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CREATIVE WRITING- INTERTEXTUALITY- MODULE

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• 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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Related Resources

• —Creative Writing

Understanding Intertextuality as a Technique of Drama View Download

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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

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

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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