Intertextuality: connecting texts
What this area tests
Intertextuality: connecting texts asks how texts gain meaning through relations with other texts, genres and traditions. In SL Literature it underpins Paper 2’s comparative essay, the individual oral’s second work, and Paper 1’s recognition of genre conventions. The exam tests analytic comparison: not whether texts are similar, but how a connection-allusion, adaptation, parody, pastiche, translation or shared convention-shapes technique and interpretation.
Core rules
- Compare like with like: pair a technique with a technique, an effect with an effect. “Both use imagery” is not a comparison until you specify what each image does.
- Consider direction and purpose: is a text quoting, revising, parodying, answering or translating an earlier text?
- The reader’s knowledge matters. An allusion can create irony, critique or nostalgia only for a reader who recognises it.
- Genre and medium shape intertextual meaning: a graphic memoir, a play and a novel handle the same source differently.
- Avoid treating connections as trivia; explain why the link changes the reading of one or both texts.
Worked example
A candidate compares Wide Sargasso Sea with Jane Eyre. Rhys’s novel is a prequel and counter-narrative: it gives Antoinette a voice and a colonial context that Brontë’s text withholds. The candidate pairs the two texts’ treatment of the “madwoman” figure, showing how Rhys’s first-person narration and Caribbean setting revise the earlier novel’s Gothic conventions. They note that a reader who knows Jane Eyre reads Antoinette’s fate with irony and foreboding, while a reader who does not still follows a story of displacement. The comparison is strong because it explains how the later text’s narrative voice and setting produce a critique, not merely because both texts include a wedding or a house.
Traps
- Listing similarities without analysing technique or effect.
- Assuming influence runs only one way.
- Treating an allusion as a puzzle to identify and then abandon.
- Ignoring genre and medium differences.
- Comparing themes while ignoring form.
- Forcing a connection where the texts do not reward it.