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.

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.