A
Tiny Taste
Intertextuality
IN-ter-TEKST-you-AL-ee-tee
What
- The relationship
between texts.
When
All texts have a relationship
with other texts. It may be due to:-
- the conventions
of a format (all personal letters have similar
features);
- an allusion
to another text. For instance, in one of the "Lethal Weapon"
movies, Mel Gibson's character repeats a line from The Princess
Bride: "My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father.
Prepare to die."
Advertisements
often allude to popular films. For example, the Heinekin ads which
not only feature the actor, Michael Caton, from The Castle,
but also include his character's propensity (tendency) to compliment
effort, rather than success.
- A transformation
of a previous text into a different format, or rewritten to up-date
it to a new historical period. Examples include: the film and
the book versions of both Schindler's List and The Colour
Purple); and the up-dated version of Shakespeare's The
Taming of the Shrew with the new film 10 Things I Hate
About You.
- What musicians refer
to as "influences". When discussing their songs, musicians
often refer to being "influenced" by another composer's
work.
- Anniversaries and
historical events. How many types of texts carried the Sydney
Olympics symbols? How many texts (newspaper articles, advertisements)
have reflected the anniversary of Federation and incorporated
some of the symbols, page-layouts, fonts, of one hundred years
ago?
- Continuing
the story in either prequels or sequels. The
idea of continuing the story is not new. Jean Rhys imagined how
the Mrs Rochester in Charlotte Bronte's novel, Jane Eyre,
came to be "mad" and created the prequel in her novel,
Wide Sargasso Sea.
It is also natural
that we, the reader/viewer, want to know "what happens next".
Sequels have become very common, though, due to the fact that movie
producers/publishers know they have an existing market for a text
and exploit the fact that we will queue up for the next installment.
See Appropriation, Deconstruction.
Why
- All texts
to which we are exposed are going to influence the way we respond
to other texts. It's called experience.
- Composers
of texts deliberately make reference to other material because
it creates another layer to their text and makes it more challenging
and interesting to the reader/viewer.
- If you are
very knowledgeable about texts, it's often possible to trace a
composer's reading/viewing history by how he/she has composed
a text. Note, though, that you're not going to know what the composer
has deliberately rejected in his/her travels through literature.
One
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