Universidad Central de Venezuela

Facultad de Humanidades y Educación

Maestría en Inglés como Lengua Extranjera
Discourse

Intertextuality
Presenters:
Belloso, Yleni
Meza, Norwick

Caracas, November 20th, 2014

 Borrowing that invites a Why the author is chooses a
comparison between your particular literary or social text,
understanding of the text how it is included in the text, and
outside of the book, and its what is its effect on the reader.
use by the author.
Reference to or application
of a literary, media, or social
“text” within another literary,
media, or social “text.”

INTERTEXTUALITY

She argued against the concept of a Notion introduced by

text as isolated entity which operates Julia Kristeva
in a self-contained manner and states
that:
“Any text is the absorption or
transformation of another text”
•When a book refers to a second book by title, scene, character, or
storyline, or when a book refers to a social “text” such as a media,
social, or cultural story
•Almost every episode of the Simpsons contains intertextual references
to at least one film or a famous film scene, a famous book author,
musician, social or historical event, politics, religion, etc.

Edgar Allan Poe and

Bohemian Rhapsody by
Queen.
 “La persistencia de la
memoria” by
Salvador Dalí

The Bible
Adan and Eve

“The shinning”
directed by
Stanley Kubrick
Homer Simpson and The Raven
by Edgar Allan Poe
•Every text is a mosaic of references to other texts, genres and
discourses.
•In 1968 Barthes announced “the death of the author” and “the birth of
the reader” declaring that “a “text” unity lies not in its origin but in its
destination” - - postmodernism.
•The reader creates meaning.
•This requires from the audience the necessary background knowledge
and experience to make sense of such references.
•Intertextuality is also reflected in the fluidity of genre boundaries and in
the blurring of genres.
 Forms of Intertextuality
•A brief or prolonged reference to a literary text in a second
literary text.
1. Book in a Book •The author can simply use the title, adopt a famous
character name, or revisiting a famous scene from another
book.

•A brief or prolonged reference to a media or social

“text” in a literary text.
•Author´s reference to a film, tv show, or song.
2. Other “Text” in a Book
• That reference does not need to be necessarily
taken form the same type of text. Therefore, there can
be a reference of a story within a book, even though
the story is not a piece of literature
 allusion

quotation

calque

plagiarism

Intertextual figures include

translation,
pastiche and parody
Comparison
Implicit comparison by putting two
“texts” together. When literature
references another text, we are
asked to draw from our
knowledge of the text in its
original form, and compare this to
how it is being used, changed, or
reframed by the primary book.
Intertextuality functions on
comparison and contrast of
similarities and differences.
Dialogue
Intertextuality invites a
conversational dialogue between
two “texts.”
Destabilization
Intertextuality can sometimes destabilize, or
shake up our understanding of, the original
text being referenced or a scene or idea in
the primary book. The book may be
presenting a scene, character, or argument
that we feel we are beginning to understand
when it is disrupted and destabilized by entry
of this intertext.

Functions
Effects
1. Transformation of the Primary Book
The first influence intertexuality can have is on a reader’s understanding of the primary book. This is a matter of evaluating
effect on the book at hand. Why does the primary book choose this similar or dissimilar intertext, where is it used, how does
it add to or change our understanding of the scene it is in, and how does it evoke important arguments the book is making
overall?
2. Transformation of a Prior Text
Intertextuality can also influence our understanding of the original text, causing us to “reflexively” re-read, or reconsider, our
understanding of the original text. Even if the outside text is not being reworded or rewritten in any way, by placing it in a
new book, the outside text is reframed and therefore changed. Does the author explicitly or implicitly change the intertext
from its original form and in what ways?
3. Reinterpretation of Both
Intertextuality can create a simultaneous re-reading of both the primary book and its intertext. This involves a back-and-
forth re-reading of each text based on what their similarities and differences reveal about one another.
 “In any event, by the late 1970´s or early 1980´s it was coming to be taken
as central that intertexuality and interdiscursivity were the fundamental
nature of all texts. That is, all texts represent different voices engaged in
implied if not actual dialog with each other.”

dialogism (daɪˈæləˌdʒɪzəm) (Rhetoric) rhetoric a discussion in an imaginary

dialogue or discourse,
the representation of an author’s thoughts through his use of a dialogue
between two or more of his characters.

The use in a text of different tones or viewpoints, whose interaction or

contradiction is important to the text’s interpretation.
 Heteroglossia
Heteroglossia a diversity of voices, styles Bakhtin defined heteroglossia as a
of discourse, or points of view in a literary blending of world views through language
work and especially a novel that creates complex unity from a hybrid of
noun utterances. The writer (author) of policy,
the existence of two or more voices within a text, esp. the readers (audience), and the
conflicting discourses within a linguistic activity as
between the narrative voice and the characters in a stakeholders (characters) co-create a
novel cultural reality (novel) vision from the new
Word Origin policy
coined by Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, Russian
philosopher
This analysis emphasises the combination of existing statements or speech-genres to construct a text.
Each novel is constructed from a diversity of styles and voices, assembled into a structured artistic
system which arranges difference in a particular way.
This is a challenge to the idea of linguistic creativity as an original and individual use of language. Even
within a single perspective, there are always multiple voices and perspectives, because the language
which is used has been borrowed from others. Bakhtin argues that this is not simply creativity by the
author. He is highly critical of such an emphasis on the author, which he sees as expressing a
monological view of the novel.
Rather, the author performs a particular syncretic expression of social heteroglossia. The originality is
in the combination, not the elements.
The social and historical world is also characterised by heteroglossia and discursive struggle.
On a social scale, Bakhtin criticises those (such as Saussure) who view language as a closed system.
He sees such views as complicit in the creation of a unified language as a vehicle of centralised power.
Most often, the ‘standard’ language (such as standard English) is taken from the speech of the elite.
Such an elevation of a particular hegemonic language suppresses the heteroglossia of multiple
everyday speech-types. Everyday speech is commanded to conform to official style so as to be
recognised as part of a privileged, closed-off speech-community.
http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/in-theory-bakhtin-1/
The English terms dialogic and dialogism often refer to the concept used by the Russian philosopher
Mikhail Bakhtin in his work of literary theory, The Dialogic Imagination. Bakhtin contrasts the dialogic and
the "monologic" work of literature. The dialogic work carries on a continual dialogue with other works of
literature and other authors. It does not merely answer, correct, silence, or extend a previous work, but
informs and is continually informed by the previous work. Dialogic literature is in communication with
multiple works. This is not merely a matter of influence, for the dialogue extends in both directions, and
the previous work of literature is as altered by the dialogue as the present one is. Though Bakhtin's
"dialogic" emanates from his work with colleagues in what we now call the "Bakhtin Circle" in years
following 1918, his work was not known to the West or translated into English until the 1970s. For those
only recently introduced to Bakhtin's ideas but familiar with T.S.Eliot, his "dialogic" is consonant with
Eliot's ideas in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," where Eliot holds that "the past should be altered by
the present as much as the present is directed by the past".[For Bakhtin, the influence can also occur at
the level of the individual word or phrase as much as it does the work and even the oeuvre or collection
of works. A German cannot use the word "fatherland" or the phrase "blood and soil" without (possibly
unintentionally) also echoing (or, Bakhtin would say "refracting") the meaning that those terms took on
under Nazism. Every word has a history of usage to which it responds, and anticipates a future response.
The term 'dialogic' does not only apply to literature. For Bakhtin, all language — indeed, all thought —
appears as dialogical. This means that everything anybody ever says always exists in response to things
that have been said before and in anticipation of things that will be said in response. In other words, we
do not speak in a vacuum. All language (and the ideas which language contains and communicates) is
dynamic, relational and engaged in a process of endless redescriptions of the world.
Bakhtin also emphasized certain uses of language that maximized the dialogic nature of words, and
other uses that attempted to limit or restrict their polyvocality. At one extreme is novelistic discourse,
particularly that of a Dostoevsky (or Mark Twain) in which various registers and languages are allowed to
interact and respond to each other. At the other extreme would be the military order (or 1984 newspeak)
which attempts to minimize all orientations of the work toward the past or the future, and which prompts
no response but obedience.
When scholars, like Julia Kristeva, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, rediscovered Bakhtin, his work
seemed to fit with the then-nascent concepts of "intertextuality". And European social psychologists
applied Bakhtin's work to the study of human social experience, preferring it as a more dynamic
alternative to Cartesian monologicality.
 References

Teaching The God of Small Things in Wisconsin Great World Texts: A Program of
the Center for the Humanities, University of Wisconsin-Madison Written by Tracy
Lemaster © 2012 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
http://humanities.wisc.edu/assets/misc/What_Is_Intertextuality.pdf

Handbook of discourse analysis. Edited by Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen &

Heidi E. Hamilton
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/heteroglossia

http://www2.hawaii.edu/~pesaconf/zpdfs/1
6white.pdf DIALOGISM

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/es/defini
cion/ingles_americano/dialogism
Dialogism http://www.thefreedictionary.com/dialogism
http://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/heteroglossia
http://www2.bgsu.edu/departments/english/cconline/wills/hereroglossia.html