Intertextual Practices Research Articles

Reanimating experts and authorities: Functions of speech reporting in COVID-19 news

This study explores the incorporation of experts’ and authorities’ voices in COVID-19 news articles with respect to their distribution and discursive functions. Based on a corpus 90 articles from 2020 to 2022 in The Korea Herald, the analysis reveals that reporters rely heavily and, at times, uncritically, on biomedical voices, representing them as a homogeneous group that provides a superior form of knowledge. The discursive functions range from providing substance to the coverage, to adding negative emotional coloring, to disowning, and to deauthorizing, which appear to vary according to the dynamics of the pandemic. These intertextual practices do not simply transmit biomedical knowledge to the reader but also mediate public perceptions of the virus by defining what counts as (il)legitimate knowledge and framing it as an alarming threat and an (in)security issue. In effect, multidimensional perspectives are precluded that may also be helpful for a complex issue like the pandemic.

Tackling illegitimate intertextuality through socialization - An action research project

Without proper guidance, some graduate-student writers can misstep and break with the source-use conventions of their disciplines in various ways, including acts that could be considered plagiaristic. Many universities attempt to reduce such missteps with published definitions of plagiarism, guidance in formatting styles, and training in discrete writing skills such as paraphrasing and summarizing; however, the persistence of illegitimate intertextual practices suggests that the issue might be more complex than simple ignorance of conventions or lack of writing skill. This paper reports on a five-year action research project that sought to explore illegitimate intertextuality in research proposals submitted by the members of five diverse cohorts of social science graduate students near the outset of their studies. Data were collected through Turnitin.com similarity reports, discussions with students and instructors, submitted written assignments, and a survey. Over the five years, the project evolved away from simple definition and skill-building toward a focus on socializing students into an academic community of practice. The findings from this project suggest that the core of the issue may be that students hold fundamentally different conceptions of the role of sources in academic texts to those held by their more experienced discourse-community mentors. These results have implications for the training of graduate students in writing in their disciplines, suggesting it may be better to start with the “why” of citation, before moving on to the “what” and the “how.”

“I’m Not Afraid of Storms, for I’m Learning How to Sail My Ship.” Facets of Womanhood in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868)

Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) is a timeless piece of writing about four sisters living in the late 19th-century Concord in America. Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy who, albeit raised within the boundaries of the same social setting, represent different facets of womanhood. Whereas Meg displays a traditional model of femininity from that time, Jo may be viewed as a rebellious tomboy combining both male and female features within her. Amy stands for artistically gifted women, while Beth exhibits the transcendent ideal of womanhood, which cannot be achieved. Since the types of femininity they represent differ, they are analysed separately to then be juxtaposed to highlight the differences between them. This paper proposes the analysis of the four sisters with respect to different facets of femininity they display. It uses intertextual practice to show the resemblance between the fates of the March girls and Alcott’s life. The comparative analysis proves that there is no universal answer to the question of what it means to be a woman as there are countless feminine types, which may partly overlap. By creating four March sisters, the representatives of distinct types of femininities, Alcott proves that every female is allowed to offer her own definition of femininity, depending on the ideals she represents.

The poetics of rivers and the intertextual practices in Joe Ushie’s ‘Bekwang River’ and Gabriel Okara’s ‘The Call of the River Nun’

In this paper, the imagery of rivers and their semantic significance in Joe Ushie’s ‘Bekwang River’ and Gabriel Okara’s ‘The Call of the River Nun’ were investigated. The study is necessitated by the assumption that given the geographic commonalities between Ushie and Okara, there are bound to be corresponding continuities in their topographical verses, specifically in terms of how they depict the bodies of water in their immediate environs. The paper adopts the eclectic approach; drawing critical tools from ‘postcolonial formalism’ as its conceptual framework in combination with the ideas and concepts drawn from the intertextual theories of Mikhail Bakhtin, Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva, in an attempt to establish the intertextual practices – possible convergences and divergences – in the poem/s of Ushie and Okara. The analysis of the selected poems, Okara’s ‘The Call of the River Nun’ and Ushie’s ‘Bekwang River’, reveals that the river motif, which is strongly present in the poems of Ushie and Okara, does not only serve as a poetic representation of the state of their physical landscapes but is also used to make important poetic commentaries that touch on human nature and the political circumstances of their milieu. The poetics of Ushie and Okara also intertextualise at the level of tropes, as can be seen in the personification and metaphorisation of rivers in the poems analysed, which are deployed to make major statements on the flow of time and its implications on human actions. The study then is indicative of poetry and poets’ place in society as the watchers of the times, preservers of traditional norms and values, pathfinders in a directionless universe, prophets who warn and exhort the people, and the defenders of the oppressed.

Forms and functions of intertextuality in academic tweets composed by research groups

This paper explores the forms and functions of intertextuality in academic tweets composed by research groups. Academic tweets are dialogic and intertextual texts, usually composed by incorporating other voices and taking up text-visual elements from other contexts. Based on the analysis of 300 tweets taken from the Twitter accounts of four research groups in two different disciplines (Chemistry and Medicine), this study investigates the ways in which intertextual practices contribute to the communicative purposes of the genre. The analysis shows that the affordances of Twitter (e.g. hyperlinking, modularity, multimodality) and the purpose of academic tweets shape the forms and functions of intertextuality in these tweets. When composing these tweets academics both reconfigure well-established forms of intertextuality and display novel forms which help them to promote their research, negotiate their relationships with their readers, and share content with diverse audiences.

Intertextual Practice in Death Trials and Pragmatic Functions

Intertextual Practice in Death Trials and Pragmatic Functions

Pani Dalloway i Pan Dalloway, czyli przeniesienie tekstu wysokoartystycznego do obiegu popularnego

Mrs. Dalloway and Mr. Dalloway, Transferring High Literature Text into Popular Literature This paper explores how Mrs. Dalloway, one of the seminal works of high modernism, has been transferred into popular literature by Robin Lippincott in his novella Mr. Dalloway (1999). The sequel can be framed within the trend of cultural recycling and intertextual practices in which formerly marginalised fictional characters are given a voice or become more exposed. Although scholars have studied generic status of the text, “recursiveness” and Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” (James Shiff, Monica Latham and Bret Keeling); transformative potential of the original text, as well as images of London (Monika Girard), there is still a paucity of scholarship on narrative patterns and the concept of time. Therefore the author of the following paper seeks to fill this void and analyse how the elitist text of high modernism is transferred into popular literature with respect to the aforementioned aspects.

Intertextual practice in Joris-Karl Huysmans' A Rebours

A rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans is understood on the scriptural and aesthetic level as the privileged place of discursive interactions and all forms of interculturality. Textuality only makes sense in the rapprochement of writing and reading, as well as in the deployment of pictorial and artistic discourse. Thus, we propose to study in this article this textual phenomenon from two relations of co-presence, namely, reference and quotation. Then, we will draw out its meanings, showing precisely in what way the intertextual practice would be for Joris-Karl Huysmans a quest at the same time spiritual, intellectual and artistic. Keywords: Intertextuality, Reference, quotation, des Esseintes, A rebours.

Exploring young children’s argumentation as a heuristic intertextual practice

Argumentation is a fundamental communicative ability that children develop over time through formal schooling and daily practice with peers and family members. Literature on children's argumentation appears to have focused on their social interactions out of school, clinical environment, or informal pedagogic contexts. Even though there are research inquiries into children’s argumentation in formal academic learning, many have been focused on argumentative writing in math or science classes. Much less is known about teacher-led argumentation and the youngest children's emerging argumentation in language art classes, where argumentation is formally and systematically introduced and learned. This paper reports a year-long ethnographic study on argumentation in a first-grade English language art classroom in the United States. Ethnographic discourse analysis was conducted to analyze two key literacy events from the daily reader's and writer's workshop. It is supplemented with qualitative analysis of the researchers' field notes and the students' artifacts. Our findings highlight the inherent intertextual nature of children’s argumentation and a critical role the teacher played in eliciting and steering the children’s argumentation construction through strategic instructional conversations (especially accountable talk). Our findings also revealed teacher-led children’s intertextual argumentation as a powerful heuristic process and tool to enrich students’ learning. The paper concludes some classroom argumentation teaching practices based on the research findings.

Análisis de la realización de espectáculos televisivos en directo: Italia en Eurovisión 2021

This paper aims to study the production of live television at the Eurovision Song Contest, a contest characterized by the use of avant-garde and experimental technologies and staging. The filming and production of the winning performance in 2021, «Zitti e buoni», by the Italian group Måneskin, is selected as a case study, as it breaks with previous trends. The main objectives of this research are to analyze the selected performance from a discursive and formal perspective and to identify the visual references on which the production is based. We apply a formal audiovisual analysis while considering intertextual practices and the intention to appropriate pop culture references. The formal audiovisual analysis highlights the respect for a functional and classic audiovisual grammar that tries to make itself invisible to highlight the members of the band with their charisma. Faced with previous practices trying to break spatial and temporal continuity, the performance claims a classical audiovisual grammar and an apparently simple staging based on nostalgia.

Headloading: Exploring Creative Transmediation as a Methodological Direction in Visual Art Research

This article describes a study which explored a methodology suitable for studio-based visual art research. The study drew upon an ethnographic and cultural phenomenon manifesting in a social media conversation, with art practice emerging through a process of transmediation. The exploration proposes a methodology which integrates interdisciplinary concepts, such as semiotics, within related practice-led frameworks in order to further develop processes available to practical researchers in visual art. This approach essentially retools aspects of transmedia and intertextual practices, resulting in a methodology for art practices as “visual transmedia discourse”. As a means of storytelling and practice-based visual research it enables the extension of semiosis across platforms and contexts of display. In this article, the steps explored for the methodology are exemplified by considering headloading as a sociocultural phenomenon and using art practice by one of the authors, Trevor Morgan. Artworks were created by reinterpreting the theme, particularly as sociopolitical commentary on Facebook, contextualised with artworks by other Nigerian artists and personal experience of the practice and the context. This article also demonstrates how visual data and the emerging art pieces are analysed using Barthes’ semiotics of denotation and connotation.

The paradox of intertextuality and dilemmas in English translations of traditional Chinese medicine texts: terminology as a case study

ABSTRACT Structuralists use the concept and methods of intertextuality to locate and fix literary meaning, yet poststructuralists employ the same term to disrupt notions of meaning, making it difficult to navigate through this paradox in textual and translation studies. When this term was incorporated into Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) translation studies, the paradoxical meanings of the term were also adopted without resolving these paradoxes. This paper therefore focuses on the translation of a few key TCM terms, and attempts to clarify the following translation dilemmas that arise when attempting to apply the concept of intertextuality: 1) Intertextuality deconstructs clear and stable meanings and this leads to untranslatability; 2) It is impossible to reproduce the intertextual relations of the original; 3) The notion of equivalence in translation is therefore an illusion; 4) Translating becomes an intertextual practice itself, and the target text is just intertextually related to the source text. The paper probes into the potential usefulness and significance of intertextuality for TCM translation and finally proves that all dilemmas of translation can only be resolved through the very act of translating.

Mot ett bredare arketextualitetsbegrepp: den augustinsk-lutherska diskurstypen i Birgitta Trotzigs Dykungens dotter

This article has three aims, all of them related to the theory and practice of intertextuality. Firstly, the article makes an attempt to reconstruct the Augustinian-Lutheran type of discourse. A number of modern theologians and historians of philosophy have observed that the main currents within Christian theology have their basis in a specific discourse organization of textual utterances. With reference to these observations, the article maps out some dominant features of Augustine’s and Luther’s discoursive practices. The type of discourse thus reconstructed contains grammatical, logical-argumentative, narrative and rhetoric-figurative characteristics, and – as a matter of fact – it manifests a high degree of applicability in the field of literary studies. Secondly, the article applies the reconstructed type of discourse to analyze a masterpiece of Swedish twentieth-century literature, the novel Dykungens dotter (The Marsh King’s Daughter, 1985) by Birgitta Trotzig (1929–2013). In several interviews, Trotzig makes evidently contradictory remarks on Augustine and Luther. She dissociates herself from their anthropology at the same time as she hints that their view of human conditions has made a deep impression on her. The article’s application intends to throw light on this precarious hermeneutic situation. The intense presence of the Augustinian-Lutheran type of discourse in the novel made apparent through the application indicates that an interpretation of Trotzig’s writings by means of Augustinian-Lutheran intertexts is hermeneutically motivated in spite of her own negative declarations. Thirdly, the article makes use of the reconstructed type of discourse in order to examin Gérard Genette’s notion of architextuality. There is a theoretical incongruence in his notion. On an explicit definitory level, architextuality includes all types of discourse and modes of enunciation. On a conteptual level, however, the notion of architextuality is constructed on the pattern of literary genres. The article’s application demonstrates that Genette’s notion requires some corrections to live up to its definitory commitments. The Augustinian-Lutheran architext comes into conflict with some of Genette’s linguisticly construed structuralistic categories and demands a more discoursive and hermeneutic way of thinking.

Echopoetics and unbelonging: Making sense of reconciliation in academia.

This article is a narrative and conceptual exploration of the journey towards practicing Indigenous allyship in an academic context. I begin by tracing a trajectory of coming to work with Indigenous peoples as a non-Indigenous, multiple migrant, and queer person of color situated as a therapist and educator in a Canadian academic institution's Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences. Anti-racist and de/postcolonial theories and concepts abound to label my experiences of tokenization, yet they invariably fall short of the nuanced and complex ways that both reconciliation and oppression unfold in the everyday. Beyond critical theories that speak with certainty of structural violence, I trace my trajectory of coming to understand my work with Indigenous peoples within and for healthcare curricula and community development. I describe an intertextual practice of echopoetics that is trying to make sense of a world where both historical trauma and daily aggressions continually reproduce inequities, in order to reveal spaces of possible hope and healing. Yet, what seems to be happening in this echopoetics is a process of unbelonging from the multiple cultural and institutional narratives in my surround-at times including those that intend to liberate. Focusing on the negation-"non"-as a non-Indigenous/non-White person, I provide a reflection on how this practice cultivates an unbelonging that becomes both a political stance at the point of invisibility, as well as a lonely yet definite healing.

Rhetoric, Music and Philosophy in 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein by David Clark: Intermedial and Intertextual Practices

88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (to Be Played with the Left Hand) (2008) by Canadian artist David Clark is a web-based Flash creation that explores the life and works of Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. As the title suggests the digital work should be “played with the left hand”, this means that there are additional semiotic units (e.g. videos, sounds, images, linguistic texts) hidden in the metaphysical strings of the constellations that the reader can add to the narrative by means of interaction and manipulation. We argue that by discovering unexplored paths and creative unknowns the reader encounters examples of gestural melodic manipulation that will consequently lead to the creation of visual music. The visual music produced by the secret of the Left Hand, whose notes (piano keys) are the gestural enunciation of different discourses and diverse thematic, expose the potential intermedial literary characteristics of the text. Our analytical approach will demonstrate how rhetoric and digital technologies join to visually express philosophical concepts.

USAGE OF PASTICHE GENRE IN INTERTEXTUAL PRACTICE OF ADVERTISING MEDIA DISCOURSE

Foreign language learning presupposes the acquisition of language code but it is also an entrance to a new communicative community which is culturally defined by its verbal genre. Access to knowledge is an admission to scientific communities which have their own discursive forms for presentation, discussion and allocation of knowledge. The educational activity is responsible for learners’ perception of “discursive fusion” which is a process of education. Contemporary higher school learners ought to master discursive forms which are not a part of their immediate communicate experience. The study of relationships between literature and advertising presumes deep understanding of their location in a cultural practice. Contemporary advertising genre widely uses scriptural matrixes of completely different discursive genres. Particular preference is given to pastiche and parody. In considering the phenomenon of modern rewriting one should not claim the decision of a difficult problem of pastiche definition. It is more necessary to emphasize valorization of such processes as imitation and transposition assuming the relation of traditions to new conceptions in French context. Pastiche should be considered as a practice which allows inquiring genre borders. This practice takes the form of a game intended to participation of an advertising message receiver. Beginning from the point of emergence pastiche became a part of social and institutional universe, the same piece of work and any other. In contemporary advertising the usage of pastiche is allowed in the name of free expression on condition that the risk of the fusion with hypotext is absent as well as an imitator has a humorous plan excluding either intention or possibility to harm anybody. The article concerns the demonstration of didactical usage efficiency of secondary literary genre, pastiche, in an intertextual practice of advertising media discourse. The emergence of this form of imitation in the course of the French language learning as a foreign one is an original means of a traditional pedagogical practice renovation of text imitation and, at the same time, the increase of learner’s motivation with the help of amusing live contact with various discursive genres.

De la créativité lexicale à l’hybridité générique et vocale: une analyse stylistique de Le-fils-de-lafemme-mâle de Maurice Bandaman

Stylistics is a science born from the works of Charles Bally at the start of the 20th century. It centers on literary texts. To decipher them, stylistics focuses on methods and concepts from the language sciences. It is therefore effective in bringing to light the various subtleties of the African novel which continues to regenerate from the resources of African language and linguistic heritage. This regeneration results in an Africanization of the writing language. It follows that re-lexicalization is at the heart of verbal praxis. It is materialized by the embedding of oral ethno-texts in the novel. This creativity is a form of discursive subversion which is characterized by a polyphonic and transgeneric aesthetics. Le-fils-de-la-femme-mâle by Maurice Bandaman conforms to this standard. The typographical configuration shows that the enunciative foundations of the work rests on the structure of the traditional African tale. As a result, the novel resists the norms of traditional storytelling. Furthermore, the insertion of the African tale into the structure of the novel is not based on any stable rule. The discourse is based on an intertextual practice that upsets the architectonics of the classic novel. It breaks with the canon and imposes another reception modality which provides obvious enjoyment to the reader. This work highlights all of the enunciative, linguistic and discursive phenomena that contribute to the authenticity of this work.

Looking, Reading, and Intertextuality in Ding Ling's “Shafei nüshi de riji” 莎菲女士的日記 (Miss Sophia's Diary)

Abstract This article examines Ding Ling's 丁玲 (1904–86) practice of intertextuality in her famous 1927 story “Shafei nüshi de riji” 莎菲女士的日記 (Miss Sophia's Diary) by means of the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism. Sophia's diary is in dialogue with a plethora of texts she has read or encountered before. Ding Ling uses these intertexts to shed light on Sophia's negotiations with the New Woman's identity, as well as with the medium of the written word. At the same time, Sophia's diary is perennially in dialogue with anticipated readers or interlocutors. The story's thematization of reading is inseparable from the motifs of looking and gazing: just as Sophia is constantly preoccupied with how people look at her, she is anxious about how her diary will be read. Thus, her diary has an inherently dialogical stance as Sophia flirts with different intertextual ways of defining herself, always implicitly in contention with others who might view or read her otherwise. The article ends by reflecting on the resonances between Sophia's textual flirtations and the story's depictions of erotic desire, suggesting that the idea of promiscuity emerges as a figure for the practice of intertextuality during the May Fourth period.

Canons, Thefts, and Palimpsests in the Arabic Literary Tradition

Abstract The purpose of this essay is to explain and also problematize the reasons behind my use of intertextual interaction as an inclusive term that cuts across time and space. With regard to Arabic literary production, ancient and modern, this inclusive term recalls a similar classical and pre-modern understanding of textual engagements as manifestations of textual subordination, anxiety, empowerment, competitiveness, and supremacy. Therefore, the present essay associates this understanding with Arab philologists’ theories of plagiarism. What came once under the rubric of plagiarism has a shared register, parlance, and postulates with current intertextual practices. Both address textual tapestries and matrices whereby threads are woven in an intricate manner. Over time, words, meanings, motifs, and thence theorizations form a constellation. The essay explores a number of Arabic novels of the third millennium as examples of this textual engagement not only with Arabic literary tradition, but also with texts from the global south. Such a substantial and visible textual appropriation invites this critical intervention which, in turn, is bound in dialogue with contemporary literary forays that reflect on texts as tissues of quotations.

Chinese university teachers’ perceptions and practices regarding plagiarism: knowledge, stance, and intertextual competence

ABSTRACT Although much has been written about Chinese students’ understandings of illegitimate intertextual practices, few studies have investigated Chinese university teachers’ perceptions of plagiarism, let alone the effects of their disciplinary background on their knowledge of and attitudes toward plagiarism. This paper reports on a study that examined the knowledge that 128 Chinese university teachers of different disciplinary backgrounds had of plagiarism, their attitudes toward identified plagiarism, and their own ability to engage in legitimate paraphrasing. Multiple regression analyses showed that disciplinary background and teaching experience were significant predictors of the participants’ knowledge of plagiarism, whereas disciplinary background and overseas experience significantly predicted their stance on plagiarism. A logistic regression analysis identified disciplinary background as a significant predictor of the participants’ ability to produce legitimate paraphrases. Qualitative analyses of the participants’ open-ended responses revealed that their criteria for plagiarism aligned with Anglo-American conceptions of plagiarism and that intertextual competence was dependent in no small measure on linguistic competence.