types of intertextuality in creative writing

• Scriptwriting

What is Intertextuality — Definition and Examples

I ntertextuality is an incredibly important concept for writers to understand – but what is intertextuality? We’re going to break down everything there is to know about intertextuality by looking at examples from film, television, literature, and games. By the end, you’ll know how to recognize intertextuality, and institute it in your own works.

Intertextuality Definition

First, let’s define intertextuality.

Intertextuality has something to do with texts. But what is a text? Your first thought might be a text message but we'll focus on a different meaning.

A text is a written or visual work; books, paintings, movies, shows, and games are all texts. Any object that can be "read" — so we can think of the lyrics of a song but also the song itself, which can be analyzed and discussed. But before we jump into our examples, let’s formally go over the intertextuality definition!

INTERTEXTUALITY DEFINITION

What is intertextuality.

Intertextuality is the relationship between texts, i.e., books, movies, plays, songs, games, etc. In other words, it’s anytime one text is referenced in another text. Intertextuality works best when it’s explained explicitly, then later alluded to implicitly. Either way, this technique is a fantastic way to share common references to us and our world. When a show like  The Sopranos references  The Godfather , suddenly the bridge between our reality and the reality of the show gets shorter. And, so, it can be argued that part of the appeal of bridging that gap is to make a show like  The Sopranos more "real."

Types of Intertextuality:

Intertextuality may seem benign by storytelling standards, but it’s actually really important – and we’re going to show you why.

Here’s a great video on this from Nerdwriter1 to get the conversation started.

What is Intertextuality?  •  Hollywood’s New Currency

Now that we have a basic understanding of this concept, let's go a little deeper. We'll start with the different types and how they work.

Types of Intertextuality

What are the types of intertextuality.

Literary critics love nothing more than making terms for things that don’t really need terms. Intertextuality is no exception. Go around the web and you’ll find more than a dozen “types of intertextuality.”

The truth is: most of them are the same.

We’re going to keep it simple by sticking to three main types.

EXPLICIT INTERTEXTUALITY

Explicit intertextuality is when one text is explicitly replicated, either through a remake, reboot, or plagiarism. 

Examples of explicit intertextuality:

• Disney fairy tales:  Cinderella ,  Beauty and the Beast ,  The Little Mermaid .
• Movie prequels and sequels, such as those from the  Star Wars  franchise.

IMPLICIT INTERTEXTUALITY

Implicit intertextuality is when one text is implicitly replicated through  parody  or  satire .

Intertextuality in Film Examples  •  Spaceballs Parodies Star Wars

Examples of implicit intertextuality:

• Parody movies: Spaceballs , Galaxy Quest , Meet the Spartans .
• Satire movies: The Great Dictator , Hollywood Shuffle .

ALLUSORY INTERTEXTUALITY

Allusory intertextuality is when one text alludes to other texts. This can be done through just about anything, e.g., dialogue, action, plot , imagery , character names, etc.

What is Intertextuality?  •  The Office References a Quote from Wayne Gretzky

Examples of allusion intertextuality:

• Ex Machina : Caleb references the Bhagavad Gita to suggest Nathan is a “destroyer of worlds.”
• Inside Out : one cop tells another “forget it Jake, it’s cloud town” in reference to the ending quote from Chinatown .
• The Office : Michael Scott gives himself credit for crediting the iconic Wayne Gretzky quote, “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

Intertextuality in Literature Examples

What is intertextuality in literature.

John Milton’s 1667 treatise on the Fall of Man – Paradise Lost – is one of the best intertextual works ever made. Here’s a quick video on Paradise Lost from Course Hero.

Intertextuality Examples in Literature  •  ‘Paradise Lost’ by John Milton

Paradise Lost takes a text ( The Bible ) and recontextualizes it through a new perspective: Satan’s. The strength of intertextuality lies in how it adds new ideas to the original’s discourse. Seeing as The Bible is one of the most read texts of all-time, it makes sense that other texts reference it intertextually; but Paradise Lost remains perhaps the most impactful of all examples.

TV Referencing Cinema

Intertextuality examples in television.

In a situational sense, intertextuality always works best when the allusion/parody/satire is referenced explicitly before it’s referenced implicitly. I know, it’s complicated.

Let’s look at a perfect example of why this is the case though. This section contains major spoilers for The Sopranos . 

Throughout its six-season run, The Sopranos references gangster classics such as The Public Enemy , Goodfellas , and The Godfather . Sopranos ’ fans can probably count a dozen instances of Godfather references off the top of their head – but here’s a refresher course.

Define Intertextuality in TV  •  Every Godfather Reference in The Sopranos

Perhaps no Godfather reference is more important than the “gun in the bathroom” reference though. In a candid conversation with his father, AJ tells Tony “every time we watch Godfather , when Michael Corleone shoots those guys in the restaurant – those assholes who just tried to kill his dad – you sit there with your fucking bowl of ice cream and you say it’s your favorite scene of all-time.” Here, the writers tell us about an intertextual event.

That’s step one in executing an intertextual allusion. 

Step two comes in the very last scene of the show when an unidentified man enters the restaurant, proceeds to the bathroom, followed by the screen cutting to black. We’re able to infer the man is retrieving a gun from the bathroom because of the intertextual reference from earlier. Check out the clip below.

What is Intertextuality?  •  Watch The Sopranos Ending

The fact that Tony appears on the other side of his favorite scene from The Godfather is ironic . 

Intertextual Films

Intertextuality examples in movies.

Woody Allen’s best movies are full of intertextual references – but some of his best references come in Play It Again, Sam , (written by Allen, directed by Herbert Ross); heck, even the title of the movie is an intertextual reference to Casablanca !

Check out the clip below to see how Allen organically integrated intertextual references into the film’s screenplay .

Intertextuality in Film Definition  •  Play It Again, Sam

This clip is intertextual gold. In under two minutes, Allen expertly deconstructs Italian cinema through the lens of parody, from Le Coppie to La Strada’s denouement at the beach. The thing is: Allen doesn’t presuppose these references with the information needed to understand them, thus limiting their extended appeal.

Intertextual Examples in Games

Intertextuality examples in games.

I’ll keep this one brief because it’s a reference few are probably familiar with. In the video game Yakuza: Like a Dragon , the protagonist expresses that he wants to be a hero , like one from the Dragon Quest video game franchise. Hence, the sub-title “Like a Dragon.”

Here’s the scene where Ichiban lays out his intertextual dreams:

What is Intertextuality?  •  Intertextuality in Video Games: Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Video games are emerging as a legitimate medium for storytelling; literary techniques included. Yakuza: Like a Dragon contains one of the best-executed examples of intertextuality I’ve seen in gaming to date.

What is Subtext?

Intertextuality is the relationship between texts – but what is subtext? Simply, subtext is the unspoken truths between-the-lines. Up next, we break down subtext, with examples from The Squid and the Whale , Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , and more. By the end, you’ll know what subtext is and how to implement it in your own work!

Up Next: Subtext in Screenwriting →

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Literary Devices

Literary devices, terms, and elements, intertextuality, definition of intertextuality.

Intertextuality is the way that one text influences another. This can be a direct borrowing such as a quotation or plagiarism, or slightly more indirect such as parody , pastiche , allusion , or translation. The function and effectiveness of intertextuality can often depend quite a bit on the reader’s prior knowledge and understanding before reading the secondary text; parodies and allusions depend on the reader knowing what is being parodied or alluded to. However, there also are many examples of intertextuality that are either accidental on the part of the author or optional, in the sense that the reader is not required to understand the similarities between texts to fully grasp the significance of the secondary text.

The definition of intertextuality was created by the French semiotician Julia Kristeva in the 1960s. She created the term from the Latin word intertexto , which means “to intermingle while weaving.” Kristeva argued that all works of literature being produced contemporarily are intertextual with the works that came before it. As she stated, “[A]ny text,” she argues, “is constructed of a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.”

Common Examples of Intertextuality

We use different examples of intertextuality frequently in common speech, such as allusions like the following:

• He was lying so obviously, you could almost see his nose growing.
• He’s asking her to the prom. It’s like a happy version of Romeo and Juliet.
• It’s hard being an adult! Peter Pan had the right idea.

The concept of intertextuality can also be expanded to music, film, advertising, and so on in the way that everything produced now is influenced by what came before. References to pop culture in advertising, films that are made from books, and diss tracks in rap can all be considered intertextual, though they are not strictly texts.

Significance of Intertextuality in Literature

As Kristeva wrote, any text can be considered a work of intertextuality because it builds on the structures that existed before it. There are countless examples of authors borrowing from the Bible and from Shakespeare, from titles (William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses and The Sound and the Fury ) to story lines (John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres ). However, Kristeva’s point was more profound than examples of authors knowingly and directly borrowing themes, names, plot lines. Her argument was that all systems of signifying, from the meaning of body language to the structure of a novel, are predicated upon the systems of signifying that came before. A single novel or poem can never be considered independent of the system of meanings in which it relays its message; indeed, each new work of literature transforms and displaces discourse which predated it.

Examples of Intertextuality in Literature

Those who have insinuated that Menard devoted his life to writing a contemporary Quixote besmirch his illustrious memory. Pierre Menard did not want to compose another Quixote, which surely is easy enough—he wanted to compose the Quixote. Nor, surely, need one have to say that his goal was never a mechanical transcription of the original; he had no intention of copying it. His admirable ambition was to produce a number of pages which coincided—word for word and line for line—with those of Miguel de Cervantes.

(“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote ” by Jorge Borges)

Borges’s short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote ” can be considered an aesthetic exploration of intertextuality, and contains intertextuality on multiple levels. The main idea is that an author named Pierre Menard is reconstructing Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote word by word. He is not translating it, not updating it, but instead writing it again. Menard—and, ultimately, Borges—argues that the act of writing the Quixote story again, even word for word, creates a new text. Borges uses intertextuality by assuming the reader understands the importance of Cervantes’s Don Quixote , though the reader does not have to have actually read that novel.

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by And the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns.

( Beowulf , as translated by Seamus Heaney)

Beowulf is an interesting example of intertextuality because the monster, Grendel, is said to be a descendant of the Biblical figure of Cain. The first Beowulf poet would probably have assumed his reader would have understood this allusion and, indeed, know a great deal about the Bible stories. Our contemporary reading of Beowulf is necessarily intertextual as well because the original poem was written in Old English, which is unintelligible to Modern English speakers. Seamus Heaney used the original text to produce his translation, of course, but his resulting work is his own creation. In the introduction to the new text, Heaney explains many choices he made, including how he decided to translate the first word of the text, “Hwaet!” and “So,” instead of choices other translators made such as “Listen,” “Lo,” and “Attend.”

“Even God can have a preference, can he? Let’s suppose God liked lamb better than vegetables. I think I do myself. Cain brought him a bunch of carrots maybe. And God said, ‘I don’t like this. Try again. Bring me something I like and I’ll set you up alongside your brother.’ But Cain got mad. His feelings were hurt. And when a man’s feelings are hurt he wants to strike at something, and Abel was in the way of his anger.”

( East of Eden by John Steinbeck)

John Steinbeck’s East of Eden is another work of literature based on the story of Biblical story of Cain and Abel. Steinbeck makes this allusion abundantly clear, as proven by the excerpt above. Steinbeck both references the story directly, and also reworks the story through his contemporary characters of Cal and Aron.

CLAUDIUS: Welcome, dear Rosencrantz… (he raises a hand at GUIL while ROS bows – GUIL bows late and hurriedly.)… and Guildenstern. (He raises a hand at ROS while GUIL bows to him – ROS is still straightening up from his previous bow and half way up he bows down again. With his head down, he twists to look at GUIL, who is on the way up.) Moreover that we did much long to see you, The need we have to use you did provoke Our hasty sanding. (ROS and GUIL still adjusting their clothing for CLAUDIUS’s presence.)

( Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard)

Tom Stoppard’s absurdist play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is an excellent intertextuality example, because Stoppard rewrites Shakespeare’s Hamlet story from the point of view of two previously unimportant characters (note that Shakespeare did not create Hamlet from scratch, but instead based it on a legend of Amleth—more intertextuality). For the most part, Stoppard composes his own lines, but at times lifts text directly from Shakespeare’s version. In a humorous way, the above excerpt contains the exact speech from Claudius to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, yet with Stoppard’s added stage notes. A reader would be required to at least know something about Shakespeare’s Hamlet to understand the purpose of Stoppard’s commentary on it.

After all, to the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

( Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling)

In a moment of subtle intertextuality, the mentor figure of Dumbledore tells Harry Potter not to pity a dying wizard. The wizard in question has been living for hundreds of years due to the “sorcerer’s stone,” and is not afraid of death. J.K. Rowling is hinting back at the line in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, who once uttered, “to die would be an awfully big adventure.” There are themes in common between these two fantasy stories of Harry Potter and Peter Pan , yet the reader does not need to pick up on the influence to J.M. Barrie’s work to appreciate J.K. Rowling’s work. J.K. Rowling also borrowed from other sources, such as from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and from the horrors of real-life Nazi Germany, yet once again the reader can appreciate the story without thinking about its influences.

Test Your Knowledge of Intertextuality

1. Which of the following statements is the best intertextuality definition? A. The relationship between texts. B. Allusions from one text to another. C. The translation of a text into a different language.

2. Which of the following would not be an example of intertextuality? A. A translation of one work into a different language. B. A poetic homage to an earlier writer by adopting that writer’s theme and tone. C. The main characters of two unrelated works coincidentally both named Bob.

3. Which of the following statements is not  an example of intertextuality in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead? A. Tom Stoppard used the same character names as in Shakespeare’s original play. B. The Disney movie The Lion King is also based somewhat on Shakespeare’s Hamlet. C. Parts of the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead are exact quotes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Intertextuality

Definition of intertextuality.

Intertextuality is a sophisticated literary device making use of a textual reference within some body of text, which reflects again the text used as a reference. Instead of employing referential phrases from different literary works, intertextuality draws upon the concept, rhetoric , or ideology from other writings to be merged in the new text. It may be the retelling of an old story , or the rewriting of popular stories in modern context for instance, James Joyce retells The Odyssey in his very famous novel Ulysses .

Difference Between Intertextuality and Allusion

Although both these terms seem similar to each other, they are slightly different in their meanings. An allusion is a brief and concise reference that a writer uses in another narrative without affecting the storyline. Intertextuality, on the other hand, uses the reference of the full story in another text or story as its backbone.

Examples of Intertextuality in Literature

Example #1: wide sargasso sea (by jean rhys).

In his novel, Wide Sargasso Sea , Jean Rhys gathers some events that occurred in Charlotte Bronte ’s Jane Eyre . The purpose is to tell readers an alternative tale. Rhys presents the wife of Mr. Rochester, who played the role of a secondary character in Jane Eyre . Also, the setting of this novel is Jamaica, not England, and the author develops the back-story for his major character. While spinning the novel, Jane Eyre , Rhys gives her interpretation amid the narrative by addressing issues such as the roles of women, colonization, and racism that Bronte did not point out in her novel otherwise.

Example #2: A Tempest (By Aime Cesaire)

Aime Cesaire’s play A Tempest is an adaptation of The Tempest by William Shakespeare . The author parodies Shakespeare’s play from a post-colonial point of view . Cesaire also changes the occupations and races of his characters. For example, he transforms the occupation of Prospero, who was a magician, into a slave-owner, and also changes Ariel into a Mulatto, though he was a spirit. Cesaire, like Rhys, makes use of a famous work of literature, and put a spin on it in order to express the themes of power , slavery, and colonialism.

Example #3: Lord of the Flies (By William Golding)

William Golding , in his novel Lord of the Flies , takes the story implicitly from Treasure Island , written by Robert Louis Stevenson . However, Golding has utilized the concept of adventures , which young boys love to do on the isolated island they were stranded on. He, however, changes the narrative into a cautionary tale, rejecting the glorified stories of Stevenson concerning exploration and swash buckling. Instead, Golding grounds this novel in bitter realism by demonstrating negative implications of savagery and fighting that could take control of human hearts, because characters have lost the idea of civilization.

Example #4: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (By C. S. Lewis)

In this case, C. S. Lewis adapts the idea of Christ’s crucifixion in his fantasy novel, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe . He, very shrewdly, weaves together the religious and entertainment themes for a children’s book. Lewis uses an important event from The New Testament , transforming it into a story about redemption. In doing so, he uses Edmund, a character that betrays his savior, Aslan. Generally, the motive of this theme is to introduce other themes, such as evil actions, losing innocence, and redemption.

Example #5: For Whom the Bell Tolls (By Earnest Hemingway)

In the following example, Hemingway uses intertextuality for the title of his novel. He takes the title of a poem , Meditation XVII , written by John Donne . The excerpt of this poem reads:

“No man is an island … and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls ; it tolls for thee.”

Hemingway not only uses this excerpt for the title of his novel, he also makes use of the idea in the novel, as he clarifies and elaborates the abstract philosophy of Donne by using the concept of the Spanish Civil War. By the end, the novel expands other themes, such as loyalty, love, and camaraderie.

Function of Intertextuality

A majority of writers borrow ideas from previous works to give a layer of meaning to their own works. In fact, when readers read the new text with reflection on another literary work, all related assumptions, effects, and ideas of the other text provide them a different meaning, and changes the technique of interpretation of the original piece. Since readers take influence from other texts, and while reading new texts they sift through archives, this device gives them relevance and clarifies their understanding of the new texts. For writers, intertextuality allows them to open new perspectives and possibilities to construct their stories. Thus, writers may explore a particular ideology in their narrative by discussing recent rhetoric in the original text.

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Intertextuality

Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

Intertextuality refers to the interdependence of texts in relation to one another (as well as to the culture at large). Texts can influence, derive from, parody, reference, quote, contrast with, build on, draw from, or even inspire each other. Intertextuality produces meaning . Knowledge does not exist in a vacuum, and neither does literature.

Influence, Hidden or Explicit

The literary canon is ever-growing. All writers read and are influenced by what they read, even if they write in a genre different than their favorite or most recent reading material. Authors are influenced cumulatively by what they've read, whether or not they explicitly show their influences in their writing or on their characters' sleeves. Sometimes they do want to draw parallels between their work and an inspirational work or influential canon—think fan fiction or homages. Maybe they want to create emphasis or contrast or add layers of meaning through an allusion. In so many ways, literature can be interconnected intertextually, on purpose or not.

Professor Graham Allen credits French theorist Laurent Jenny (particularly in "The Strategy of Forms") for drawing a distinction between "works which are explicitly intertextual—such as imitations , parodies , citations , montages and plagiarisms—and those works in which the intertextual relation is not foregrounded," (Allen 2000).

A central idea of contemporary literary and cultural theory, intertextuality has its origins in 20th-century  linguistics , particularly in the work of Swiss  linguist  Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). The term itself was coined by the Bulgarian-French philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva in the 1960s.

Examples and Observations

Some say that writers and artists are so deeply influenced by the works they consume that the creation of any completely new work is rendered impossible. "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," (Allen 2000).

Authors Jeanine Plottel and Hanna Charney give more of a glimpse into the full scope of intertextuality in their book, Intertextuality: New Perspectives in Criticism. "Interpretation is shaped by a complex of relationships between the text, the reader, reading, writing, printing, publishing and history: the history that is inscribed in the language of the text and in the history that is carried in the reader's reading. Such a history has been given a name: intertextuality," (Plottel and Charney 1978).

A. S. Byatt on Redeploying Sentences in New Contexts

In The Biographer's Tale, A.S. Byatt broaches the subject of whether intertextuality can be considered plagiarism and raises good points about the historical use of inspiration in other art forms. "Postmodernist ideas about intertextuality and quotation have complicated the simplistic ideas about plagiarism which were in Destry-Schole's day. I myself think that these lifted sentences, in their new contexts , are almost the purest and most beautiful parts of the transmission of scholarship.

I began a collection of them, intending, when my time came, to redeploy them with a difference, catching different light at a different angle. That metaphor is from mosaic-making. One of the things I learned in these weeks of research was that the great makers constantly raided previous works—whether in pebble, or marble, or glass, or silver and gold—for tesserae which they rewrought into new images," (Byatt 2001).

Example of Rhetorical Intertextuality

Intertextuality also appears often in speech, as James Jasinski explains. "[Judith] Still and [Michael] Worton [in Intertextuality: Theories and Practice , 1990] explained that every writer or speaker 'is a reader of texts (in the broadest sense) before s/he is a creator of texts, and therefore the work of art is inevitably shot through with references, quotations, and influences of every kind' (p. 1). For example, we can assume that Geraldine Ferraro, the Democratic congresswoman and vice presidential nominee in 1984, had at some point been exposed to John F. Kennedy's 'Inaugural Address.'

So, we should not have been surprised to see traces of Kennedy's speech in the most important speech of Ferraro's career—her address at the Democratic Convention on July 19, 1984. We saw Kennedy's influence when Ferraro constructed a variation of Kennedy's famous chiasmus , as 'Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country' was transformed into 'The issue is not what America can do for women but what women can do for America,'" (Jasinski 2001).

Two Types of Intertextuality

James Porter, in his article "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community", delineates variations of intertextuality. "We can distinguish between two types of intertextuality: iterability and presupposition . Iterability refers to the 'repeatability' of certain textual fragments, to citation in its broadest sense to include not only explicit allusions, references, and quotations within a discourse , but also unannounced sources and influences, clichés , phrases in the air, and traditions. That is to say, every discourse is composed of 'traces,' pieces of other texts that help constitute its meaning. ...

Presupposition refers to assumptions a text makes about its referent , its readers, and its context—to portions of the text which are read, but which are not explicitly 'there.' ... 'Once upon a time' is a trace rich in rhetorical presupposition, signaling to even the youngest reader the opening of a fictional narrative . Texts not only refer to but in fact contain other texts," (Porter 1986).

• Byatt, A. S. The Biographer's Tale. Vintage, 2001.
• Graham, Allen. Intertextuality . Routledge, 2000.
• Jasinski, James. Sourcebook on Rhetoric . Sage, 2001.
• Plottel, Jeanine Parisier, and Hanna Kurz Charney. Intertextuality: New Perspectives in Criticism . New York Literary Forum, 1978.
• Porter, James E. “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community.”   Rhetoric Review , vol. 5, no. 1, 1986, pp. 34–47.
• Definition and Examples of Text in Language Studies
• What is Metadiscourse?
• What Is Foregrounding?
• Context in Language
• The Meaning of Rhetor
• The Difference Between a Speech and Discourse Community
• Semiotics Definition and Examples
• What Is the Second Persona?
• Understanding the Use of Language Through Discourse Analysis
• Rhetorical Move
• Oration (Classical Rhetoric)
• Expressive Discourse in Composition
• Rhetorical Analysis Definition and Examples
• Informal Logic
• Coherence in Composition
• Definitions and Discussions of Medieval Rhetoric

• Literary Terms
• When & How to Use Intertextuality
• Definition & Examples

How to Use Intertextuality

How you employ another text in your work depends on what you want to do with it. Do you want to pay homage to a great author like Homer or Shakespeare? Then try re-staging their stories in a new setting. If, on the other hand, you want to spoof those authors, then take whatever is silly or humorous about them and exaggerate it in a parody.

Remember that intertextuality is not limited to texts of the same type . This is important since many of the most sophisticated uses of deliberate intertextuality are those that cut across different mediums and styles . For example, have you ever tried to paint a piece of music? Or write a story based on a philosophical idea? Getting inspiration in this way is a great way to include intertextuality in your writing or art.

When to Use Intertextuality

Obviously, your writing and art will be intertextual whether you want them to be or not. Latent intertextuality is inescapable! But when should you employ deliberate intertextuality?

Deliberate intertextuality has a place both in creative writing and formal essays . In creative writing, it’s a great way to get inspiration for stories. You can draw on other authors’ stories and characters , or you can use other art forms to get inspiration. Either way, when you make deliberate references to these other works you are employing intertextuality.

In formal essays, deliberate intertextuality is a key part of the research process. When you cite a source, you are taking a little chunk of someone else’s text and building it into your own argument. Obviously, you want this intertextuality to be deliberate – if it’s latent, then that means you’re not citing your sources, which is very poor form in an essay!

List of Terms

• Alliteration
• Amplification
• Anachronism
• Anthropomorphism
• Antonomasia
• APA Citation
• Aposiopesis
• Autobiography
• Bildungsroman
• Characterization
• Circumlocution
• Cliffhanger
• Comic Relief
• Connotation
• Deus ex machina
• Deuteragonist
• Doppelganger
• Double Entendre
• Dramatic irony
• Equivocation
• Extended Metaphor
• Figures of Speech
• Flash-forward
• Foreshadowing
• Intertextuality
• Juxtaposition
• Literary Device
• Malapropism
• Onomatopoeia
• Parallelism
• Pathetic Fallacy
• Personification
• Point of View
• Polysyndeton
• Protagonist
• Red Herring
• Rhetorical Device
• Rhetorical Question
• Science Fiction
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
• Synesthesia
• Turning Point
• Understatement
• Urban Legend
• Verisimilitude
• Essay Guide
• Cite This Website

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39 “Intertextuality”: A Reference Guide on Using Texts to Produce Texts

• Ways Texts “Connect” or Reference Each Other
• How to Reference Completely and Ethically

by Clint Johnson

“Intertextuality” is the term for how the meaning of one text changes when we relate it to another text. It is one way to understand how writing is contingent upon other factors: in this case, how another text influences the way we understand, or struggle to understand, a given text.

Scholars debate the extent and significance of intertextuality in how we understand language. Some literary theorists argue that any text is just a combination of other texts. Julia Kristeva, for example, writes, “Any text is the absorption and transformation of another.”

How you typically experience intertextuality in your reading and writing is likely to be far simpler than such theories suggest. After all, texts combine with other texts all the time to create meaning, and they do so in specific ways. Understanding these ways helps us better understand what we read and better achieve our goals when we write.

WAYS TEXTS “CONNECT” OR REFERENCE EACH OTHER

What it is:.

When one text uses ideas and words of another text.

How to do it:

A quotation is literally copied language from one text that is used in another. The copied words are put within quotation marks to show the language originally comes from another source. The source is also cited.

Why  do it:

Quotation is common in many genres because it allows us to adopt others’ language for a variety of purposes. We quote others for their eloquent use of language, or to distance ourselves from statements we need to communicate but do not want to own, or to acknowledge the existence of other perspectives and voices. As a general rule, we only quote when both the words and ideas of a source are valuable to our writing.

Paraphrasing

When one text includes ideas from another text put in new words.

When paraphrasing, a writer uses their own language to communicate an idea found in another text. Paraphrasing does not require quotation marks because the words are not borrowed from another source. Paraphrasing references specific ideas from a text rather than all ideas in the text. The original source is cited.

We paraphrase others to give credit or assign responsibility for ideas and to use others’ identities in our writing. Paraphrasing can also allow us to easily integrate important ideas from other sources into our writing without changing our style. This creates a consistent feel for the reader. As a general rule, we paraphrase whenever we wish to use the ideas of a source but don’t feel that the source’s words add additional value. We might also paraphrase if the source’s words somehow detract from our work, such as if their language is too technical or biased for our purposes.

Summarizing

When one text uses the main ideas of another text in the order they are originally presented. The source is cited.

A summary presents another text’s major ideas in their original order but without minor details. It essentially condenses a text, shrinking it down by communicating only the most important information. To preserve confidence that the writer summarizing the text hasn’t changed the meaning, summaries are typically written in an objective style. Summaries can be various lengths, from as short as a sentence to as long as needed without giving unnecessary detail.

We summarize to give our reader a sense of another text in its entirety, at least in terms of main ideas, in a short time and space. As a general rule, we summarize whenever we wish to demonstrate that we comprehend a text’s overall meaning or when we ask a reader to interact with the text extensively in our writing.

What is it :

An indirect reference to another text.

The writer does not quote, paraphrase, or in other ways explicitly communicate how the text alludes to, or indirectly connects to, what they are writing. Instead, they trust the reader to be able to identify the connection using their own knowledge.

We allude to a text when we are confident our audience is familiar with the text mentioned. As a general rule, we allude when we want our reader to relate their own knowledge to what we are writing. If our readers are not familiar with the text we allude to, we will likely confuse them.

HOW TO REFERENCE COMPLETELY AND ETHICALLY

Attribution.

Specifying who originated a statement, idea, or text, either by authoring or publishing it. Occasionally, we attribute by citing a text’s title.

Writers attribute by including the name of the person or organization that authored the text they are using in their piece. The name of the author of the original text is connected to the language or ideas the writer references. This may take the form of a parenthetical citation, a signal phrase (e.g., according to ), or a speech tag ( John says ). Attribution is routinely combined with quotes, paraphrases, summaries, and more (but not allusion).

Why do it :

We attribute when we want readers to know where a statement or idea comes from or who it belongs to. Attribution allows us to give people credit for their work, to use others’ credibility in our own writing to increase our own authority, and to separate what we say and believe from what others say and believe. As a general rule, we always attribute the first time we reference a text and often again for texts we reference multiple times.

[Find more attributions in the rest of the example sections above.]

Avoid Plagiarism

What plagiarism is:.

Using someone else’s words and/or ideas and, intentionally or unintentionally, passing them off as one’s own.

How NOT to do it:

There are a number of ways to plagiarize, including quoting or paraphrasing without giving credit to the original author, failing to use quotation marks for language taken from other texts, summarizing without attributing, or using someone else’s reasoning or organizational structure as your own. When using exact language from a source, always put that language in quotation marks. Similarly, when using language or ideas from a source, use attribution to give credit to the author of the text. At Salt Lake Community College we stress that writers should never plagiarize intentionally and must be willing to correct unintentional plagiarism if it occurs by revising their writing.

Why NOT do it:

In the United States and much of the rest of the world, especially the west, words and ideas are considered intellectual property, similar in many regards to physical property. Because language and ideas can be trademarked, much like inventions, using them without obeying fair-use rules is considered theft. Plagiarism is a dishonest act and is considered a form of cheating in the academic and professional worlds. While plagiarism is a serious academic offense for which a student may fail an assignment or class, unintentional plagiarism will usually be met with correction and instruction on how to ethically and effectively reference other texts. Intentional plagiarism is cheating and will not be tolerated.

Works Cited

Dalton, Kathleen. “Theodore Roosevelt: The Making of a Progressive Reformer.”  History Now,  The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History,  https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/politics-reform/essays/theodore-roosevelt-making-progressive-reformer

Golodryga, Brianna. “‘No More Backbone Than a Chocolate Eclair’: The Best Political Insults of All Time.” The Huffington Post , 2 Nov. 2016, www.huffingtonpost.com/bianna-‘golodryga/no-more-backbone-than-a-c_b_12774594.html

Kristeva, Julia. The Kristeva Reader . Edited by Toril Moi. Columbia University Press, 1986.

“Theodore Roosevelt Quotes.” Brainyquote, n.d., www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/t/theodorero122699.html

Essentials for ENGL-121 Copyright © 2016 by David Buck is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Intertextuality.

• Graham Allen Graham Allen Department of English, University College Cork
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.1072
• Published online: 23 May 2019

Intertextuality is a concept first outlined in the work of poststructuralist theorists Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes and refers to the emergence of and understanding of any individual text out of the vast network of discourses and languages that make up culture. No text, in the light of intertextuality, stands alone; all texts have their existence and their meaning in relation to a practically infinite field of prior texts and prior significations. Such a vision of textuality emerges from 20th-century developments in our understanding of what it means to use and to be in language. No speaker creates their language from scratch; all linguistic utterances depend upon the employment and redeployment of already existent utterances. Intertextuality is part, then, of a radical rethinking of human subjectivity and human expression, a rethinking that at its most extreme argues it is language rather than human intention that generates meaning.

Having found expression in the radical texts of early poststructuralism, intertextuality became a popular concept within literary criticism, often reimagined in ways that appear far less skeptical about authorial intentionality. A survey of literary theory and practice from the 1970s onward will show a host of critics and theorists employing the term to foreground formalist, political, psychoanalytical, feminist, postcolonial, postmodernist, and other modes of interpretation and commentary. At times these approaches bring the concept much closer to ideas centered in the humanistic subject, such as influence, allusion, citation, and appropriation, while at other times they continue and extend the deconstruction of traditional models of intention. What all theories and practices of intertextuality seem to share, however, is a need to reimagine the act of reading, given that reading can no longer be confined to the reader’s encounter with a single, stable, inviolable text. Taken together, intertextual theories and practices have demonstrated in a myriad of ways the need to move beyond the

Author—Text—Reader

model to models of reading which, by treating all texts as intertexts, confront the limits of interpretation itself.

• structuralism
• poststructuralism
• deconstruction
• interpretation
• digital culture
• remediation

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Intertextuality As A Literary Device

by Sophie Novak | 31 comments

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Do you borrow phrases and concepts from other works in your own? If yes, then you’re using intertextuality, perhaps even without knowing it.

Though it sounds intimidating at first, it’s quite a simple concept really:

Intertextuality denotes the way in which texts (any text, not just literature) gain meaning through their referencing or evocation of other texts.

Photo by fotologic

What Is Intertextuality?

When writers borrow from previous texts, their work acquires layers of meaning. In addition, when a text is read in the light of another text, all the assumptions and effects of the other text give a new meaning and influence the way of interpreting the original text.

It serves as a subtheme, and reminds us of the double narratives in allegories .

This term was developed by the poststructuralist Julia Kristeva in the 1960s, and since then it’s been widely accepted by postmodern literary critics and theoreticians.

Her invention was a response to Ferdinand de Saussure ’s theory and his claim that signs gain their meaning through structure in a particular text. She opposed his to her own, saying that readers are always influenced by other texts, sifting through their archives, when reading a new one.

In a recent short story I was writing, I included a quote by Turgenev at the beginning, which served as a sum-up of my main premise in the story.

Intertextuality Example:

A famous example of intertextuality in literature is James Joyce’s Ulysses as a retelling of The Odyssey , set in Dublin. Ernest Hemingway used the language of the metaphysical poet John Donne in naming his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Even the Bible is considered an instance of intertextuality, since the New Testament quotes passages from the Old Testament.

Beware of Plagiarism

One thing you need to absolutely remember when evoking a reference to another work is to make it clear it’s a reference. Once intertextuality has gained popularity, there were cases of authors using phrases of other works, without indicating what they are doing. There’s a thin line between using intertextuality as a literary device and plagiarising, even if not intended.

Intertextuality as a Sophisticated Concept

A complex use of intertextuality is considered a sophisticated tool in writing. Rather than referencing phrases from other works, a refined use of intertextuality involves drawing upon an ideology, a concept, or even rhetoric from others.

Thus, you may explore the political ideology in your story by drawing upon the current rhetoric in politics. Alternatively, you may use a text source and explore it further.

Looked at it this way, the popular rewriting of fairy tales in modern contexts can be viewed as a highly cultured use of intertextuality.

To be sure, intertextuality is a powerful writing tool that shouldn’t be overlooked. It opens new possibilities and perspectives for constructing a story.

What other uses of intertextuality can you think of? Have you explored this literary device? Share your thoughts below.

Need more grammar help?  My favorite tool that helps find grammar problems and even generates reports to help improve my writing is ProWritingAid . Works with Word, Scrivener, Google Docs, and web browsers. Also, be sure to use my coupon code to get 25 percent off:  WritePractice25

Freewrite for fifteen minutes and include a reference (a word, phrase, concept, quotation etc.) of another work in your practice. When you’re done, post it in the comments.

As always, be supportive to the others.

Sophie Novak

Sophie Novak is an ultimate daydreamer and curious soul, who can be found either translating or reading at any time of day. She originally comes from the sunny heart of the Balkans, Macedonia, and currently lives in the UK. You can follow her blog and connect with her on Twitter and Facebook .

31 Comments

“They were able to compose only by bringing themselves to attacks of inspiration, an extinct form of epilepsy.” – Yevgeny Zamyatin in We.

“[Goethe] leaned down, opened the drawer, and found a pile of rotten apples. The smell was so overpowering that he became light-headed. […] Schiller had deliberately let the apples spoil. The aroma, somehow, inspired him, and according to his spouse, he ‘could not live or work without it.'” – Goethe, cited in Odd Type Writers

Inspiration isn’t just a fickle mistress, it’s also an unnatural mental state. It’s an intoxication that disrupts the normal functions of the brain. It’s accompanied by a release of endorphins and dopamine, producing a sense of euphoria and invincibility in the artist and making the whole experience addictive.

Once the effects wear out, the victim is left deflated with a sense of guilty elation. Then, withdrawal kicks in with a bout of “the blues”.

The victim will then actively seek out inspiration through various methods, both rational, like reproducing the setting in which inspiration struck, and irrational, like calling upon the forces of the occult, and everything in between, with various degrees of failure. Others will simply wait for inspiration to strike again, which can take from days to months, and longer.

A more reliable way to get your fix is to work for it. Start creating without inspiration, and it will eventually manifest itself spontaneously. Creation breeds inspiration. More so than the other way around.

Inspiration isn’t all that fickle when you get to know her.

I found your comments very insightful.

‘Creation breeds inspiration’. Amen. It gets easier, once you push through, for sure.

“Nothing is easy.” – Zeddicus Z’ul Zorrander in the Sword of Truth series.

I strode to where Angriz lay. Looking down on him from this position, I noticed what I had missed before: his jaw was unhinged. I squatted down to determine how I might best grab his jaw to fix it. The sight of his massive fangs caused me to swallow hard. They were intimidating. They were triangular and serrated like a shark’s teeth, but on a much larger scale. My fingers were going to get cut pretty bad by them. The worst part was I had no idea how the Bloodtaste worked. He might be overtaken by it once more. I sighed as a line from my favorite book series, “The Sword of Truth”, came to mind; ‘Nothing is ever easy.’

Knowing that nothing could be gained by further delay, I reached out and grasped Angriz by his jaw. The fingers of my right hand went into his mouth over his teeth as I grasped the point of his jawbone. I used my left hand for leverage and guidance and I tugged his jaw outward and swung it back into alignment. I turned the air blue when his razor sharp fangs sliced my fingers open. His jaw went back into place with an audible click and I released the pressure. I took my hand out of his mouth and without thinking, placed the lacerated digits into my own to comfort them. Swearing like a sailor denied shore leave, I got up and went to the packs to get cloth for my fingers.

I wrapped my fingers, not thinking about anything, when a gasping growl gave me a start. I whirled around to find Angriz sitting up with his hands clutching his head.

“By Vashara, my head hurts!” he cried.

I felt a huge grin grow on my face. I strode over to him, speaking as I went. “It is good you’re awake, Angriz!” I said. I lowered my voice so I didn’t wake Dearbhaile.

He turned to look at me, dropping his hands and dropping his jaw. “What has happened to you, Carter?” he whispered.

I blinked in confusion, and followed his eyes to where he was looking. I discovered I was covered in a silvery white fluid. I then remembered being sprayed with Belial’s blood after decapitating the half-demon. That must be what it was.

“That can wait until later, Angriz,” I said. “Right now we have bigger problems.”

“What is going on, Carter?”

“Keeper Dearbhaile is hurt. Come, I’ll show you.”

I lead Angriz to where she lay. I knelt and pointed out the wounds I had noticed from my preliminary examination. The half-dragon growled, eyes flashing, at what had been done to our friend. He squatted down and stared at her injuries.

“They tortured her,” he said without inflection.

“This is more than I know how to heal. Can you do anything?”

“Some. I’ll need your assistance.”

He nodded in agreement. I directed him to gather wood to build a large fire not far from where she lay. I gathered our blankets and placed them near her. After the fire was going, we began with the easy stuff. I had Angriz bring her awake.

“Keeper Dearbhaile,” I said to her. “I need to learn where you are hurt. I need you conscious in order to do so, but you don’t have to speak unless necessary. Nod if you understand me.” A slow nod. “We need to remove your clothing to better examine you for injury.”

She nodded again. I directed Angriz in cutting away her robes. Though we were as gentle as we could be, she cried out from the pain of our movements.

“Carter,” Angriz whispered, “Why do we need her clothing off?”

“Because I can’t look through them to see what injuries might be hidden by her clothes. Can you?”

He shook his head. I turned from him and skimmed my fingers over Keeper Dearbhaile’s body. I began at her skull and went downward, relying on her flinching to tell me where her injuries were. There was no reaction until I touched the area on her right side just beneath her breast. She arched her body, hard, away from my touch. I peered at the area. All I was able to detect was a dark red mark. There didn’t appear to be any bruising, but I wanted to be certain. I pulled Angriz closer and had him to look. I knew his vision was sharper than mine in low light.

That’s a proper use of intertextuality. Well done.

I am not sure if I am doing it right. Please correct me if I misunderstood.

ONE, TWO, START! The annual race has started. This is a 24 hour race among many the members of the club. The person who loses will be served as a slave for an entire day to the club members. Immediately within minutes, we see John Feller running past the rest of the members. In fact, he was an all time Olympic Champion in the 400-yard dash. Everyone else is following behind him, scrubbing along to catch up to him. Within 8 hours, John finished 60% of the race while the close second Gene Jackson is only at 40% completion. Behind Gene, there are other members ranging from 35%-40% completion. As we can see, John definitely is the winner. However, there is no reward for the winner but only punishment for the loser. After another 4 hours, John is at 90% while the rest are at 52-60% completion. There are still 12 hours left in the race and John can clearly finish within a few hours. However, it is already 9:00 PM.

John, feeling powerfully illustrious, decided to stop by and take a quick nap before he continues. Even if he sleep for 4 hours, the rest of the group will only be 70-80% complete. He will still be way ahead of them. So John decided to take a quick nap before he sprints to the finish.

One hour, two hours, three hours, four hours. Like John planned, the group is only at 70-80% completion. Two more hours went by, now the group is at 78-90% with Gene leading the pack. Out of the corner of his eyes, he still see John wresting and turning. Next to him, he saw that John actually took some sleeping pill to help him take a nap. Thinking it would be fun, Gene slipped over and mixed the leftover pills and created an airborne solution. He carefully placed the medication under John’s nostrils, and off he went.

after six more hours went by, everyone had finished the race besides John. Everyone was worried what happened. Another 18 hours went by before we saw John running toward the club. John loudly proclaimed, “WTF, how did you guys finished the race in 18 hours? Did you guys cheat?” It turned out, John didn’t realize a full day has already passed since they started the race. Looks like John is doomed to be slave for the next 24 hours…or the next 6 hours if the club members are nice about it.

Hmmm, I did get confused. Have you included somebody’s text/work in the practice?

I try to make it an analogy to the tortoise and the hair concept. Is that the right way of doing it?

Oh right, now I see. Yeah, of course – there’s no strict use, so you’re pretty free in doing as you wish. Smart, by the way.

“The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis” –so quoted Dante in his Divine Comedy.

It is a fact, that there are two sides to any coin. And these two sides are not right or wrong, nay…they are the two views, two opinions that two different people, two different societies, two different countries hold, and if you were a stranger to their customs and traditions, you would agree with both of them, perhaps without wanting to.

But it is the opinion that wins (through war or debate) that is declared as the right opinion, the right view. In reality, it may not be so.

Taking sides in a battle does not mean that you agree to the battle, but not taking any sides does mean that you will follow the one who wins, which shows your lack of decision making, your lack of exercising the power which you, quite unknowingly hold.

A single opinion can make a drastic difference, perhaps even a bad one, but a single opinion matters. If it didn’t then there would have much more sorrow and injustice in this world (as if the sorrow and injustice we already have is little!).

Being neutral means being indifferent, not diplomatic, because diplomats have an ulterior motive too. Nay, diplomats are not neutral, never! They prefer not to disclose their deepest thoughts.

It is the person who does not exercise the power he holds effectively, the person who is unsure about his conscience, about his upbringing that fails, and in the fact that he must be taken to the deepest circle of hell (as Dante mentions), there exists no doubt.

Being opinionated does count. Even if the opinion is wrong, believing in the wrong with the right motive can even change the wrong and turn it into the right!

Yes, leadership does take quite a lot of confidence, but a leader has with himself the fellowship of hundreds of followers to boost his confidence. But the true soul is the one that follows the leader only after deciding for himself whether the leader is right. He is the person who trusts his conscience first and then the words of a leader. And if his conscience advises that the leader is wrong, then he stands up for himself, maybe alone and fights against all odds to proclaim his righteousness – that is the true hero.

And then, isn’t it better to have a true enemy rather than a doubtful follower?!

I really like this Saunved, and I tend to agree on the neutrality not being the way to go. Dante can be used quite prolifically. 🙂

Dante really was (and is) an influential figure! I’m reading Inferno right now and the words seem to pierce right through the heart! I’m glad you liked this! 😉

I’ve read it such a long time ago, so you gave me a push to give it another go, perhaps with grown-up and critical eyes this time. 🙂

🙂 I hope I’ll grow up and say the same! 😀

Sophie sat down at her desk, determined to start her new practice of writing every day. She opened a new file on her laptop and created a new folder for daily writing exercises, then set a fresh pad of paper with blue, red and black pens to the right side of her desk, and carefully placed The Elements of Style to the left, on top of her latest copy of Writer’s Digest. She checked her watch. Seven minutes used up. Still eight to go. She removed the tea bag from her cup and paused to smell the apple cinnamon scent and gaze out the window at the tree across the street, just starting to show its fall colours. What should she write? Eight minutes was too short to start on the novel she had always wanted to author. It was too short to write a short story, even. Maybe some brainstorming for tomorrow’s session, or maybe a poem. She could get a start on a poem. She glanced at her watch again. Six minutes. Well, maybe she could find some good writing prompts for the rest of the week. Google, where will you lead today? thewritepractice.com. Sophie navigated to their latest daily prompt, on Intertextuality as a Literary Device, and decided that would be a good place to start, tomorrow.

Very cute! I’ve been intertextualized. 🙂

Thanks! First post 🙂

Glad to have you here.

This was so much fun. Your truth mixed with humor had me chuckling.

I’m glad! Thanks for the feedback.

I think you just invented meta-intertextuality. Hats off to you.

Thanks! By the way, I really enjoyed your perspective on inspiration.

I’ve come across intertextuality before but never knew it had a name! Here’s my effort. (I’ve had Melville’s “Moby Dick” on my mind for months now.)

That shopping trip yesterday gave Lewis a new angle on his wip. Bored housewives, eager for a cup of tea and gossip would be just the backdrop to set up and ignite that elusive scene of the desperate daughter meeting her scheming widowed mother in an upmarket coffee shop. Outside the sea had crashed noisily onto the rocks, falling away from the steel and chrome shopping mall that defied the storm. Its roar muted by the thick layer of glass that made him feel like an uninvolved spectator sitting in a comfortable sitting room watching it on television. They had said this building would turn out to be a white elephant. Who would want to shop with sharp smell of ozone in your nose while the wind snatched at your hair? They say nights when the place has emptied one can see a peg-legged old sea-captain stomping about angrily on the rocks, all the while looking out to the restless sea. What is he hoping to see? No craft would brave a sea whipped into such an angry cauldron. A creature of the deep, perhaps? One large enough to survive this maelstrom? Lewis had found the right amount of conflict for the scene..

Good article, Sophie. One of the problems with intertextuality – at least, in a commercial novel – is that the lay reader is unlikely to detect those buried allusions. Especially if the reader is not steeped in western culture. Kristeva made the point that all creative writing is a ‘mosaic of quotations’. Each carries its own baggage of assumptions and associations. To import those sub-texts into a novel can be great fun but will the average reader ‘get’ them, even at a subliminal level?

That said, biblical and mythic intertexts, in western culture, always pull their weight 🙂

How can someone’s eyes ‘look like coming home’? I never really understood this; until now, of course. How do I explain it? Someone once said that the eyes are a window to the soul, and that is exactly what they are. Windows work both ways. Troubled souls look for comfort through the eyes of one person into another’s. Often they don’t find it in their usual confidantes. But when they find what they’re looking for in the eyes of another, there’s a calmness that washes over those two souls: calm and understanding. When a troubled soul discovered this peace, its last wish is to lose it. Its owner finds themselves constantly thinking of that particular pair of eyes, or windows, and conjuring up their image; often going into detail the richness or depth of the color. A connection is formed. There doesn’t have to be prior emotional connection for someone’s eyes to “look like coming home”. There doesn’t have to be any emotional connection at all. It’s simply the feeling one gets of knowing they can trust someone; along with the urge to share everything with that person, knowing they would listen, encourage you, and understand. But one’s brain knows to keep quiet. It’s good to keep emotions down to a minimum. No one wants to hear it anyway. So the soul uses the eyes to speak. At the same time the other soul uses their eyes to listen. And when the two peoples eyes meet, even for a brief moment, the restless souls relax. These two people are true soulmates. Soulmates don’t have to know the full story. They don’t have to be emotionally connected or even be destined to get married. They are just someone whose very presence seems to brighten the room or whose soul satisfies your own without speaking, and without spending extensive amount of time with them; just by simply looking through that special person’s eyes. Because once your soul shares itself with another, that person does, indeed, become special. ———————————— This is a bit of expository writing. I intertextualized the phrase “your eyes look like coming home” which I’ve heard in various songs on the radio and I kind of just explored the meaning behind it through my writing.

Chin up little girl. Show the world your tear-streaked face and smiling eyes. Let her hear your words and the sobs in between. Tell your story from the beginning to the climax down to the perennially desired denouement. Stand proud in your ripped clothes and mended soul because there is no punch you cannot roll with. Your scars are your cartouche, intricate and permanent.

Look into a mirror, into a still lake or into a murky puddle . it doesn’t matter because the truth is little one , you are beautiful. Put on your white dress and dance to your heart’s content and don your black frock and finally say goodbye . Learn , make blunders , understand , and learn. It’s a vicious cycle indeed.

On days your entire being says “I am tired”, sit on a hammock and sip some tea. Feel your cheeks lift and your soul grow . You hear Veronica Shoffstall written soliloquy loud and clear now ; “And you begin to accept your defeats with your head up and your eyes open with the grace of a woman not the grief of a child.”

‘Sing, Goddess, of the anger of…’ well, not Achilles. I’m not much of an athlete, or a warrior. I suppose I’m more like Paris, but he doesn’t get angry as much as scared. It’s not really singing either, not in the classical sense or the modern one. I never could rhyme. As for goddess, well, the gender of divinity not withstanding, I’m an atheist. So I suppose I can really relate to the anger in the opening words of the Iliad.

Still, anger it is. The same kind of anger as well. I kind of anger at having one you love, one you considered your, taken away from you by someone who decided that they had a better claim to her than you. Anger so deep, so all-consuming that you take to your tent and sulk until the Trojans try to burn your ships and kill your best friend. Ok, well it’s not a perfect analogy, but you get my drift.

My Brisais was not a slave-girl stolen in a raid, but the details are not important. What is important is that she’s gone now. All thanks to him. My Agamemnon is not a king, or a great leader of men. He actually seemed like a perfectly nice guy. Well, she clearly thought so too. Better than me anyway, although that’s not hard. Even so, like Agamemnon, he just strolled in and took what he decided was his, without even consulting me.

Things, I have to confess, were not exactly going well. Our relationship was sailing between a Scylla of not spending enough time together and Charybdis of often fighting when we did spend time together, and I had been finding it increasingly difficult to resist certain harpies who I suppose I’m now at liberty to pursue, but that is a different epic all together. It doesn’t do to mix one’s metaphors; I hear you can do yourself some serious damage if you don’t know what you’re doing.

So, Agamemnon. What do I do? Unlike Achilles, my withdrawal to my tent does not seriously hamper my antagonist’s war effort. As I said, more like Paris. I could confront him, but again, more like Paris, and I would have no Aphrodite to spirit me away as I was about to be defeated, but again, I’m mixing my classical references.

This is some powerful freaking thing that measures the beauty of words with the evanescent bloom of a summer day in the everlasting sunshine of sunsets and marigolds and seems to suggest that life is the final resting place for those who understand the importunate misfortunes and enduring grief of time when long ago we sat on the rocks and watched the sea rise in the late afternoon as the golden fingers of the sun cast their lines over the shadows of passing destinies and left us enthralled with the wonder of friendship in collegial groups that waded in the waves at the ends of the earth and left us full of the tiresome tirades of mad old men drunk with metaphor and cold drafts of beer in the taverns by the small lane where Joyce penned his magnum opus and mused on human frailty and the mutinous revolts of the discontented who disturb the sleep of mankind with dreams of world domination notwithstanding the probability that some future utopia of grace and peace will end with a whimper when a Messianic figure, bent on fate’s dictate, engages in the pursuit of some other paradise, some other murky domain where the insects flit among the daffodils and disease takes its toll on luxuriant hopes of better days wherever those days might lead us onward to the slow drift of time where the cycle of death and rebirth under the tall oaks of Central Park on the outskirts of Fifth Avenue exist not far from President Obama’s new home in Kalorama toward the bleak outcome of ISIS victories in the deserts of the Middle East lurching toward the caliphate longed for by Muslims and other seekers of wisdom and truth, but it can never end, you say, you say with a winsome glance at history and bibliographic data that surrounds us in the library overflowing with books written by the great Irish authors like Connor McGuire and Ronen Connelly who were awarded prizes for their deft insights and loquacious rants that evaporated amid the political campaigns that drearily dwindled before the electorate in the waning days of the Republic while Greek scholars read Plato and Sophocles expressed sorrow o’er the fate of Oedipus and Homer cast his spell over Odysseus while the sirens sang of better days into the dreary nights that hovered over the Gates of Hercules on moonlit evenings in the summer casting magic spells and unfortunate outcomes bemoaned by warriors bent on ransacking Rome within the watchful gaze of Nero who fiddled while Rome burned and led his people to disastrous catastrophes in the decades after Caesar was stabbed to death in the Senate building not far from the graves of Romulus and Remus who were reared by a wolf in the forests outside the city gates in the ancient days that predated even more ancient days and wearied British school boys who had to cope with names like Tiberius and Claudius later made famous by public broadcasting or the BBC after the fall of Richard Nixon who promoted lasting relations with the Chinese Communists and bragged about his support for Section 8 housing as if his past history as an arch conservative under the mentorship of Dwight Eisenhower could ever persuade the masses that Republican politicians cared one wit for the poor suffering immigrants who made their way from Mexican towns on the U.S. border until a great wall was built that would prevent an invasion of migrants and starving antelopes into Texas, all the while relaxing in a bed of roses on the Pedernales where LBJ predicted that no one would ever understand James Joyce’s greatest creation until a District Court in Manhattan declared that Molly Bloom’s narrative of an orgasm did not constitute obscenity under federal law.

I used the phrase “the golden fingers of the sun.” This is an allusion to Homer’s Illiad. Homer repeats the phrase, “the rosy fingers of dawn.”

The dawn goddess Eos was almost always described with rosy fingers (ῥοδοδάκτυλος, rhododáktylos) or rosy forearms (ῥοδόπηχυς, rhodópēkhys) as she opened the gates of heaven for the Sun to rise. In Homer, her saffron-coloured robe is embroidered or woven with flowers; rosy-fingered and with golden arms, she is pictured on Attic vases as a beautiful woman, crowned with a tiara or diadem and with the large white-feathered wings of a bird.

From The Iliad:

Now when Dawn in robe of saffron was hastening from the streams of Oceanus, to bring light to mortals and immortals, Thetis reached the ships with the armor that the god had given her.

— Iliad xix.1

But soon as early Dawn appeared, the rosy-fingered, then gathered the folk about the pyre of glorious Hector.

— Iliad xxiv.776

‘We are the hollow men.’

Haunted by the words of an ancient poet, whose name I could not remember, I stood at the edge of Today and watched the world shiver. Oblivion was coming, second by second… and the earth could do nothing but shiver; a trembling, whimpering orb suspended in space, awaiting its inevitable doom.

‘Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion;’

I had awaited this time for centuries, staring down on humanity with searching eyes. The end was coming. It had always been coming. And finally it was about to appear. Tomorrow had faded into dust. Yesterday was nothing but a vague memory. And Today was doomed.

‘Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom’

And suddenly, it was there. The darkness that had been withheld over the ages, unravelling across the trembling blue sphere with hands of merciless ice. I stood aloft from it all, seperate from the fate of the nations. Swiftly, like a shadow leaking across the floor, the darkness seeped across the surface of that wretched planet.

‘This is the way the world ends’

Thick, inky blackness smothered the land and the sea. I could only imaging the view from below. Darkness tumbling down highways, across empty lots and flooding through farmlands. Darkness wrapping itself around the tallest buildings, and coursing into the smallest homes. Darkness, infiltrating everything. Darkness, everywhere.

A sigh, a groan of mourning and agony was lifted from the dying world. It reached my ears and I only turned a blind eye. I had been waiting, and finally the end was here.

Then the darkness lifted, and there was Nothing. A small utterance of something unfamiliar seemed to linger at the back of my mind. But what use was guilt? The deed had been done. Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, all lost in Oblivion and replaced with Nothing. And silently, surely, without exclamation or bravado, it was over. The world had ended.

‘Not with a bang but a whimper.’

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Article Contents

1. introduction, 2. categories of cultural appropriation, 3. what is minor literature, 4. intertextuality and appropriation, 5. the ethics and aesthetics of cultural appropriation.

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The Ethics and Aesthetics of Intertextual Writing: Cultural Appropriation and Minor Literature

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Paul Haynes, The Ethics and Aesthetics of Intertextual Writing: Cultural Appropriation and Minor Literature, The British Journal of Aesthetics , Volume 61, Issue 3, July 2021, Pages 291–306, https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayab001

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Cultural appropriation, as both concept and practice, is a hugely controversial issue. It is of particular importance to the arts because creativity is often found at the intersection of cultural boundaries. Much of the popular discourse on cultural appropriation focusses on the commercial use of indigenous or marginalized cultures by mainstream or dominant cultures. There is, however, growing awareness that cultural appropriation is a complicated issue encompassing cultural exchange in all its forms. Creativity emerging from cultural interdependence is far from a reciprocal exchange. This insight indicates that ethical and political implications are at stake. Consequently, the arts are being examined with greater attention in order to assess these implications. This article will focus on appropriation in literature, and examine the way appropriative strategies are being used to resist dominant cultural standards. These strategies and their implications will be analyzed through the lens of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature.

Any genre is never more interesting than when being broken in some way…not what the story is about but its very existence. ( Moore, 2017 )

Both words in the phrase ‘cultural appropriation’ are ideologically loaded, which is further intensified as they become merged into a single concept. This concept is controversial and fundamentally political—as, indeed, is culture itself.

Culture is necessarily shared. It is also continually undergoing transformation, not least through relationships with other cultures or in addressing alternative values to those on which it is structured (see Kulchyski, 1997 ; Matthes, 2016 ; Kramvig and Flemmen, 2019 ). The implications for neatly defining culture are clear:

[T]he definition of culture has a contested history. Not only do cultures change over time, influenced by economic and political forces, climatic and geographic changes, and the importation of ideas, but the very notion of culture itself also is dynamically changing over time and space – the product of ongoing human interaction. This means that we accept the term as ambiguous and suggestive rather than as analytically precise. ( Baldwin et al., 2008 , p. 23)

The interaction of practices and values from different cultures is, therefore, never a neutral process. Drawing out the ethical and political implications of cultural exchange is thus a challenge. This challenge has been addressed in a number of ways, including categorizing different types of exchange ( Rogers, 2006 ), categorizing the object of exchange ( Young, 2000 , 2005 ) or identifying types of ethical consequences of cultural exchange practices themselves ( Heyd, 2003 ). This article will take a different approach and evaluate cultural exchange within the arts along a fault-line that divides exchange practices between i) appropriation that serves the interests of existing cultural inequalities and ii) appropriative practices used to challenge existing modes of dominance. The focus of the evaluation will be literature—in particular, the ethics and aesthetics of intertextual writing as identified through the lens of minor literature, a concept developed by Deleuze and Guattari (1986) . The insights obtained by using the minor literature concept will help to enrich the concept of cultural appropriation and assess its ethical implications. In particular, it helps to clarify the relevance of status, advantage and opportunity as being asymmetrical features of cultural exchange, and it can be applied to identify strategies to address these asymmetries. Evaluating appropriative strategies within a variety of intertextual literary settings will thus enable these insights to be examined and applied to other cases. Before this evaluation can commence, the notion of cultural appropriation needs to be examined in a little more detail.

Cultural appropriation can be approached in different ways. The variety of different practices classified as instances of cultural appropriation means that stipulating a definition is problematic (see Jackson, 2019 ). Helene Shugart (1997) observes that appropriation occurs when features perceived to belong to a specific culture are used to further the interest of those not sharing that cultural heritage:

Any instance in which a group borrows or imitates the strategies of another—even when the tactic is not intended to deconstruct or distort the other’s meanings and experiences—thus would constitute appropriation. ( Shugart, 1997 , pp. 210–211)

Expanding on this definition is helpful in positioning the concept at this initial stage. In this way, if culture is defined (even if imprecisely) in terms of the complex network of practices, knowledge and beliefs that emerge and are shared through social interaction (see Baldwin et al., 2008 , pp. 23–24), then cultural appropriation can thus be characterized as an unauthorized use or imitation of characteristics, symbols, artefacts, genres, rituals or technologies derived from these networks, but removed from their cultural setting and original purpose (see also Rogers, 2006). Characterized this way, a number of relevant themes and practices can be identified—although as an emerging concept, presenting a systematic approach to these themes and practices presents a challenge. Peter Kulchyski warns of attempting to apply an exhaustive or systematic schematic of categories or instances (Kulchyski, 1997); nevertheless, there are some common themes of relevance to the arts, including the following categories: cross-cultural aesthetic appreciation ( Heyd, 2003 ); the fictional (re)production of marginalized voices ( Moraru, 2000 ); appropriation in popular visual culture ( Wetmore, 2000 ); reciprocal creative exchange ( Sinkoff, 2000 ; Goldstein-Gidoni, 2003 ; Dong-Hoo, 2006 ); transculturation in the arts ( Lionnet, 1992 ) and performance and protest ( Hoyes, 2004 ; Galindo and Medina, 2009 ; Carriger, 2018 ). The article will return to some of these topics shortly but will firstly address attempts to provide structure to the patterns observed within this diversity.

Richard Rogers (2006) has developed a framework with which to position the concept of cultural appropriation based on four categories: exchange, dominance, exploitation and transculturation. The different categories are used to evaluate the ethics of different types of cultural exchange and are constituted by social, political and economic contexts such as considerations of power relations between cultures, hegemonic concerns, resistance and the hybrid nature of cultural development. Cultural exchange is characterized by reciprocal cultural influence in the absence of specific differences in power relations. Cultural dominance occurs when features derived from a dominant culture are imposed on individuals from a subordinate culture. Cultural exploitation occurs when people from a dominant culture take or imitate features or entities from a subordinate culture without permission or without providing compensation. Finally, transculturation is categorized as a hybridization of different cultural elements from multiple sources, particularly where the product of the relationship represents a new cultural form.

Rogers describes the logic and relevance of these categories in detail (see Rogers, 2006 , pp. 479–497), providing a helpful series of archetypes to assess the conditions that predetermine exchange relationships. Despite these strengths, this approach has its limitations, particularly in relation to the arts. Rogers’ assumption of the operation of a binary structure of power as a force of cultural imposition (or the evasion of ‘fair compensation’) both simplifies the systemic aspects of power, and risks presenting culture in an essentialist or reified way. As a framework, it is powerful in assessing explicitly commercial relationships but less insightful in evaluating more nuanced creativity emerging within cultural exchange.

A contrasting approach is to place less emphasis on the nature of the cultural encounter and more on the entities enabled or exchanged through the cross-cultural encounter. The framework developed by James Young, for example, distinguishes between different classes of entities appropriated. Young identifies five categories (material appropriation; non-material appropriation; stylistic appropriation; motif appropriation and subject appropriation). In contrast with Rogers’ approach, Young’s categories focus more explicitly on themes relevant to artistic production. Material appropriation involves transferring ownership of a tangible object from members of one culture (those creating the entity) to members of another culture (those appropriating the entity). Non-material appropriation occurs through the reproduction of non-tangible works by members of another culture. Stylistic appropriation occurs when members of one culture use stylistic elements used by or in common with the works of another culture. Motif appropriation occurs when the influence of another culture is considerable in creating a new work rather than the new work being created in the same style as the works of that culture. Subject appropriation concerns cases when members of one culture represent members or aspects of another culture ( Young, 2000 , pp. 302–303). The framework is further enhanced by considering the offensiveness of contrasting examples and mitigated by factors such as context, social value and freedom of expression. The strength of Young’s categorization is to give clarity to the many different ways in which exchange risks being objectionable, particularly in the creation and circulation of artistic technique, art and artefacts, and in the broader context of authenticity, representation, cultural heritage and intellectual property rights. Young’s approach is also limited by this focus. By exposing the conditions relevant to the framing of cultural appropriation, Young’s categorization also demonstrates the inadequacy of attempting to unify the multiplicity of cultural encounters and boundaries (and the commodification of cultural content) through the reception of typically dissonant or totemic artefacts. Focussing on exceptional exchange patterns (hawking/hoarding stolen relics, stylistic plagiarism, stereotyping, carnivalesque profanation, etc.) means Young’s approach fails to focus on the more pressing implications of cultural exchange and broader issues, such as racism or rights based on heritage (see, for example, Heyd, 2003 ; Jackson, 2019 , pp. 1–9). In addition, Young’s way of framing cultural interaction reveals exactly the type of appropriative representation—for example, addressing who determines consent or which individuals are authentically ‘insiders’—that it was invoked to question (see Matthes, 2016 ). It also assumes a discourse of victimhood that is both oversimplified and ‘justifiably unacceptable to many indigenous people’ ( Cuthbert, 1998 , p. 257).

A third approach to categorize forms of appropriation and exchange is presented by Thomas Heyd (2003) . Heyd’s focus has the potential to offer additional insight relevant to this article, as it is derived from research on art and aesthetics ( Heyd, 2003 , p. 37). Heyd emphasizes the need to distinguish between three categories of risk that occur with acts of appropriation. The first risk is moral and occurs when appropriation is unauthorized and threatens the income or rights of disadvantaged or indigenous groups or artists. The second risk is cognitive and occurs when a different value context is imposed on a creative process that threatens the authenticity of the cultural artefacts (and culture) appropriated. The third risk is ontological and occurs through a misrepresented portrayal of the culture producing the appropriated entities, which ultimately threatens their cultural identity. (see Heyd, 2003 , pp. 37–38). There is, however, a fourth risk—one with which Heyd seems unaware, but for which his approach is complicit. This is the risk of defining the creativity of artists in terms of their heritage, namely interpreting a work of art by an artist from a marginalized culture predominantly in terms of their marginalized status irrespective of its relevance to their art . This deterministic coupling of creativity to heritage is problematic for a variety of reasons. The most obvious objection is that it limits the creative work to an imposed standard, often in terms of a stereotypical representation of its marginalized origin, or dictating the criteria for authenticity. The disqualification of Genevieve Nnaji’s film Lionheart from the 2020 Academy Awards ‘International Feature Film’ category for having insufficient Igbo dialogue (and too much English) exemplifies this final point well, regardless that the film reflects an authentic contextual use of different languages for business purposes in Nigeria, which is itself a prominent theme of the film ( Whitten, 2019 ). Viewed in terms of the authenticity that such creativity ‘owes’ to its marginalized cultural patterns additionally removes the potential for the intended subversion of such standards. Removing opportunities to resist or subvert prevailing standards is another aspect of cultural domination, appropriating or closing down ‘strategies of discourse and public performances of culture beyond the stultifying binaries of right/wrong or appreciation/appropriation’ ( Carriger, 2018 , pp. 165), strategies examined later in this article.

An alternative approach is to address the growing body of case studies that present the scope of cultural appropriation in its broadest form and position them in terms of how they reproduce or resist forms of cultural dominance. This will also help to identify strategies—such as performance, redeployment, learning, engagement or re-identification—able to serve the purpose of resistance or subversion, or to produce lines of flight to address marginalization, exclusion, invisibility and powerlessness. What potentially unites such examples is that they might serve to provide evidence of the operation of cultural expropriation —not merely to resist cultural domination or address establishments of power, but to develop mechanisms of cultural innovation available to empower even the most marginalized of social groups. For this reason, there is the need for a revised perspective that distinguishes between processes of cultural appropriation and strategies of cultural expropriation, and to explain their relevance and implications. To do so, the article will now turn to this theme and attempt to redefine the relationship underpinning the revised perspective in terms of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature.

To answer the question that Deleuze and Guattari ask—‘What is minor literature?’—is to address the broader questions implied by the powers of becoming that it reveals. More specifically, the minor literature concept will address the question of how to construct a form of writing from a language that is not one’s own. In order to address the challenges implied by cultural appropriation, the minor literature concept will also need to be linked to the aesthetic and ethical contexts for which cultural narratives, myths and representation are key themes—issues to be examined in the final section of this article. To address this topic and make these connections more explicit, it will be helpful to begin with Deleuze and Guattari’s framing of the distinction between minoritarian and majoritarian, through which the minor literature concept is positioned.

Minoritarian in this sense is not an indicator of (numerical) minority or ethnic minority but is characterized in its difference with an embodiment or approximation of a standard that defines a majority. It is this difference from the abstract (majority-serving) standard that separates, and sets apart, the minority. Majority assumes a state of power and domination as the standard measure ( Deleuze and Guattari, 1988 , p. 105). An example of such a standard is the requirement of membership of the Académie Française in order to create ‘official’ academic art in late nineteenth-century France. Membership offered prestige and a position, but required adherence to its conventions (encompassing majority, i.e. White, male, elitist, values). Such faithfulness to these conventions produced art now perceived to be conservative, bourgeois, contrived and lacking in innovation. In a similar way, in adhering to prevailing conventions, the majoritarian character is a constant and homogeneous system. In this regard, majority is expressive of identity (i.e. inert and invariable). This is in contrast with minorities, which serve as subsystems dependent on, but invisible within, the system. Minoritarian, in this sense, is seen by Deleuze and Guattari as ‘a potential, creative and created, becoming’ ( Deleuze and Guattari, 1988 , pp. 105–106). To operationalize this relationship, Deleuze and Guattari go beyond a majority/minority duality, adding a third category or state: ‘becoming-minor’—namely a creative process of becoming different or diverging from the abstract standard that defines majority.

Minor literature emerges from this conceptual relationship. For Deleuze and Guattari, creativity in literature extends its authority through a minoritarian mode. Minor literature does not attempt to meet the standard but instead attempts to subvert or revise the standard: ‘minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature’ ( Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 , pp. 17–18). In this regard, all great literature is minor literature to the extent that it creates its own standard. The example of Franz Kafka is used to illustrate the point. Kafka was a Czech and a Jew who wrote in German—a language that, although foreign to his being, was also a channel for the creation of identity. For Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka was a great writer because he wrote without a standard view of the interpersonal problems of people. In this way, Kafka’s work does not represent an established identity, but is prefigurative in giving a voice to that which is not given: a ‘people to come’—that is, a people whose identity is a work in progress, in a state of creation and transformation.

In conceptualizing the contours of minor literature, Deleuze and Guattari identify three key characteristics: the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy and the collective assemblage of annunciation. ( Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 , p. 18). Examples from literature will help to unpack these features, and these will be assembled and discussed in Section 4. Before this, a small number of observations should suffice as an introduction to the theme.

The characteristics of minor literature can be contrasted with those of major literature. A major literature works within a set of literary and discursive standards in order to foreground and narrate the way individual concerns join with other individual concerns within a social environment. These conventions, as much as the social and political setting, remain in the background. The storyline might be anchored in a specific location, but in major literature, this setting serves as the context to explore the subjective experience and relationships developed between the cast of characters we encounter. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin ( 1852 ) will serve as an example of major literature. The novel conforms to its epoch’s conventions of a well-written, structurally sophisticated and emotionally engaging story. The social setting of the novel is mid nineteenth-century Southern USA, defined by the condition of slavery. The novel’s theme is the immorality of slavery, but the narrative structure itself focusses primarily on the relationships between the Shelby family, the St. Clare family, their slaves and their experiences as these relationships change. The novel expresses its anti-slavery narrative through conventional tropes, literary devices and stock characters (cruel slave trader, enlightened slave owner, Uncle Tom, etc.) in a way that appealed to the sensibilities of its predominantly White, Christian readership.

In contrast, minor literature is concerned with the social ‘assemblages’ themselves, which are comprised not merely of characters but also include other equally important entities. Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize this in three ways, particularly with reference to minor literature as a reversal of the conventional interpretation of storytelling. Firstly, this is done by presenting a perspective that is usually invisible or suppressed as the central focus while, at the same time, conventionally dominant codes are handled as though they were alien or unfamiliar. The second way this is achieved is through a reversal of emphasis, specifically in the sense that the cast of characters express social and political forces, and these forces themselves are the subject(s) of the performance. Finally, this is approached by thinking of authorship as the adoption of collective value: the writer does not conform to literary conventions and genres, but instead expresses the collective sentiments of the socio-political reality of the character’s setting.

While these characteristics are almost by definition genre-defying, an example of an approach to literature that combines these features is that of intertextuality. Such writings, irrespective of other qualities they may possess, can be appreciated in enriching, modifying and creating hybrid distortions to the narrative that, in turn, produce that which is not already recognized, suggesting new avenues of becoming and new questions yet to be addressed. In an example to be examined further in the following section, Ishmael Reed’s 1976 novel Flight to Canada illustrates minor literature characteristics, and does so through in a deliberate—and intertextual—contrast with the major literature features of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin . Flight to Canada examines how American culture narrates the history of the American Civil War. Reed uses real and fictional events from the 1850s and 1860s—including characters appropriated from Stowe’s novel and the corresponding historical figures inspiring them, coupled with the narrator’s world of the 1970s—to satirize this narrative. Conceptualized in this way, it becomes clearer why intertextuality as minor literature plays a potentially important role: such literature is a type of appropriation that resists ethical and aesthetic dominance in order to explore the possibilities of new standards. The following sections will unpack the characteristics of minor literature and exemplify this argument in more detail.

The concept of minor literature is relevant here because of the changing nature of production promotion, exchange and consumption of literature. There is little need to rehearse the argument that social media platforms are changing the way information circulates with implications for the changing nature of the production and consumption of text. The point of most relevance here is that the means and circulation of writing are immense and, by implication, access to culturally specific myths, stories and history, the diversity of styles, approaches to aesthetics and authorship available has expanded. If, in addition, there are a limited number of distinctive plotlines feeding into Western literature (see, for example, Booker, 2004 ), then this diversity is typically channelled through a rather limited set of tropes but one potentially enriched by engaging with non-Western writing or storytelling traditions. Appropriating or adapting a pre-existing location and accompanying set of characters offers different degrees of engagement with the original material and includes a variety of strategies: détournement, fan fiction, honkadori, pastiche, transmedia and type-scene, to name a few. Each is appropriative in taking an existing story or narrative device and using it as the basis of a new story or a continuation or hybridization of the original. Using a strategy of appropriation enables issues to be elaborated and extended because other aspects of the story are already developed or the individuals established. In this way, the voices repeated within intertextual work repeat to transform the work: thus repeating the power of difference, the conditions from which the original work emerged. The work appropriates, but its transformation could equally embody an expropriation, as defined earlier.

As conceptualized this way, the focus of appropriation is to make visible the complex bonds between characters and entities within the story’s social settings that are otherwise overlooked. This is not simply a matter of replacing one voice for another, but of creating a hybrid voice. Such hybrid voices alter the text by eliciting a diversity of styles, pushing back against dominant conventions and questioning the very defining features of literary success. Consequently, this facet of minor literature also implies the emergence of new approaches to literary aesthetics, politics and ethics, as Lev Grossman suggests: ‘[Breaking down walls] used to be the work of the avant garde, but in many ways fanfiction has stepped in to take on that role. If the mainstream has been slow to honor it, well, that’s usually the fate of aesthetic revolutions’ ( Grossman, 2013 : xiii). This does not mean that minor literature can be reduced to features of intertextuality, nor that minor literature is necessarily intertextual. Instead, examining intertextual literature through the lens of minor literature can distinguish acts of appropriation in terms of ethical responsibility, offer opportunities for challenging political dominance and contribute to improved aesthetic transparency by challenging the aesthetic standards that support culturally dominant conventions. Once established, this approach can be applied more specifically to examine other forms of cultural appropriation.

To illustrate this insight a little more, some of the features of appropriation in literature will need to be examined. To provide some exemplification and further insights into the cultural aspects of such appropriation, the notion of intertextuality will be used to illustrate the three key characteristics of minor literature introduced in the previous section.

The first characteristic presented by Deleuze and Guattari describes minor literature as the case in which ‘language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization’ ( Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 , p. 16). Consequently, invisible or otherwise suppressed perspectives become repositioned as the point of emphasis and, as such, are able to challenge dominant codes and conventions, which, as a result, become rendered as foreign or incoherent.

While there is a diversity of motives, styles and modes of expression to be found within intertextual literature, a key theme is that of reversal of foreground/background. Returning to Ishmael Reed’s 1976 novel Flight to Canada will help to illustrate this characteristic, as the flight itself is both literally and figuratively a deterritorialization. In the novel, Reed addresses the way Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin appropriates the narrative framework of Josiah Henson’s autobiography ( Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave ) ( Henson, 1849 ) by reappropriating the story to its rightful owners, the former slaves themselves. Stowe’s novel rescued Henson’s account of his life from obscurity, but at the cost of distortion and sensationalism serving the codes, conventions and expectations of a predominantly White readership, as expressed through the lens of its White characters. Reed’s corrective is a counter-distortion of history by telling Henson’s story from the slave’s perspective but using deliberate anachronism and combining real and fictitious events in ways that reverse expectations and use literature itself for the purpose of liberation. In the novel, the lives of powerful and notable historical individuals (Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Stowe, for example) are fictionalized, being presented as stereotypical figures, incoherent drunks and trite dupes for the reader’s ridicule, while the characters representing Henson, the slaves and slave descendants he encountered in his life are given depth and insightfulness, particularly in voicing their reflections on the historical conditions for emancipation.

In reflecting on a very different approach to reappropriation, Françoise Lionnet’s view that Francophone women novelists of colour offer insights into ‘border zones’ of culture provides another example of this first characteristic ( Lionnet, 1992 ). Examples of the deterritorialization of language are demonstrated by Lionnet’s observation that at the periphery of cultural discourses is a heteroglossia, a hybrid language that is a site of creative resistance to dominant conceptual paradigms. The creative literary practices that are employed by writers of African heritage occupying these border zones reveal, for Lionnet, processes of adaptation, appropriation and contestation, which shape identity in colonial and postcolonial contexts. The established conventions of storytelling found in the literature of the colonial power are invoked by postcolonial border-zone writings, often for the purpose of being subverted, in particular: ‘to delegitimate the cultural hegemony of “French” culture over “Francophone” realities’ ( Lionnet, 1992 , p. 116).

The second characteristic identified by Deleuze and Guattari is that minor literature emphasizes social and political forces rather than focussing primarily on individual concerns joined with other individual concerns charted through a series of personal experiences, as is the case with major literature. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari make the following observation concerning this second characteristic: ‘its cramped spaces forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified because a whole other story is vibrating within it’ ( Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 , p. 17).

Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) offers a useful illustration of such political immediacy. In the novel Rhys interweaves feminist and postcolonial argument within an intertextual plot derived from, and intertwined with, Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1874). Rhys’ novel tells the story of Bertha Mason (under her real name Antoinette Cosway) from the character’s point of view. The story begins with an account of her childhood in Jamaica and recounts her honeymoon and unhappy marriage to Edward Rochester. The story charts her emigration to England and ultimately her confinement to ‘the attic’ of Thornfield Hall. The main character is, in many ways, the mirror of Jane Eyre but, as a Creole woman having lost her wealth and position in society and in a fragile state of mental health, is one that can be seen as having developed through an explicit engagement with the (political) forces of patriarchy, colonialism, racism, displacement, assimilation and slavery. It is within the cramped space shaped by these political forces that the madness of Bertha can be recognized and explained, and which confine her as much as her husband’s servants tasked with keeping her prisoner at Thornfield Hall. In a similar way, Hanan al-Shaykh’s One Thousand and One Nights: A Retelling ( 2011 ) and David Henry Hwang’s play M. Butterfly ( 1993 ) develop intertextual strategies to (re)appropriate stories and characters that have been refracted through orientalist retelling. Through the use of hybrid postcolonial cultural principles, each author shapes intertextual narratives with which to explore and oppose the social and political forces of dominance associated with cultural imperialism. Both al-Shaykh and Hwang, like Rhys, also used their texts to reappropriate from their source literature a series of mythologies with which to undermine the conservative values still present in ‘decolonized’ cultures. These myths become political forces to challenge discrimination and the exclusion of disadvantaged groups, such as women and LGBT communities, in their respective cultures.

The third defining characteristic of minor literature is that it affords the taking on of collective value. It is worth quoting at length from Deleuze and Guattari to clarify what this implies:

Indeed, precisely because talent isn’t abundant in a minor literature, there are no possibilities for an individuated enunciation that would belong to this or that ‘master’ and that could be separated from a collective enunciation. Indeed scarcity of talent is in fact beneficial and allows the concept of something other than a literature of masters; what each author says individually already constitutes a common action, and what he or she says or does is necessarily political, even if others are not in agreement. ( Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 , p. 17)

Intertextual literature is a type of writing for which the notion of talent varies according to the themes, styles and objectives that characterize the relationship between the new work and the canonical work. As derivative works, there are already the conditions for a collective enunciation, albeit perhaps a sense that is marginal, but it is equally a condition of great literature in forging ‘the means for another consciousness and another sensibility’ ( Deleuze and Guattari, 1986 , p. 17). In examining the conditions for great literature, Claire Colebrook, in her introduction to Deleuze and Guattari, uses James Joyce’s Dublin to illustrate this third aspect of minor literature, a Dublin Joyce portrays (in both Dubliners and Ulysses ; 2000a , 2000b ) through themes, techniques and characters appropriated from Homer’s Odyssey :

Joyce’s Dubliners repeats the voices of Dublin, not in order to stress their timelessness, but to disclose their fractured or machine-like quality – the way in which words and phrases become meaningless, dislocated and mutated through absolute deterritorialisation. What Joyce repeats is the power of difference. ( Colebrook, 2002 , p. 119)

Colebrook explains that Joyce’s Dublin is a (colonially appropriated) territory formed from the language of religious moralism and a bourgeois commercialism such that when ‘free-indirect style frees language from its ownership by any subject of enunciation, we can see the flow of language itself, its production of sense and nonsense, its virtual and creative power’ ( Colebrook, 2002 , p. 114). Colebrook’s observation is a useful illustration of this third characteristic of minor literature because, in avoiding any conformity to existing genres and their techniques and traditions, and instead expressing collective sentiments of a relocated territory, Joyce is able to recount and provide navigation points to track the social assemblages that the characters shape from an otherwise ordinary day in Dublin in 1904. The collective value embodied within the territory is thus further reinforced through parallels and echoes with the ten-year odyssey of Odysseus in his world.

Joyce appropriates, but not to repeat Hellenic cultural values. Instead, he repeats—renews—the power of difference from which Homer’s original story was created. It is also no coincidence that Homer, in providing the first written versions of sophisticated storytelling of its type, also provides scope for the first sophisticated intertextual literature, each disclosing the power of Homer’s epic to transform. These include Virgil’s Aeneid , which presents a narrative of the Trojan War and its consequences from the point of view of the vanquished (and their place in Rome’s founding myth) and Euripides’ play Trojan Women , an account of the events of the Trojan War from the point of view of female characters. Homer’s text continues to afford the repetition of difference, from Derek Walcott’s Omeros ( 1990 ), a postcolonial reworking of Homer relocated to the Caribbean, to Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls ( 2018 ) and Madeline Miller’s Circe , ( 2018 ), which like Euripides’ before them, portray the Trojan War from the perspective and experience of Homer’s (minor) female characters.

Taken collectively, these characteristics illustrate the potential for appropriative strategies to be implemented in the service of emancipatory storytelling, in particular by repurposing other cultural values. In this way—and unlike major literature, which remains attached to the service of power—storytelling as minor literature gives a voice, a collective value, and it recognizes the political and social conditions shaping its characters that, in turn, serves to rouse its readers. This observation that appropriation from other cultures can be liberating for marginal voices complicates many lines of critique used to denounce cultural appropriation as a unified practice. It is, however, also a powerful strategy, particularly in repurposing and disarming the language and values used to marginalize and exclude other cultural perspectives, as will be presented in the following sections. Examining the ethical and aesthetic consequences implied by the rethinking of literary works through the minor literature lens will therefore provide insight into distinguishing between cultural appropriation and cultural expropriation. This distinction is of particular relevance for examining creativity emerging from multiple cultural influences and in the broader debates concerning cultural exchange within the arts. It is to this theme that the article will now turn.

Creativity within the arts often involves engaging with an aesthetic cosmopolitan appreciation of culture, often in a way that perceives itself to be ‘morally responsible and aesthetically discerning’ ( Rings, 2019 , p. 161). Within this context, the use of appropriative strategies to further artistic creativity can be analyzed in many ways, but the lens of minor literature helps in focussing on clarifying different ethical and aesthetic implications related to the different approaches that define the cultural encounter.

Using this lens enables a distinction to be applied to strategies of intercultural engagement based on the implications of exchange: appropriation (or misappropriation) includes instances in which characteristic narratives, techniques, symbols and artefacts are taken or imitated in a way that diminishes the original sources. In contrast, expropriation includes the act of repurposing narratives, techniques, symbols and artefacts in ways designed to enhance the original or provide benefits for the common good. While these features are only part of the defining characteristics of these concepts, when prefixed with the word ‘cultural’, the difference is as contrasting as it is useful. Thus, cultural appropriation represents an unauthorized use or imitation of characteristics, techniques, and so on, from their cultural setting in a way that risks diminishing their cultural source and compromising their purpose. Cultural expropriation, in contrast, is an attempt to provide a broader access to cultural resources and spaces that have provided value for privileged beneficiaries so that others may experience these benefits in a way that has the potential to be mutually enhancing. As a pursuit of majoritarian interest, cultural appropriation preserves existing aesthetic standards, which benefit vested interests. Cultural expropriation, as exemplified by practices of minor literature, helps to question these standards, drawing attention to, or indeed challenging, the conditions that maintain vested interests and provide more opportunities for aesthetic pluralism, ultimately opening up the possibility of new standards of literature.

The minor literature paradigm also emphasizes that the ethical and aesthetic implications of cultural appropriation are interdependent, as are the implications of cultural expropriation. Appropriation and expropriation are not neutral processes; exchange is always dependent on factors beyond the immediate goals of the transaction or encounter. Instances of appropriation predominantly serving majoritarian interests are thus both ethically and aesthetically implicated. This is because exploiting cultural products developed by marginalized groups to serve the interests of dominant social groups reshapes them according to the logic of the commodity form (see Kulchyski, 1997 , p. 617). In this form, ownership is stripped from those with fewest resources, value is extracted and, rather than recognition and reconciliation, coercion is used to define (and impose) ethical and aesthetic standards. These standards might welcome or appreciate otherwise excluded female or minority ethnic artists and writers, but they do so, perhaps for tokenistic reasons, in the interest of the values determined by the dominant culture. In conforming to this logic, minority cultures can be mined or harvested in ways that support the interest of established power relations because the work of art derives its value not from its role as a cultural intermediary or its mode of communication, or in cultivating cultural appreciation, but as a circulating commodity.

In contrast, instances of expropriation occur when creativity associated with marginal cultures or dominated social groups is produced in accordance with cultural resources developed by dominant social groups in order to challenge the standards that maintain and legitimize such cultural dominance. The ethical and aesthetic implications are interdependent because, by addressing exclusion and inequality, this form of engagement provides opportunities for re-examining existing aesthetic standards, as exemplified by recent attempts to ‘decolonize’ the arts curriculum (see, for example, Prinsloo, 2016 ).

Additionally, the cultural appropriation/expropriation division is an important distinction that helps to position different aspects of cultural exchange. A majoritarian usage involves taking ownership of cultural phenomena without questioning the image or essence of its own sense of cultural identity. It expresses extensive multiplicity in that adding more instances does not change the nature of its identity. For example, European and American art of the past century owes a debt to non-Western cultural sources; however, the resulting Western art, as artistic creation, derives its value in being captured and filtered by ‘gate keepers’ and ‘arbiters of taste’ serving European and American cultural measures, namely the aesthetic frameworks and foundations that match/reduce the art work to established criteria, determining which artefacts are to be accepted as ‘fitting’ works of art and through which markets they are to be consumed. As Baudrillard observes:

Modern art wishes to be negative, critical, innovative and a perpetual surpassing, as well as immediately (or almost) assimilated, accepted, integrated, consumed. One must surrender to the evidence: art no longer contests anything, if it ever did … it never disturbs the order, which is also its own. ( Baudrillard, 2019 , p. 103)

In contrast, a minoritarian usage expresses intensive multiplicity—that is, it does not just match features already established, but each additional example alters the composition of the group. In this way, minoritarian practices will take cultural artefacts, practices, content or styles and use them in ways that help to shape the possibilities of their identity and make connections, which in turn shape other identities. For example, intertextual writing, such as Reed’s Flight to Canada discussed earlier or indeed fan fiction, expropriate the characters of a canonical work and insert them into novel relationships so that new aspects of identity or its setting can be elaborated and extended beyond its established world. In this way, the voices repeated within the intertextual work are not those of the author of the original or the derivative work, but are intermediaries, (re)writing the literary event that opens up new possibilities for the reader (see Attridge, 2004 , 2010 ). The voices of intertextual works repeat much that is ‘canon’ in order to transform it: repeating the power of difference by repeating the conditions from which the original work emerged, as the Joyce/Homer example demonstrates.

Such writing also subverts the logic of established ethical and aesthetic standards, undermining both the logic of the commodity and the conventions of categorizing talent. It does so by blurring market boundaries and disrupting market forces: much of this writing, as exemplified by fan fiction, is exchanged free of charge and often circulates in draft form or otherwise incomplete and frequently disseminated anonymously (or pseudonymously). In appropriating from established literature, such work often defies copyright and asserts its existence not by appealing to criteria established by literary criticism but by justifying its relevance in customizing and ‘supplementing’ established works. Indeed, it often defines itself in terms of its opposition to the values or implicit assumptions insinuated or implied within the original work. It is in this regards a ‘dangerous supplement’—‘It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void’ ( Derrida, 1976 , p. 145) but as writer Joss Whedon observes: ‘Art isn’t your pet—it’s your kid. It grows up and talks back to you’ ( Whedon, 2012 ).

Focussing on the beneficiaries of appropriative practices is a useful device in ensuring that standards, both ethical and aesthetic, are reviewed so that intercultural engagement becomes an opportunity to enhance appreciation of perspectives derived from a variety of cultures and to enrich artistic creation. The negative issues identified with cultural appropriation cannot be addressed by majoritarian strategies such as tokenism, patronizing encouragement or quotas to refresh an otherwise pre-established artistic canon. Minoritarian approaches, such as expropriation or cultural/artistic transculturation are required to reflect an appropriate measure of responsibility and cultural awareness in defining an inclusive, meritocratic, creative, engaging and critical approach to artistic creation—namely a conception of the arts that contests and disturbs the order, reclaiming this role for the avant garde once more.

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Clint Johnson

• Ways Texts “Connect” or Reference Each Other
• How to Reference Completely and Ethically

“Intertextuality” is the term for how the meaning of one text changes when we relate it to another text. It is one way to understand how writing is contingent upon other factors: in this case, how another text influences the way we understand, or struggle to understand, a given text.

Scholars debate the extent and significance of intertextuality in how we understand language. Some literary theorists argue that any text is just a combination of other texts. Julia Kristeva, for example, writes, “Any text is the absorption and transformation of another.”

How you typically experience intertextuality in your reading and writing is likely to be far simpler than such theories suggest. After all, texts combine with other texts all the time to create meaning, and they do so in specific ways. Understanding these ways helps us better understand what we read and better achieve our goals when we write.

WAYS TEXTS “CONNECT” OR REFERENCE EACH OTHER

What it is:  When one text uses ideas and words of another text.

How to do it:  A quotation is literally copied language from one text that is used in another. The copied words are put within quotation marks to show the language originally comes from another source. The source is also cited.

Why do it:  Quotation is common in many genres because it allows us to adopt others’ language for a variety of purposes. We quote others for their eloquent use of language, or to distance ourselves from statements we need to communicate but do not want to own, or to acknowledge the existence of other perspectives and voices. As a general rule, we only quote when both the words and ideas of a source are valuable to our writing.

Paraphrasing

What it is:  When one text includes ideas from another text put in new words.

How to do it:  When paraphrasing, a writer uses their own language to communicate an idea found in another text. Paraphrasing does not require quotation marks because the words are not borrowed from another source. Paraphrasing references specific ideas from a text rather than all ideas in the text. The original source is cited.

Why do it:  We paraphrase others to give credit or assign responsibility for ideas and to use others’ identities in our writing. Paraphrasing can also allow us to easily integrate important ideas from other sources into our writing without changing our style. This creates a consistent feel for the reader. As a general rule, we paraphrase whenever we wish to use the ideas of a source but don’t feel that the source’s words add additional value. We might also paraphrase if the source’s words somehow detract from our work, such as if their language is too technical or biased for our purposes.

Summarizing

What it is:  When one text uses the main ideas of another text in the order they are originally presented. The source is cited.

How to do it:  A summary presents another text’s major ideas in their original order but without minor details. It essentially condenses a text, shrinking it down by communicating only the most important information. To preserve confidence that the writer summarizing the text hasn’t changed the meaning, summaries are typically written in an objective style. Summaries can be various lengths, from as short as a sentence to as long as needed without giving unnecessary detail.

Why do it:  We summarize to give our reader a sense of another text in its entirety, at least in terms of main ideas, in a short time and space. As a general rule, we summarize whenever we wish to demonstrate that we comprehend a text’s overall meaning or when we ask a reader to interact with the text extensively in our writing.

What is it:  An indirect reference to another text.

How to do it:  The writer does not quote, paraphrase, or in other ways explicitly communicate how the text alludes to, or indirectly connects to, what they are writing. Instead, they trust the reader to be able to identify the connection using their own knowledge.

Why do it:  We allude to a text when we are confident our audience is familiar with the text mentioned. As a general rule, we allude when we want our reader to relate their own knowledge to what we are writing. If our readers are not familiar with the text we allude to, we will likely confuse them.

HOW TO REFERENCE COMPLETELY AND ETHICALLY

Attribution.

What it is:  Specifying who originated a statement, idea, or text, either by authoring or publishing it. Occasionally, we attribute by citing a text’s title.

How to do it:  Writers attribute by including the name of the person or organization that authored the text they are using in their piece. The name of the author of the original text is connected to the language or ideas the writer references. This may take the form of a parenthetical citation, a signal phrase (e.g., according to ), or a speech tag ( John says ). Attribution is routinely combined with quotes, paraphrases, summaries, and more (but not allusion).

Why do it:  We attribute when we want readers to know where a statement or idea comes from or who it belongs to. Attribution allows us to give people credit for their work, to use others’ credibility in our own writing to increase our own authority, and to separate what we say and believe from what others say and believe. As a general rule, we always attribute the first time we reference a text and often again for texts we reference multiple times.

[Find more attributions in the rest of the example sections above.]

Avoid Plagiarism

What plagiarism is:  Using someone else’s words and/or ideas and, intentionally or unintentionally, passing them off as one’s own.

How NOT to do it:  There are a number of ways to plagiarize, including quoting or paraphrasing without giving credit to the original author, failing to use quotation marks for language taken from other texts, summarizing without attributing, or using someone else’s reasoning or organizational structure as your own. When using exact language from a source, always put that language in quotation marks. Similarly, when using language or ideas from a source, use attribution to give credit to the author of the text. At Salt Lake Community College we stress that writers should never plagiarize intentionally and must be willing to correct unintentional plagiarism if it occurs by revising their writing.

Why NOT do it:  In the United States and much of the rest of the world, especially the west, words and ideas are considered intellectual property, similar in many regards to physical property. Because language and ideas can be trademarked, much like inventions, using them without obeying fair-use rules is considered theft. Plagiarism is a dishonest act and is considered a form of cheating in the academic and professional worlds. While plagiarism is a serious academic offense for which a student may fail an assignment or class, unintentional plagiarism will usually be met with correction and instruction on how to ethically and effectively reference other texts. Intentional plagiarism is cheating and will not be tolerated.

Works Cited

Dalton, Kathleen. “Theodore Roosevelt: The Making of a Progressive Reformer.”  History Now,  The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, www.gilderlehrman.org/history-by-era/politics-reform/essays/theodore-roosevelt-making-progressive-reformer

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Open English @ SLCC Copyright © 2016 by Clint Johnson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Julia Kristeva: Intertextuality

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 22, 2016 • ( 9 )

A term popularised by Julia Kristeva in her analysis of Bakhtin’s concepts Dialogism and Carnival, intertextuality is a concept that informs structuralist poststructuralist deliberations in its contention that individual texts are inescapably related to other texts in a matrix of irreducible plural and provisional meanings. The term is used to signify the multiple ways in which any one literary text is made up of other texts, by means of its implicit or explicit allusions, citations, its repetitions and transformations of the formal and substantive features of earner texts, or simply its unavoidable participation in the common stock of linguistic and literary  conventions  and procedures that are “always already” in place.

In Kristeva’s formulation, any text is an “intertext” — the site of an intersection of numberless texts and existing only through its relation with other texts. This idea was anticipated in Barthes’ idea of the text as “a tissue of quotations”, as “fluid”, with many levels of meaning. The concept of intertextuality defuses the traditional humanist notion of the text as a self-contained, autonomous entity in the view that it is but a weave” of codes from other texts or discourses such as that of history, social conditions, philosophy, theology and so on.

Intertextuality vindicates the Derridean view that there is nothing outside the text — which means that all meanings reside in the interpretation and re-interpretation of texts and that no text exists outside its interpretation. The intertextual productions are thus fundamental to literary production, involving particular ways of seeing based on power relations, forms of resistance and so on, which have their import in various theoretical disciplines including Marxism, Feminism and Postcolonialism.

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Tags: Dialogism and Carnival , intertextuality , Julia Kristeva , Linguistics , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Mikhail Bakhtin

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Table of Contents

Ai, ethics & human agency, collaboration, information literacy, writing process, textuality, intertextuality.

Intertextuality is

• the network of relations among texts and textual interpretations
• the ways relationships among texts influence (1) the production and (2) the interpretation of texts.

Key Words: Communication ; Hermeneutics ; Semiotics ; Text, Composition ; Textual Research ; Textual Analysis ; Symbol Analyst .

Textuality is broader than “meaning” because it has to do with the material and social conditions for the production and dissemination of texts. Often called intertextuality , it is “the recursive interplay among groups of texts .

Scholars don’t really think of texts as isolated from other texts. Rather, they see texts as being conceptually networked to other texts—as one instance of an ongoing conversation . Of course this is obvious when an author quotes, paraphrases, summarizes, translates, and/or satirizes other texts. But texts can also be influenced by other texts in more subtle ways.

Writers, speakers, symbol analysts—and so on—cannot but help be influenced by what they’ve read. That’s natural. We filter our interpretation of texts based on our observations and past experiences as readers . We use our past knowledge of genre to understand and compose texts.

People who study communication and research methodologies tend to think of texts as socio-cultural-historical, networked artifacts. This conception of texts is tied to the epistemological assumption that meaning doesn’t reside solely in an individual text but rather in the relationship a text has with past texts. Scholars create and test new knowledge claims by referencing and discussing past research and scholarship (see Scholarship as a Conversation ).

Recommended Resources

Erickson, A. (2017, April 24). What ‘personal space’ looks like around the world.  The Washington Post . Retrieved June 6, 2018, from  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/04/24/how-close-is-too-close-depends-on-where-you-live/?utm_term=.137d9248a29d  

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