Intertextuality: connecting texts
Intertextuality: connecting texts
This area of exploration studies how texts echo, adapt, challenge or transform other texts and genres. Paper 2 is explicitly comparative, and the HL essay often benefits from a carefully chosen intertextual frame. The exam tests comparative analysis of authorial choices, not the detection of loose parallels.
Core rules and concepts
- Intertextuality includes allusion, quotation, parody, pastiche, adaptation, appropriation and genre borrowing.
- Genette’s hypertext/hypotext model describes a later text (hypertext) transforming an earlier one (hypotext); Kristeva’s term foregrounds meaning as produced between texts.
- Comparison needs a tertium comparationis: a shared basis such as narrative voice, treatment of power, or use of genre.
- Organize by comparative points, not by text-by-text summary.
- Differences matter as much as similarities; they often carry the interpretative weight.
Worked example
A contemporary novel appropriates the detective genre but withholds the detective’s solution. The hypotext is the classic investigation; the hypertext keeps the interrogation scenes and clue motif but makes the reader complicit in surveillance. Reasoning: establish the shared genre feature, quote both texts, show the transformation, and explain what the change critiques. The comparison is not “both use mystery”; it is “the later text uses the withheld solution to question whether detection is justice”.
Traps that cost marks
- Two separate mini-essays with no comparative thread.
- Listing similarities without interpreting them.
- Forcing a comparison where the shared basis is weak.
- Ignoring the texts’ different contexts and media.
- Asserting an allusion without evidence or explanatory payoff.