpacking.

I was most fascinated in this article by Bahktin’s use of the term “metalinguistics” to encapsulate what all of us sociolinguists would consider our every day work: the work of parole, of “languaging,” of words embedded in their contexts. The more I study sociolinguistics, the less I am certain that Saussure’s distinction between lange and parole is a useful one, for what is language without its situation? Even Labov’s original classification of language use in the attention to speech model seems to come unraveled when we think about the ways in which people may use different styles quite consciously; the “vernacular” does not always arise from the least attentive speech (c.f. current work by N. Schilling). All linguistics, I think, is truly “metalinguistics”—how language arises and contrasts with other parts of language is much of its meaning. I am reminded of Gordon’s discussions of frames and repetition; for the denotative meanings of, “I’d like to order Chinese food” or “superior” can’t unravel their meaning as they appear in the texts that Gordon examines.

As a longtime writer of fiction myself, I also found the discussion of dialogicality with regard to the author’s voice and the character’s to be an interesting one. One of the most difficult things one learns as a fiction writer is how to bury one’s voice within the voice of one’s characters—how to make them talk about the things you want them to talk about and do the things you want them to do without tipping your hand to the reader that this is what you are doing. In this sense, all fiction is laminated with the author’s voice, but in good fiction, the author’s voice is a hidden presence—the hand guiding invisible marionette strings from above the stage. In this sense I both agreed and disagreed with Bakhtin; although the author’s voice is certainly present, the extent to which it is engaged with and actively contrasting with that of the characters in the text I believe is less readily apparent than Bahktin seems to think.

Also interesting in this article was the discussion of the ways in which a narrator casts speech toward an absent interlocutor. The creation of this sort of anticipatory text is quite relevant to my own research, as I believe that part of internet discourse is concerned with what Bell refers to as referee design: speech directed with a third, absent party in mind. This is what seems to be happening in the passage Bahktin cites from Poor Folk, in what he refers to as the “sideways glance” of the text. This idea of a text which glances sideways, which frames itself outside the domain simply of interlocutors to also encompass probable reactions of a third party is, I think critical to understanding how people communicate on the internet—in a way, anything posted on a message board, even when posted in direct response to another’s text, is incorporating this “sideways glance” at the third parties who are also privy to that text by means of the message board on which it is situated.

Repeating, Reframing, Rekeying -- Tannen 2006 and 2010

I was fortunate to actually hear the plenary address at the 2010 LSA meeting and therefore be introduced to the 2010 reading verbally; however, there are always differences between a spoken and written version of the same text (if there weren't, we'd have much less to study), and it is useful to be able to examine them both.

Tannen's framework is perhaps one of the more useful for my own work in that it seems apparent that the process of white-knighting is one of re-keying. In the 2006 article, she focuses in on an extended discussion of a text which is repeated, reframed, and rekeyed over the course of several discussions. The discussion moves from a simple discussion about whether or not a husband is willing to take a box to the post office to a more general discussion of whether or not the husband will be supportive in the instance that the wife's job becomes extremely stressful upon the inauguration of a new president. This pattern is readily recognizable in a number of interpersonal arguments of this nature, but the framework of tracing the way the conversation comes up again repeatedly (repetition), is marked as both argument and humor (rekeying), and is changed from a discussion about one thing to a discussion about another (reframing) gives useful insight into how we can better unpack the complicated layers of discourse that are present in such interaction.

Most useful to me from the 2010 talk is perhaps this issue of the taking on of voices, as Natalie does in the bath. As she permits herself to take on both her mother's and her own voice, through her doll, she separates herself from herself, and is able to comment on her own actions through her mock disapproval of her own behavior. The taking on of voices is something which happens quite a bit in the context of white-knighting; sometimes from the interactants themselves, and sometimes from "sockpuppets" who are pretending to be anyone from the characters from the original novels or the characters from the fic that is being discussed. Looking at the way this taking on of voices enables the commenters to provide an additional layer of commentary will, I believe, prove fruitful in my own analysis of the ways white-knighting is constructed.

Layers, Lamination and Frames Gordon 2009

It’s always interesting to be introduced to the same data through the eyes of two different researchers. Before this week, I was exposed to the Sloan project data through only the LSA plenary address (Tannen 2010), which is a rather different look than Gordon gives them. Tannen’s focus is on the way that these conversations get rekeyed—turned into conversations about other things, and seems to indicate a process by which they turn, whereas Gordon’s emphasis is on the dialogicality present in the conversations by the virtue of the repetition of strings of the text.

By focusing on the repetition, Gordon uncovers some things that Tannen does not—the intertext in this situation is created by the repetition itself—often verbatim repetition. The words take on new meaning not by who says them and when and in what manner, but by simply being repeated. I think this may be a useful space for me to probe in my own research, as much of what goes on on the internet is verbatim repetition, and the degree to which things are reframed by this repetition would be interesting to uncover.

Particularly interesting, I thought, were the times when the repetition was the source of the rekey, for example, in the "superior research subject" conversation, where the husband and wife turned it from teasing the wife about her recorder to teasing the husband about his teasing. This may be a spot worth probing further for my own research, as again, the rekey happens even with this identical repetition. and in fact it is the repetition itself, and the fact that obviously she's repeating it for a reason, that causes the rekey.

Lost in Translation: Becker 1994

Becker looks at a very particular and very literal kind of prior text in his article, "Repetition and Otherness:" an actual translation of a passage in Classical Malay. He notes the ways in which prior texts define a community and are used by a community, particularly as tropes from which to build other texts, for example, the "how many x does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" This one rang as particularly salient for me--as a graduate student, I spend a great deal of time with other graduate students and newly-minted Ph.D.s, and as a result whenever it takes more than one of us to accomplish some menial task, like putting together a new coffee table, someone inevitably says something along the lines of, "How many Ph.D.s does it take/how many years of graduate education does it take to do x?" In invoking the joke, we're of course tying in not only to the prior text of the "how many" joke, but also in to the humor of the incongruity of whatever (seemingly) simple task we're trying to perform and the supposed expertise that arises from having such advanced educations.

I found most intriguing in Becker's work the idea of the "untranslatable" tropes which rely on these sorts of common prior texts. Even though presumably one could translate a joke such as this one into another language, without the prior text of the joke's history, much of its humor is lost. Instead of drawing on a bank of similar jokes in the listeners' collective memories, it is only an isolated statement, which may have some intrinsic humor by way of incongruities such as the one I mentioned above, but which loses a significant portion of its humor in the absence of the ability to draw on the prior texts of what other versions of the joke have preceded this particular telling.

One thing I also found intriguing was the idea of prior text being invoked by the way in which a text is presented visually. For the Malay speakers, the text under discussion is presented in Arabic, which creates an intertextual tie to the Islamic holy texts which the Malay speakers would have encountered. Although sociolinguists focus a great deal on form in terms of things like syntactic structure, adjacency pairs and the like, we miss a great deal of things which can be communicated by other issues of form, such as prosody and the actual form of in which written text is presented. Sometimes we look at this in terms of some visual representations, and some slxs have looked at, for example, the way the form of a transcript affects the way we think of it (I'm thinking of Bucholtz's article on the politics of transcription here), but I find that on the whole, we could do more in looking at the actual presentation of text to the "reader" (or hearer) of that text.

Becker's article also reminds me of Agha's work on naming, and the way the "baptisimal event" of name-giving invokes the prior texts (my lamination of this term onto Agha's work) of all who have had that name before. Extending the notion of prior text and repetition onto this part of Agha's analysis might yield interesting results.

Snatches of Other Texts: Fairclough 1992

"Intertextuality is basically the property texts have of being full of snatches of other texts, which may be explicitly demarcated or merged in, and which the text may assimilate, contract, ironically echo, and so forth. [Emphasis mine]"

Fairclough's definition of ITXTY is a very interesting one, because I think it explains a great deal of his approach to text and register and discourse and a number of other things which he describes. Most important in his article, I believe, is his vision of texts and discourse as being more parole than lange. I've always been drawn to the term "languaging," because it to me encompasses a lot of what language is--less something static which we can understand through rules and structure (although I'm sure many formal theoretical linguists would disagree with me on that one) but rather something which is shaped on the fly by the ways in which it interacts with other parts of language.

On the note of formal linguistics, however, it was interesting to note that Fairclough appropriated the language of formalism in describing loci of discourse in using the term "complementary distribution," for example, the "school" discourse and register is defined in part by the fact that it is in complementary distribution with the locations which are "non-school," such as home. The question then arises if these loci of discourse exist without the loci that they are defined in contrast to: can we understand "school" discourse without having home discourse and neighborhood discourse to describe it against?

It seems that a lot of meaning arises out of these sorts of juxtapositions--school discourse becomes school discourse precisely because of the discourses that it is not. As we attend to the "snatches" of text which are present in another text, it seems evident that it is not only the presence of these snatches but also in the way they are defined by what they are in contrast to which provide a great deal of their meaning. This, I think, is an important part of intertextuality itself--the ways in which the texts interact with one another and create meaning through their contrasts (or lack thereof).