Intertextuality: connecting texts
Intertextuality is the area of exploration concerned with how texts echo, answer, adapt or contest other texts. Paper 2 and the individual oral reward analysis of the effect of these connections, not merely their identification.
Forms of connection
- Direct quotation, allusion, parody, pastiche, adaptation and genre borrowing.
- Texts can also enter a broader discourse, such as environmental writing or colonial travel narrative.
- Meaning shifts when a text is placed in a new genre, medium or context.
Worked example
A contemporary opinion piece opens: 'I have a dream, but it is not the one you think.' The opening invokes a famous cadence of moral prophecy, then negates it with 'but'. This creates irony: the reader is invited to compare a promised future with present failure. The borrowing lends authority, while the negation signals critique rather than tribute. A strong thesis would argue that the echo is used to indict, not celebrate.
Traps
Name-dropping an allusion without analysing its effect; reducing intertextuality to plot parallels; assuming influence from similarity; ignoring the reader's required cultural knowledge; confusing adaptation with mere imitation.