3.1. The First Trope: The Intertextual Literary journalists share an intensified awareness of and strategic focus on and significance of intertextuality. There is a common consensus among them that a meaningful world can always be projected not through a process of mythos-making but rather through the operation of various versions of the same story in a certain text or the interaction of the text itself with other texts within it. Intertextuality has particularly permeated the theoretical framework of literary journalism. Julia Kristeva, Mikhail Bakhtin and Roland Barthes are among the major critics who seek to give a thorough definition of the term, “intertextuality.” According to Kristeva, “Any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another.
In their Introduction to Text Linguistics, De Beaugrande and Dressler (2002) state that intertextuality “concerns the factors which make the utilization of one text dependent upon knowledge of one or more previously encountered texts”. In other words, it denotes the interconnection that exists within texts, which not only include literature, but embrace all kinds of contexts. The technique of referring to other works is frequently used in Willy Russell’s Educating Rita and Alan Bennett’s The History Boys. Both set in England, they tell different stories under the same broad theme of education. Educating Rita follows the development of a young working class hairdresser Rita and her relationship with her middle aged professor Frank.
Such cross-references widen the fictional world, helping to create a more vivid picture, perhaps prompting the reader to embark on an investigation or think on the interpretations. Thus, intertextuality enables the reader to transgress the mental boundaries of a simple information consumer, but rather encourages an individual and informed response. Being the texts that were written before digitization, they prove that non-linearity had existed in the author’s minds long before hypertextuality. To continue, Landow presents two models of non-linear structures. The first one, as noted before, is rather a structure of an intertextual literature, where there is a direct path, which could branch out at some points, but then return you back to the narrative flow.
Through intertextuality, Mailer seeks to distance himself from both the formula of the realistic novel and that of essentially referential “journalistic impartiality”. The two intertexts intertwine historically in an attempt to perpetuate what Barthes called the "referential illusion," that is, the exclusion of the subject for the sake of the object. In other words, both intertexts presuppose the idea of a cohesive world to be discovered under neutral intermediation of an anticipating subject, simply an observer. In opting for an open, fragmentary, and frankly subjective character, Mailer depends on a metafictional strategy, together with parody mockery, and hilarious mood, to mock the Time reporter and the alleged impartiality and reliability
(Porter 1986, p. 397). In relation to discourse communities, intertextuality is important in assisting writers to conform to the social setting, enabling them to make reasonings that will not distance the individuals from the community, guide them to construct the logical decisions that are in comparison with the philosophy of the group, and become more aware of the peculiarities of a discourse community the more that they socialize. In addition, "acceptability is the key standard for analyzing a writing within a discourse community" (Porter 1986, p. 405). Therefore, a writer's achievement is estimated by their capacity to recognize what can be presupposed, and obtain the community's patterns adequately to make a text that adds to the support or conceivably of the community's
“To be, or not to be, this is a question” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Collections Grade 12, 2014) could be understood as why people would bear all the painful, hardness, torment of life, rather than going to a place without problems. Meanwhile, it showed the level that Hamlet has willing to contribute to sacrifice for killing his uncle, he thought this was the right ending for everything. The choice between life and death asked by Hamlet dramatically showed the technique to describe suicide aesthetically. Another more obvious evidence used by Shakespeare was the death of Ophelia. Shakespeare described the place Ophelia dead as “There is a willow grows aslant a brook, That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.” (Forumjournal.org, 2018) This description did not fit the mood of death, instead could be seen as a place for enjoying.
The notion of intertextuality shows how texts are visible within others, and how a text never stands by itself, but it is instead influenced by earlier writings. This is how, through the reading of Great Expectations by Matilda' teacher, she felt identified with Dickens’ character Pip, visible even in the conclusion of Mister Pip, when the girl decides to write her own story, the one which is being delivered to readers. One of our first narrators will be the parents and relatives of Watts' students who, through their stories, try to share their knowledge of the world with their young learners. These narrations can be understood as text themselves, due to their swift between daily life conversation and literary narrations, but this mixing of real fact and historical events has been coined by Linda Hutcheon in her essay Beginning to Theorize the Postmodern (1987) as Historiographic Metafiction. Villagers became narrators of their own beliefs and past experiences, mixed with traces of fictional events, previously acquired by religious beliefs, novels or
Intertextuality-where one text makes explicit or implicit reference to other texts or textual systems—does not necessarily entail a rewriting project. While all counter-discourse is intertextual, not all intertextuality is counter-discursive. By definition, counterdiscourse actively works to destabilise the power structures of the originary text rather than simply to acknowledge its influence. Such discourse tends to target imposed canonical traditions rather than pre-existing master narratives which ‘belong’ to the colonised culture. Hence, when Vijay Mishra comments that ‘we may indeed claim that all Indian literary, filmic and theatrical texts endlessly rewrite The Mahabharata’ (1991:195), he is using ‘rewriting’ less as a marker of counter-discourse than of intertextuality: all other narratives in India have as context and influence The Mahabharata but the master text itself is not particularly targeted for strategic reform.
The term 'intertextuality' is now often used to describe the complex relationships that exist between works of literature. Originally, though, it was intended to mean much more. The basic tenets of this theory were first elaborated in Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism which “subsumes the work of major authors with that of minor figures in a multiple positional typology based on relation and difference” Literary theorist Julia Kristeva believed that there is a cohesive force in literature that connects all the various traditions, past and present. She gave that force a name 'intertextuality’ in 1966 in her essay ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’. In her dialogue with the texts of Mikhail Bakhtin, she argues: “Any text is constructed as a mosaic
The Theory of Intertextuality Intertextuality a term derived from the Latin intertexto, meaning to intermingle while weaving was first used by French semiotician Julia Kristeva in essays such as ”Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” in the late sixties. In this essays, she parted ways with traditional notions of the author’s influence and the sources of text’s , asserting instead that the fabric of all signifying systems, from simple objects like table settings to much complex ones like poems are created by the manner in which they transform earlier signifying systems. Thus a literary work is the product of it’s relationship to other texts and to language structures itself rather than the product of a single author. ”Any text,” she argues, ”is