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.