INTERTEXTUALITY

What is Intertextuality?

Intertextuality (pronounced in-terr-text-yoo-a-lih-tee) is not a literary or rhetorical device, but rather a fact
about literary texts – the fact that they are all intimately interconnected. This applies to all texts: novels,
works of philosophy, newspaper articles, films, songs, paintings, etc. In order to understand
intertextuality, it’s crucial to understand this broad definition of the word “text.”
Every text is affected by all the texts that came before it, since those texts influenced the author’s thinking
and aesthetic choices. Remember: every text (again in the broadest sense) is intertextual.

II. Examples of Intertextiality

Example 1
Fan fiction is a great example of deliberate intertextuality. In fan fiction, authors enter the fictional worlds
of other authors and create their own stories. For example, a Lord of the Rings fan fiction might tell the
story of minor characters or add new characters to the world of Middle Earth. Sometimes, fan fiction
becomes extremely successful in its own right – 50 Shades of Grey was originally written as Twilight fan
fiction.
Example 2
Martin Luther King’s writing was heavily influenced by the work of Mohandas Gandhi, especially in the
area of nonviolent resistance. Much of this intertextuality was deliberate, with King explicitly crediting
Gandhi as one of his influences. Scholars, however, have debated whether there might have been other
aspects of Gandhi’s writing, such as his aesthetic style, that also influenced King in a more latent way.

III. Types of Intertextuality

a. Deliberate Intertextuality

Sometimes, intertextuality is the result of an author’s choice. When a heavy metal artist makes
references to Norse mythology, or when a novelist draws on the works of Shakespeare as
inspiration, these choices forge a relationship between the old text and the new. We can call this
deliberate intertextuality.

b. Latent Intertextuality

Even when an author isn’t deliberately employing intertextuality, though, intertextuality is still
there. You can’t escape it! Everything you’ve ever seen or read sticks somewhere in your
memory and affects your understanding of the world. They all contribute to building your
specific worldview which, in turn, determines how you write or create art. We can call this
latent intertextuality.

Of course, since we can’t read an author’s mind, it’s not always easy to know the difference
between deliberate and latent intertextuality. We might find a similarity between two texts, but
we have no way to know whether it was deliberate or accidental unless the author tells us!

IV. The Importance of Intertextuality

Intertextuality shows how much a culture can influence its authors, even as the authors in turn
influence the culture. When you create a work of art, literature, or scholarship, you are inevitably
influenced by everything that you’ve seen or read up to that point. Even seemingly disparate
fields, such as music and philosophy, can exert a strong influence on each other through
intertextuality – the philosopher Nietzsche, for example, was heavily influenced by the early
operas of Richard Wagner. Similarly, authors from different cultures and historical periods can
influence each other!

Intertextuality also shows how a similar cultural, religious, political, or moral ideology can be
expressed in very different ways through different cultural practices. For example, think about
the way that art, music, literature, and philosophy all changed in the aftermath of World War I.
This earth-shattering event made people feel like nothing was stable or certain, and this was
reflected in all aspects of artistic and scholarly pursuits. Post-war paintings were far more
abstract and chaotic; post-war philosophy was nearly obsessed with problems of evil and
unpredictability; post-war music was more formless and atonal; post-war novels questioned the
rules of linear structure and chronology. Every aspect of the society was affected by the events of
this bloody war, and everything produced in its aftermath shows plenty of latent (and sometimes
deliberate) intertextuality.

V. Examples of Intertextuality in Literature

Example 1

James Joyce’s Ulysses was a deliberate retelling of Homer’s Odyssey, but transplanted out of
ancient Greece into modern-day Dublin. The various chapters in Joyce’s novel correspond to the
adventures of Odysseus in Homer’s epic poem. For Joyce, the point of this deliberate
intertextuality was to show that ordinary people can experience something heroic in their
everyday lives.

Example 2

Steven Pressfield’s novel The Legend of Bagger Vance, which was adapted into a movie starring
Will Smith, was originally written as a re-telling of the Hindu epic Bhagavad Gita – the name
“Bagger Vance” is supposed to sound like “Bhagavad.” In the original Hindu epic, the god
Krishna discusses the importance of enlightenment and warrior virtues with Prince Arjuna – the
novel/movie transplants this ancient story onto the links of a golf course.

VI. Examples of Intertextuality in Pop Culture

Example 1

The actor Christopher Guest appeared in countless comedic movies in the 1980s, including such
classics as The Princess Bride (1987) and This Is Spinal Tap (1984). In the earlier film, he plays
a heavy metal guitarist whose amplifier, as we learn in one scene, can be turned up to 11 instead
of the usual 10. Three years later, he appeared on screen again playing a man with 6 fingers on
his right hand – the character had 11 fingers instead of 10. Fans have wondered ever since
whether this was a deliberate reference to Spinal Tap or just an accident: deliberate or latent
intertextuality?

Example 2

Most people today have seen Star Wars, but many do not realize that it was intended to be an
intertextual work, based on the psychological theories of Joseph Campbell. Campbell wrote a
book called Hero With a Thousand Faces, which describes a single, universal form of hero-
stories that appears in cultures all over the world. George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars,
wanted to explore this idea of the cross-cultural heroic ideal in the character of Luke Skywalker.

VII. Related Terms

External Allusion

Allusion is a particularly common form of deliberate intertextuality – it’s when one text makes a
deliberate, but subtle, reference to another.

Citation

Citation is another common form of deliberate intertextuality – unlike allusion, it isn’t subtle at
all! The point of a citation is to acknowledge, loud and clear, that the author is borrowing an idea
or phrase from someone else. Citation is about giving credit to the original author.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is stealing another person’s work without giving them proper credit. In formal essays,
it’s important to cite your sources so that you won’t be guilty of plagiarism.
Sometimes the line between latent intertextuality and plagiarism is muddy. For example, imagine
a young comedian sees an older comedian on stage at a club. Years later, the young comedian
uses a joke that he heard that night – but he’s forgotten that he ever heard it! It was just lying
buried in his memory all those years until it came out when he was writing a new set of jokes.
This is an accident, and it’s certainly latent intertextuality. But it’s also plagiarism, even though
it was accidental! That’s why it’s important to be very careful about using other people’s texts in
your own work.
Oftentimes, we borrow phrases, concepts, or ideas from other works to be reflected in our own. This is
called intertextuality. Penlighten helps you understand this literary concept further using intertextuality
examples.

Did You Know?

The oldest example of intertextuality is New Testament that quotes or cites from the Old
Testament.

Shrek is one of the most popular children movie series. It is about an ogre, Shrek, who marries
Princess Fiona, who turns out to be an ogre too, and describes their adventures with their best
friend, a talking Donkey. There are several other characters in the movie, which partake in their
adventures. These characters are Puss in the boots, the Fairy Godmother, Prince Charming,
Gingerbread Man, Pinocchio, King Artie, Big Bad Wolf, Three Little Pigs, Three Blind Mice,
Ugly Stepsisters, Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Merlin the Wizard, and so on. If we
look closer, we can identify the characters mentioned above as parts of different stories, fables,
and fairy tales. The Shrek movie series weaves these characters in its story to make it more
entertaining. The involvement of these supporting characters makes Shrek a fairy tale as well.
This concept is known as intertextuality. It is a literary concept. Let us find out more about it.

Definition

The word is said to be derived from the Latin word intertexto, which means to intermingle while
weaving.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, intertextuality means the complex

interrelationship between a text and other texts taken as basic to the creation or interpretation of
the text.

According to A Glossary of Literary Terms by M. H. Abrams, intertextuality is used to signify

the multiple ways in which any one literary text is made up of other texts, by means of its open
or covert citations and allusions, its repetitions and transformations of the formal and substantive
features of earlier texts, or simply its unavoidable participation in the common stock of linguistic
and literary conventions and procedures that are “always already” in place and constitute the
discourses into which we are born…. any text is in fact an “intertext”-the site of an intersection
of numberless other texts, and existing only through its relations to other texts.

Meaning

The term was first coined by the Bulgarian-French philosopher and literary critic, Julia Kristeva
in 1966. The term was built based on the semiotic studies (done by Swiss linguist and
semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure) of how signs derive within a text and dialogism (studies
done by Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin) which is the study of multiple
meanings of each text.

It also supports French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes’s theory that the creator
and the creation are unrelated. The meaning of the creation or text readers and their relation to
the network of texts was brought up in the reading process.

According to Kristeva, when readers read a new text, they are always influenced by other texts,
which they have read earlier. When a writer borrows from other texts while writing his own, he
attaches layers of meanings to his work as well. When that work is read under the light of the
others, it gives it a new meaning and interpretation. According to Kristeva, any text is
constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.

Graham Allen explains the concept like this―Intertextuality seems such a useful term because it
foregrounds notions of relationality, interconnectedness and interdependence in modern cultural
life. In the Postmodern epoch, theorists often claim, it is not possible any longer to speak of
originality or the uniqueness of the artistic object, be it a painting or novel, since every artistic
object is so clearly assembled from bits and pieces of already existent art.

Types of Intertextuality

In a broader sense, there are two types of intertextuality: vertical and horizontal. Australian
scholar John Fiske made this distinction. Horizontal intertextuality means the same level
references, i.e., books referring to other books. On the other hand, vertical intertextuality means a
book referring to films, songs, etc. It can happen vice versa as well.

Apart from these two, the literary devices such as allusion, quotation, calque, plagiarism,
translation, pastiche, parody, etc., are different types of intertextuality.

Examples
► For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway has based the title of his novel published in 1940 on John
Donne’s poem XVII Meditation. An excerpt of the poem is usually published
under the name “No Man is an Island.” The title of the novel has been taken
from “And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for
thee.” Hemingway also incorporates Donne’s philosophy into his story with
the Spanish civil war as a backdrop. The intertextuality between the two
literary pieces has expanded the theme of the novel.

► Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Golding draws the adventure theme of young boys on a lonely island from R. L. Stevenson’s
Treasure Island. However, he changed Stevenson’s exalted tales of the adventures into the tales
of how savagery can take over innocence, cause loss of civilization, and depict gruesome reality.

► The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Fitzgerald alludes to T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land,

which was published two years before the novel. Like
Eliot’s poem, The Great Gatsby presents a barren land, the
valley of ashes, where nothing grows. In both the literary
works, the land is called spiritually dead. In Fitzgerald’s
land of ashes, there is only weather-beaten advertisement,
and in Eliot’s waste land, there is a heap of broken images.
Fitzgerald’s novel also refers to the Greek myth of King
Midas.

► Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Rhys take the character, Mr. Rochester’s wife, from Emily Bronte’s Jane Eyre and creates an
alternative story for it. She changes the setting of her novel and provides a backstory for her
characters to write the story from Mrs. Rochester’s point of view. She also address issues like
racism, role of a woman, and colonization.

► Daddy by Sylvia Plath

As the narrator of the poem speaks about her father, she describes him to have a ‘Mein Kampf’
look. It refers to the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s autobiography with the same name. This allusion
makes the character of the narrator’s father more striking.

► The 1995 American comedy Clueless is loosely based on Jane Austen’s Emma. The
connection can be seen in the Harry Potter series as well as Lord of the Rings. In both the cases,
the protagonist is an orphan, both have dark lords, and both have wise old wizards who help the
protagonists. Likewise, a popular animated TV series The Simpsons is known to adopt several
characters and scenes from different movies.