INTERTEXT

What is Intertextuality? It is the interconnection between similar or related works of literature in terms
of language, images, characters, themes, or subjects depending on their similarities in language, genre, or
discourse that reflects and influences an audience’s interpretation of the text. Intertextuality is the relation
between texts that are inflicted by means of quotations and allusion.

Example:
1. Tailor Swift’s song “Love Story” makes intertextuality references to Romeo and Juliet and the “ Scarlet
Letter”: “ Cause you were Romeo, I was a scarlet letter and my daddy said stay away from Juliet.

2. Another example of Intertextuality is also seen in the local legend of folk hero Bernardo Carpio. Many
versions of his tale exist, but local folklore says he is a giant who is the cause of earthquakes. In Greek
mythology, there is also Poseidon, who is the god of the sea and earthquakes. Many cultures also
attribute natural disasters to legendary figures.

Intertextuality or intertext is one method of text development that enables the author to make another
text based on another text. It happens when some properties of an original text are incorporated in the text that
is created by another author.
 when an author borrows and transforms a prior text, or when you read one text and you reference
another
 recognize the text is always influenced by the previous text and in turn anticipates future texts

WHAT ARE THE TYPES OF INTERTEXT

1. REVISION – Features a close relationship between anterior and posterior texts, wherein the latter takes
identity from the former, even as it departs from it
2. TRANSLATION – transfers, carries across, a text into a different language, recreates it a new.
3. QUOTATIONS – literally reproduces the anterior text (whole or part) in a later text
4. PARODY – an imitation of a particular writer, artist or a genre, exaggerating it deliberately to produce
a comic effect
5. PASTICHE – literary piece that imitates another famous literary work of another writer with the
purpose of honoring it and not mocking it.
6. TRAVESTY - is a practice of imitation an original text
7. COVERING it is a rendering a previously recorded song that displays the usual stylistic configurations
of the covering artist.

Reading and Writing Skills| 4th Quarter| Module 5l Week 9 - 10 1

 8. INSTRUMENTAL COVER - Instrumental/all sonic rendering of a previously recorded song where the
main vocal line has been replaced by an instrumental melodic line.
9. INSTRUMENTAL REMIX: a remix of the original song from which the leading voice has simply
been removed

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?
1. It brings another context, idea, story into the text at hand
2. Provides one way for students to compose their own texts

Majority of the writers borrow ideas from the previous works to give a layer of meanings to their
works.
For writers, intertextuality allows them to open new perspective and possibilities to construct their
story. Thus, writer may explore a particular ideology in their narrative by discussing recent rhetoric in original
text.

Intertextuality is the shaping of a text meaning by another text. Intertextual figures include: allusion,
quotation, calque, translation, pastiche and parody. An example of intertextuality is an author’s borrowing and
transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. Derived from the Latin
intertexto, meaning to intermingle while weaving, intertextuality is a term first introduced by French
semiotician Julia Kristeva in the late sixties.
In essays such as "Word, Dialogue, and Novel," Kristeva broke with traditional notions of the author's
"influences" and the text's "sources," positing that all signifying systems, from table settings to poems, are
constituted by the manner in which they transform earlier signifying systems. A literary work, then, is not
simply the product of a single author, but of its relationship to other texts and to the structures of language itself.
"Any text," she argues, "is constructed of a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation
of another" (66).
Intertextuality is, thus, a way of accounting for the role of literary and extra-literary materials without
recourse to traditional notions of authorship. It subverts the concept of the text as self-sufficient, hermetic
totality, foregrounding, in its stead, the fact that all literary production takes place in the presence of other texts;
they are, in effect, palimpsests. For Roland Barthes, who proclaimed the death of the author, it is the fact of
intertextuality that allows the text to come into being: Any text is a new tissue of past citations. Bits of code,
formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social languages, etc., pass into the text and are redistributed within it,
for there is always language before and around the text.
Intertextuality, the condition of any text whatsoever, cannot, of course, be reduced to a problem of
sources or influences; the intertext is a general field of anonymous formulae whose origin can scarcely ever be
located; of unconscious or automatic quotations, given without quotation marks. ("Theory of the Text" 39).
Thus writing is always an iteration which is also a re-iteration, a re-writing which foregrounds the trace of the
various texts it both knowingly and unknowingly places and dis-places.
Intertext need not be simply "literary"--historical and social determinants are themselves signifying
practices which transform and inflect literary practices. (Consider, for example, the influence of the capitalist
mode of production upon the rise of the novel.) Moreover, a text is constituted, strictly speaking, only in the
moment of its reading. Thus the reader's own previous readings, experiences and position within the cultural
formation also form crucial intertext.
The concept of intertextuality thus dramatically blurs the outlines of the book, dispersing its image of
totality into an unbounded, illimitable tissue of connections and associations, paraphrases and fragments, texts
and con-texts. For many hypertext authors and theorists, intertextuality provides an apt description of the kind
of textual space which they, like the figures in Remedio Varo's famous "Bordando el Manto Terrestre," find
themselves weaving: a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to
fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships, and forests of the earth were
contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. (Pynchon 10)

Reading and Writing Skills| 4th Quarter| Module 5l Week 9 - 10 2