Intertextuality: the dialogue between texts
Intertextuality studies the dialogue between texts: how works echo, revise, parody, translate or answer earlier ones, and how genre conventions travel across periods. The exam rewards analysis of what a later text does with an earlier one, not detection of allusions for their own sake.
Core rules
- Intertextuality is not influence. Influence is a claim about an author's reading; intertextuality is a claim about relationships visible in the texts themselves.
- Establish a shared basis before comparing: a motif, a myth, a genre, a narrative device, a character type.
- Then argue the transformation: what is kept, what is changed, and what the change produces. Transformation and representation are the useful concepts here.
- Comparison must be integrated. Alternate between texts within a paragraph rather than writing one block on A and one on B.
- Genre is intertextual too: a sonnet sequence answering another, a realist novel interrupted by the Gothic, a graphic memoir using the panel grid to quote photography.
Worked example
A postcolonial novel retells a nineteenth-century English novel from the perspective of a minor female character, giving her first-person narration and a Caribbean setting. Reasoning: the shared basis is character and plot; the transformation is narrative voice and geography. Because the reader knows the earlier version, the new narrator's account reads as a correction: the rewriting redistributes narrative authority. A weak answer says 'it references the original'. A strong one says what the reference does to the original's meaning.
Traps
- Allusion-spotting with no interpretive payoff.
- Claiming an author read a specific text without evidence.
- Comparing texts that share only a theme, with no formal or textual bridge.
- Forgetting differences: intertextuality often works through friction, not harmony.