Almost every word and phrase we use we have heard or seen before. Our originality and craft as writers come from how we put those words together in new ways to fit our specific situation, needs, and purposes, but we always need to rely on the common stock of language we share with others. If we did not share the language, how would others understand us? Often we do not call attention to where specifically we got our words from. Often the words we use are so common they seem to come from everywhere. At other times we want to give the impression that that we are speaking as individuals from our individuality, concerned only with the immediate moment. Sometimes we just don’t remember where we heard something. On the other hand, at times we do want to call attention to where we got the words from. The source of the words may have great authority, or we may want to criticize those words. We may want to tell a dramatic story associated with particular people with distinctive perspectives in a particular time and place. And when we read or listen to others, we often don’t wonder where their words come from, but sometimes we start to sense the significance of them echoing words and thoughts from one place or another. Analyzing those connections helps us understand the meaning of the text more deeply.
We create our texts out of the sea of former texts that surround us, the sea of language we live in. And we understand the texts of others within that same sea. Sometimes as writers we want to point to where we got those words from and sometime we don’t. Sometimes as readers we consciously recognize where the words and ways of using words come from and at other times the origin just provides an unconsciously sensed undercurrent. And sometimes the words are so mixed and dispersed within the sea, that they can no longer be associated with a particular time, place, group, or writer. Nonetheless, the sea of words always surrounds every text.
The relation each text has to the texts surrounding it, we call intertextuality. Intertextual analysis examines the relation of a statement to that sea of words, how it uses those words, how it positions itself in respect to those other words. There may be many reasons for analyzing the intertextuality of a text. We may want to understand how a school district’s policy statement is drawing on or speaking to educational research and political controversies. We may want to see how students in their writing are expressing knowledge of what they are learning from biology. We may want to understand what techniques are necessary for students to comment intelligently and critically on what they read in history. We may want to understand how students learn to write arguments informed by the best knowledge available, or we may want to see how some popular texts are deeply parts of contemporary culture.
Learning to analyze intertextuality will help you pick through the ways writers draw other characters into their story and how they position themselves within these worlds of multiple texts. It will help you see what sources researchers and theorists build on and which they oppose. It will help you identify the ideas, research, and political positions behind policy documents. It will help you identify what students know about negotiating the complex world of texts, what they have yet to learn, and how their need for particular intertextual skills will vary depending on the tasks they are addressing. Finally it will help you see how students and schools are themselves represented, made sense of, and given identity through intertextual resources that characterize students and schools.
An Example
To give you a concrete sense of how intertextuality works, consider the follow opening of a section from Education Week of October 5, 2000 on the current state of the Middle School.
The Weak Link
By Ann Bradley and Kathleen Kennedy Manzo
The middle grades are feeling the squeeze. For the past 30 years–and with particular intensity since the late 1980s–educators have labored to create distinctive middle schools, whose mission is to attend to young adolescents’ social, emotional, and physical needs as well as their intellectual development.
Yet both proponents of the middle school model and critics of the approach recognize that too many such schools have failed to find their academic way. Instead, the original concept has been undermined by ill-prepared teachers guided by ill-defined curricula.
Middle-level education is now squarely on the defensive. The standards and accountability movement is placing unprecedented demands on the middle grades, typically 6-8. So far, middle schools don’t have much to boast about when it comes to student achievement.
The spotlight has been particularly harsh since 1996, when the Third International Mathematics and Science Study [TIMSS] was released. While U.S. elementary students scored above average, middle and high school students’ scores lagged. The study faulted the American curriculum for being “a mile wide and an inch deep.”
The National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP] and most state tests reveal similar patterns, with minority students tending to fare even worse.
“The middle school is the crux of the whole problem and really the point where we begin to lose it,” says William H. Schmidt, a professor of education at Michigan State University and the U.S. coordinator for TIMSS. “In math and science, the middle grades are an intellectual wasteland.”
The article doesn’t have a fragmentary quotation until the end of the fourth paragraph and a full quoted sentence until the sixth, yet from the beginning it creates an intertextual web of statements that place middle schools in the middle of a controversy and define particular problems that middle schools need to address. The first paragraph in setting out the movement that created the current concept and practice of middle schools evokes the many discussions, philosophical statements, developmental studies, policy papers, school bond initiatives, mission statements, curricular guidelines, training documents, parental information sheets and myriad other documents which guided and made real, and carried on the work of the middle school around the whole child concept.
The second paragraph, again without identifying particular climate, evokes an extensive atmosphere of controversy between “proponents” and “critics.” Further it passes judgment on certain curricula and training (which rest on plans and materials) as inadequate. There is also the implied hint of studies or reports that definitively establish the inadequacy of training and curricula, so that it is implied that both proponents and critics would agree to the inadequacy as the root cause of schools having “failed to find their academic way.” Thus, in general language the paragraph not only establishes a controversy but specifies a problem and root causes that all statements on both sides have already agreed to.
The third paragraph adds another intertextual context for the pressure on middle schools: the standards and accountability movement. This evokes the political battles over education in many states and the nation, as well as particular legislative initiatives undertaken in the name of standards and accountability. The fourth through sixth paragraphs then alight on particular tests, their results, and statements interpreting them to establish with social scientific certitude that there is a specific problem with the middle schools. It is only after all this preparation that we get a direct and forceful quoted statement to drive home the point in the sixth paragraph.
The journalists have created a drama of a movement and its critics, supported by scientific studies to define a problem and take a side in the controversy. The journalists seem to be adopting a neutral, objective voice of simply reporting on as controversy, but they have assembled the characters and recounted the tale so as to focus the issue and then put the words of one powerful critic at the climax. The reporters use the voices of the people and groups they report on to tell their story as much as a novelist uses characters or a ventriloquist uses dummies. Of course if their weren’t a TIMSS or a NAEP with their results or prominent academics making statements the reporters would not have had powerful resources to tell their story, nor would they have likely to have come to the same conclusions. Yet of the many ways these and other potential materials could have been used to create an overall statement and position of this article, the authors/reporters chose this particular way of putting the voices together in a story.
Basic Concepts
Intertextuality. The explicit and implicit relations that a text or utterance has to prior, contemporary and potential future texts. Through such relations a text evokes a representation of the discourse situation, the textual resources that bear on the situation, and how the current text positions itself and draws on other texts. While this is now a widely recognized phenomenon, there is not a standard shared analytic vocabulary for considering the elements and kinds of intertextuality. The terms I introduce below are an attempt to capture key dimensions and aspects of intertextuality.
Levels of intertextuality. For purposes of analysis we may distinguish the different levels at which a text explicitly invokes another text and relies on the other text as a conscious resource.
1. The text may draw on prior texts as a source of meanings to be used at face value. This occurs whenever one text takes statements from another source as authoritative and then repeats that authoritative information or statement for the purposes of the new text. In a U.S. Supreme Court decision, passages from the U.S. Constitution can be cited and taken as authoritative givens, even though the application to the case at hand may be argued. In the example discussed above, the title of the news article “The Weak Link” invokes and takes at face value the old adage that “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.”
2. The text may draw explicit social dramas of prior texts engaged in discussion. When a newspaper story, for example, quotes opposing views of Senators, teachers’ unions, community activist groups, and reports from think tanks concerning a current controversy over school funding, they portray an intertextual social drama. The newspaper report is shaping a story of opponents locked in political struggle. That struggle may in fact preexist the newspaper story and the opponents may be using the newspapers to get their view across as part of that struggle; nonetheless, the newspaper brings the statements side by side in a direct confrontation.
3. Text may also explicitly use other statements as background, support, and contrast. Whenever a student cites figures from an encyclopedia, uses newspaper reports to confirm events, or uses quotations from a work of literature to support an analysis, they are using sources in this way. In the example above, the reporters use the TIMSS and NAEP data to back up their assertion about troubles of middle schools.
4. Less explicitly the text may rely on beliefs, issues, ideas, statements generally circulated and likely familiar to the readers, whether they would attribute the material to a specific source or would just understand as common knowledge. The constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, may, for example, lie behind a newspaper editorial on a controversial opinion expressed by a community leader, without any specific mention of the Constitution. The news article discussed above relies on the middle school mission “to attend to young adolescents’ social, emotional, and physical needs.” This phrase relies most directly on familiar discussions about how schools can serve the whole child, calls for schools and other institutions to deal with the problems of youth, and journalistic, academic, and policy presentations of school programs that succeed and fail. The statement more indirectly relies on common and oft-restated beliefs about the difficult transitions of adolescents as well as fictional, journalistically embellished, and honestly factual accounts of troubled youth and youth violence.
5. By using certain implicitly recognizable kinds of language, phrasing, and genres, every text evokes particular social worlds where such language and language forms are used, usually to identify that text as part of those worlds. This book, for example, uses language recognizably associated with the university, research, and textbooks. In the example above, paragraph by paragraph the news article moves us through the worlds of school and administrative policy, political contention, statistical analysis, and contentious policy debate.
6. Just by using language and language forms, a text relies on the available resources of language without calling particular attention to the intertext. Every text, all the time, relies on the available language of the period, and is part of the cultural world of the times. In the example news report, the opening sentence relies on familiarity with the “middle grades” concept, which came out of the mid-twentieth century movement to create middle schools. It also relies on familiarity with the idiomatic phrase “feeling the squeeze” which had its origins in underworld language and then worked its way into sports and business.
Techniques of intertextual representation. These levels of intertextuality can be recognized through certain techniques that represent the words and utterances of others, starting with the most explicit:
1. direct quotation. Usually identified by quotation marks, block indentation, italics, or other typographic setting apart from the other words of the text. While the words may be entirely those of the original author, however, it is important to remember that the second author, in quoting the writing, has control over exactly which words will be quoted, the points at which the quote will be snipped, and the context it will be used in.
2. indirect quotation. This usually specifies a source and then attempts to reproduce the meaning of the original but in words that reflect the author’s understanding, interpretation, or spin on the original. Indirect quotation filters the meaning through the second author’s words and attitude and allows the meanings to be more thoroughly infused with the second writer’s purpose.
3. mentioning of a person, document or statements. Mentioning a document or author relies on the reader’s familiarity with the original source and what it says. No details of meaning are specified, so the second writer has even greater opportunity to imply what he or she wants about the original or to rely on general beliefs about the original without having to substantiate them, as the news reporters do with respect to proponents and critics.
4. comment or evaluation on a statement, text, or otherwise invoked voice. The reporters in the example above accept as truthful and definitive the TIMSS and NAEP studies, although they have been in fact criticized. They also see “the original concept undermined” and they pass judgment on curricula as “ill-defined.”
5. using recognizable phrasing, terminology associated with specific people or groups of people or particular documents. In the example article, William Schmidt criticizes middle grade math and science education by the phrase “an intellectual wasteland” that recalls Newton Minnow’s famous statement of the sixties calling television “a vast intellectual wasteland.” This echo not only evokes major public controversy over educational issues, but also implicitly suggests that middle school education has no more value than television as an educational tool.
6. using language and forms that seem to echo certain ways of communicating, discussions among other people, types of documents. Genre, kinds of vocabulary (or register), stock phrases, patterns of expression may be of this sort. The reporters of the example article clearly are writing within the forms of journalism over public policy controversies. And as mentioned previously the language of that article brings us through worlds of educational planning, political movements, statistical evaluation, and policy controversy.
Usually the most explicit purposes and formal expressions of intertextuality (those at the top of the previous two lists) are most easily recognizable and therefore most easily analyzable. It is with these more explicit forms we will introduce intertextual analysis here, and only suggest the possibilities for examination of the more implicit forms of intertextuality.
Intertextual distance or reach. Intertextual relations are also usually most easily recognizable when the textual borrowings involve some distance in time, space, culture, or institution. Phrases that are common and unremarkable in sports such as “stepping up to the plate”—just part of the ordinary way of talking that everyone shares—become a bit remarkable when they start appearing in political contexts, such as when a congressperson talks about the courage to take a stand on an issue by talking about “stepping up to the plate.” This phrase, used metaphorically, can signal us that the political situation is being viewed like a sporting event and that the standing up for a position is being viewed as an individual competitive performance. It would be even more likely to be noticed and remarked on if the term turned up in a piece of legislation. How far a text travels for its intertextual relations we can call the intertextual reach.
Often a document draws on bits of text that appear earlier in the text, echoing and building on it, in what we might call intratextual reference. A text can reach a bit farther, but stay in a limited domain when a company memo refers to and relies on previous memo from the company on the same case. We might call this intra-file intertextuality. Interesting questions rely on the way texts within a file or other collection pull together to make a representation of a case or subject–we might call such a phenomenon the intertextual collection. A classroom might equally create a fairly closed world of classroom intertextuality, between the lectures, the textbook, assignment sheets, class discussion, and student exams and papers. Classroom intertextuality broadens as students and teachers bring outside reading to bear, refer to other courses, start discussing applications to issues found in the newspapers or television documentaries. Some research disciplines are fairly contained, relying only on an explicit disciplinary intertextuality (although there may be unnoticed reliance on other fields), while others have a much larger interdisciplinary reach, and those have a broader interdisciplinary intertextuality.
Outside of the academic disciplinary world, we might speak of intracorporate or intraindustry intertextuality, but again the reach may broaden into intrasystem intertextuality, if, for example, corporate documents attend to larger corporate policies, government law and regulations, documents of other companies, economic predictions, consumer culture and so on.
Finally we should notice intermediality, when the resource or reference moves from one medium to another, as when talk, or movies, or music is alluded to in a written text.
Translation across contexts/recontextualization. Each time someone else’s words, or words from one document or another part of the same document, are used in a new context, the earlier words are recontextualized, and thereby given new meaning in the new context. Sometimes the recontextualization goes unnoticed as the earlier meanings are not far from the meaning in the new context. Sometimes, however, the shift is significant as when the name of a medical procedure, developed among surgeons and used within hospitals gets brought up in financial discussions with insurance companies, when the procedure then becomes a matter of costs and who will pay. When the term travels to discussion of medical ethics it takes on new meanings and concerns. Then the same term when put into a public debate over medical policy comes to carry a host of other meanings, particularly when the procedure may involve reproductive rights or some similarly controversial issues.
Sometimes the recontextualization may also put the words into a less friendly or more critical context, or some context that comments on, evaluates, or puts the other words at a distance. An opponent of an abortion rights act may call it the “so called reproductive choice act. The phrase so called signals a criticism of the way his opponents use the word choice. In talking with his friends a teenager may mock his teachers just by repeating their favorite phrases using an odd tone of voice. The philosopher in a scholarly book, by identifying a set of ideas as Locke’s theory of the senses holds those ideas up for examination and possible criticism. In such recontextualizations the current author takes a stance, adopts an attitude, comments on, or evaluates the original words. We might call such recontextualizations intertextual comment.
Finally within specific genres (see Chapter 11) there may be typical and expected patterns of intertextuality. For examples, as John Swales (1990) has shown, in research article introductions, authors cite the previous literature to establish that a problem exists and what is known, and then to identify a needed new kind of study not covered by the previous work. This definition of the limits of previous research creates the research space of the new work.
Another example of generically expected intertextuality occurs in the news story about a controversial issue, where you can expect quotations from people on opposite sides of the issue, or the newspaper story about a disaster where you can expect quotations from witnesses or victims.
Methodological issues
As with any form of research and analysis the first and most important task is knowing why you are engaged in the enterprise and what questions you hope to answer by it. Intertextual analysis might, for example, help you identify which realm of utterances an author relies on and how, or how an author tries to ensure the readers see the subject through a certain set of texts, or how an author tries to position himself or herself in relation to others who have made statements, or to understand how a researcher is attempting to characterize, rely on and advance prior work in her and related fields, or to understand how students are assimilating and developing a synthetic or critical understanding of subject materials. Although one may begin with broad exploratory questions the sooner one can determine what one is looking for, the more one can refine one’s analysis so as to probe more deeply into the material.
Once you know what you are looking for and why, the next task is to identify the specific texts you want to examine, making them extensive enough to provide substantial evidence in making claims, but not too broad to become unmanageable. Often intertextual analysis is quite intensive, so one may limit one’s study to a single short text, at least at first, to focus one’s inquiry. However, if you decide to use very visible and obvious markers of intertextuality, such as considering only the works cited list to see which authors some individual or groups rely on, than you might be able to do a broad quantitative study on a large corpus. After doing an intensive pilot study on a small text you may have identified a small set of easily identifiable features that are relevant to your question and you want to focus on, so you may then move to a more extensive study. But remember if you move to more extensive analysis, do not try to answer questions that require detailed intensive analysis.
Having identified your corpus the next step is to identify the traces of other texts that you wish to consider. This is most easily done when you wish to examine explicit overt references to other authors, as revealed in direct quotation or formal scholarly references or works cited lists.
If you are working with explicit references you might underline or highlight each such reference in the text and then create a list of all instances, leaving open adjoining columns to add in further observations and interpretations. You might in the next column list how it is expressed whether through a direct quotation, indirect quotation or just paraphrase or description–but still attributed. Then in the next column you may begin interpreting the intertextuality, making comments on how or for what purpose the intertextual element is being used in the new text.
Then from these basic facts, you may start making observations and interpretations by considering the reference in relation to the context of what the author is saying it. Depending on the purposes of your analysis, you might ask why the writer is bringing in the reference, how the person referred to relates to the issue or story at hand, whether the writer is expressing any evaluation or attitude toward the intertextual resource, how the original may have been excerpted or transformed to fit in with the author’s current concerns, and whether the reference is linked to other statements in the text or other intertextual references.
If your analytical purpose leads you to look at unattributed or background intertextuality, you will need to look for more subtle clues. Some distinctive words, well known now or at the time of the original writing and circulation of the document can suggest that the author was evoking a whole realm of language and attitudes, so you might look for similar or related words. Thus if we see an author appealing to “the inalienable rights of citizens” we would look in a more orderly way for other words and concepts echoing the Declaration of Independence. We may even pull out our copy to remind us of all the terms and concepts we might search for.
In the same way if a word or phrase seems out of keeping with the general tone, level, or sets of words, we might begin to ask where these words came from, what other kind of document they might reflect, and if there any other similar borrowings in the text.
Again you would then do well to make a list of such words that evoke some world or group or actors outside the text. Then in the second column you might list who those words evoke and then how they are used here to give a particular impression, then in a further column you may interpret the evocative words in relation to the context they are used in.
Whatever the focus of your analysis, from your examples you should start looking for a pattern from which you start developing conclusions, which again would depend on the purpose of your examination. If your aim is to examine how the author coordinates intertextual elements into a single coherent statement, your focus will be on the techniques the author uses to draw the voices of others into the central argument and relate them to each other through the overall perspective being developed. If your aim is to examine the degree of manipulation in the intertextual borrowing, you may wish to consult the original sources and compare the original presentation to the way the new author represents his or her sources.
Applied Analyses
The most visible intertextuality occurs when people comment on some other’s words, as they frequently have to do in school assignments. In a fifth grade class, for example, which was assigned to write responses to Ray Bradbury’s story “All Summer in a Day,” a student referred to the following passage from the story:
And they had written small stories or essays about it.
I think the sun is a Flower
That blooms for just one hour.
That was Margot’s poem, read in a quiet voice in the still classroom while the rain was falling outside.
“Aw, you didn’t write that!” protested one of the boys.
One student, C., quotes the lines directly, and then rephrases the meaning in a personal way to explain how he connects to the feelings of the character.
…I think she felt really, really bad, as much as I did, because she could just remember the sun. She wrote in her poem, “I think that the sun is a flower that blooms for just one hour.” That line made me think of a beautiful flower that blooms for just one hour.
The quotation and the personal rephrasing of what is evoked in his imagination brings C. into relation with the meanings of the text and articulates a bond of feeling for the character. In his commentary, C. aligns himself very closely to the character Margot.
Another student in another year, writing about the same story, references the same passage, but to make a different point and adopt a different position with respect to the character and story. The student R, to support her claim that “the way Margot was treated in the story was not nice,” draws inferences about behaviors described in the story.
I say that because of the way the kids were treating her, like when Margot wrote her poem: I think the sun is like a flower that blooms for just one hour.” A kid did not like her just because she remembered the sun and he was jealous. He told her that she did not write the poem.
R, in addition to quoting the couplet from the story also paraphrases an additional line about the response of one boy; she also makes an interpretive statement tying the two statements and characters together in an emotional drama, which she has then framed in an evaluation of the boy’s behavior. In doing so she does done more than extract and sympathize with one character’s thought; she has made judgments about the meaning and morality of both words and events portrayed in the story. She also has attributed meaning to more than the words of one or two characters—she has attributed meaning to the author of the story who has created the dramatic incident. (Data collected by Beth Yaeger).
Conclusion
This classroom example along with the earlier journalistic example strikingly display that intertextuality is not just a matter of which other texts you refer to, but how you use them, what you use them for, and ultimately how you position yourself as a writer to them to make your own statement. People can develop adeptly complex and subtly skilled ways of building on the words of others. Such complex intertextual performances are so familiar we hardly notice them.