Everything is a remix

Intertextuality = Connecting 2 or more Texts

Intertextuality refers to instances in which a text’s meaning (story, book, article, art, song, video, movie) is influenced by another text. These types of references can be subtle or obvious. The key idea is that these intertextual references allow for a deeper understanding of the texts.

Intertextual thinking can also be looking at patterns of events across stories, or looking at how authors have chosen to convey ideas about the same topic in different ways or across different time periods.

Intertextuality is the ways in which artistic works overlap. Purposeful intertextuality is called deliberate intertextuality while accidental intertextuality is called latent intertextuality. Examples of intertextuality include allusion, homage, pastiche, parody, and plagiarism. Furthermore, it is the idea that no text can exist as a self-sufficient whole or function as a closed system. This is because any work is shot through with external references, in influences, and quotations. Also, the reception of a text is informed by other texts, which questions the idea of originality because people’s ideas are usually inspired by those of others. Click here to learn more!

Origins: Intertextuality is a complex and contested term. It was first used (in French) by Julia Kristeva in the 1960s, even if the notion, in some form, pre-existed Kristeva by centuries. The language of those literary theorists who write about intertextuality can seem frighteningly formidable, at least to this writer. Mention of intertextuality throws up a range of vexing questions: What, for example, is originality, and where does originality begin? Can meaning ever reside independently in a text, or is all meaning relational, intertextual, and thus always receding out of sight? And if all meaning is interdependent – text to text – can we say anything for certain about a text, or does anything go? Does it even make sense to refer to literary ‘works’ as unitary entries? The questions are worth exploring, and they take English Language and Literature into the realm of Theory of Knowledge (TOK), encouraging students to think hard and critically about language and meaning.

The concept of TRANSFORMATION is bound to the idea of intertextuality. Texts may be said to exist not as isolated unitary works, but rather as intertexts in which the meanings of any one text is always bound to other earlier texts. Such an understanding highlights the connections that exist between a text, other texts, and meaning. Texts may be said to appropriate and borrow from other texts, extending, changing, and challenging in creative and imaginative ways that which has gone before. Readers too are transformed by texts where reading is understood as an act of creative construction rather than linear transmission. Moreover, the act of reading may transform readers in more direct ways. That is, reading can influence how we think and how we behave. If the IB mission statement endeavours to establish a better and more peaceful world -therefore, literary works and non-literary texts that have the potential to transform hearts and minds will be at the forefront of learning.

Texts, whether they be literary or non-literary, are viewed by modern theorists as lacking in any kind of independent meaning. They are what theorists now call intertextual. The act of reading, theorists claim, plunges us into a network of textual relations. To interpret a text, to discover its meaning, or meanings, is to trace those relations. Reading thus becomes a process of reading between texts. Meaning becomes something which exists between a text and all the other texts to which it refers and relates, moving out from the independent text into a network of textual relations. The text becomes the intertext.