intertextuality! WHAT IS IT AND WHATS AN EXAMPLE OF IT!?

Question

HELP!

Answer 1

Intertextuality is a relationship between two or more texts that quote from one another, allude to one another, or otherwise connect,

New Testament passages that quote from the Old Testament are one example of intertextuality.

Answer 2

Intertextuality involves the knowledge of one or more texts that a writer or reader brings to a new text. Of course, it may refer to a direct, explicit quotation or allusion, but more often it refers to implicit parallels between texts or variations that one text works upon another. The writer may have intended the parallel or variation, and the reader may be aware of it; but the writer may have also been unconscious of it, relying as he/she does on an inner imagination derived from previous reading/hearing of texts. Furthermore, readers may not realize consciously how their response to a text or their interpretation may have been colored by their previous experiences with parallel texts or variations on a root text.

Here is an technical explanation of the term: "The semiotic notion of intertextuality introduced by Julia Kristeva is associated primarily with poststructuralist theorists. Kristeva referred to texts in terms of two axes: a horizontal axis connecting the author and reader of a text, and a vertical axis, which connects the text to other texts (Kristeva 1980, 69). Uniting these two axes are shared codes: every text and every reading depends on prior codes. Kristeva declared that 'every text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it' (cited in Culler 1981, 105). She argued that rather than confining our attention to the structure of a text we should study its 'structuration' (how the structure came into being)."

Let me give you one or two simple examples. When Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), he may or may not have been taking off from Thomas Bailey Adlrich's Story of a Bad Boy (1870), a semi-autobiographical story about a naughty American boy, whose name happens to be Tom Bailey. Thereafter, stories of American "bad boys" almost inevitably called to mind, either consciously or unconsciously, these predecessors. Even those of us who may not have read them have heard of them and have seen and read other works influenced by them. When J. D. Salinger comes along with Holden Caulfied in Catcher in the Rye (1951), apparently also a semi-autobiographical novel, he is working a (probabably conscious) variation on the story of an American "bad boy," bringing him into the city and to the 20th century. And so the story goes on and on. Stories of "bad boys" proliferate in children's literature. In the Great Brain series, J. D. tells about the adventures of his older brother Tom, called the Great Brain. Again the books are roughly autobiographical, this time involving an Irish Catholic family in Utah. (And, the characters' names, based on the two Fitzgerald brothers, are really Tom and J.D.) Parallels, variations, intertextuality.

Let's take one more example. L. Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz (1900) became well known and his characters, American icons with the 1939 movie starring Judy Garland. Then Gregory Macquire came up with Wicked (1995) focusing on the "wicked" witch Elphaba [from L. F. BAum]; thence, the Broadway musical. But before that was a darker and subtler book by Geoff Ryamn, entitled Was (1992) [rhyming with Oz, of course] based on the actual Dorothy of Kansas (maybe) and the real-life Judy Garland. Now any story about similar characters (say, a tin woodman, or a little girl from Kansas with a pet dog, or a false wizard) cannot be read except in the context of the story that has entered our national consciousness -- the story of Dorothy -- and Judy -- and L. Frank.

That's intertextuality (conscious or unconscious): parallels and variations among texts that, in one way or another, are related, at least in the mind (conscious or unconscious) of writer and/or readers.