THE UNTHINKABLE UNPRECEDENTED: INTERTEXTUALITY IN NEWSPAPER GENRES ^*

O SEM PRECEDENTES IMPENSÁVEL: A INTERTEXTUALIDADE NOS GÊNEROS JORNALÍSTICOS

LE SANS PRÉCÉDENTS IMPENSABLE: LA INTERTEXTUALITÉ DANS LES GENRES JOURNALISTIQUES

LO IMPENSABLE SIN PRECEDENTES: LA INTERTEXTUALIDAD EN LOS GÉNEROS PERIODÍSTICOS

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discuss intertextuality. We argue that intertextuality is a converging theme among researchers from different traditions interested in the study of language from the perspective of actual practice, as well as a pervasive one in different genres and media. After briefly introducing how different researchers perceive intertextuality, this work provides the analysis of different genres within the overarching communication medium represented by newspapers, showing how intertextuality occurs in each of them. Finally some pedagogical implications are put forward pointing out the importance of calling students´ attention to a new way of reading that could consider the multiple voices inside a text.

Keywords:
intertextuality; polivocality; discourse; connection; recurrence

Resumo

O objetivo deste artigo é discutir intertextualidade. Argumentamos que a intertextualidade é tema de convergência entre autores de diferentes linhas de pesquisa e interessados no estudo da linguagem como prática real, como também elemento presente em diferentes gêneros e meios de comunicação. Após uma breve revisão da literatura, a análise de diferentes gêneros presentes na mídia impressa (jornais) é realizada, demonstrando como a intertextualidade ocorre em cada um deles. Ao final, algumas implicações pedagógicas são apresentadas chamando a atenção para a importância de um novo modo de leitura que considere a polivocalidade existente dentro de todo e qualquer texto.

Palavras-chave:
intertextualidade; polivocalidade; discurso; conexão; recorrência

Résumé

L’objectif de cet article est celui de discuter l’intertextualité. Notre argumentation est centrée dans l’intertextualité comme sujet de convergence entre des auteurs de lignes différentes de recherche, intéressés à l’étude du langage selon sa pratique réelle d’une part et d’autre part comme élément présent dans des genres et moyens de communication variés. Après une brève révision de la littérature, on a fait une analyse des genres divers rencontrés dans les médias écrits (journaux), en essayant de démontrer comment l’intertextualité se passe dans chaque modalité. Dernièrement, on a présenté quelques implications pédagogiques, attirant l’attention sur l’importance d’un nouveau moyen de lecture qui considère la polyvocalité existante dans tous les textes et dans n’importe quel texte.

Mots-clés:
intertextualité; polyvocalité; discours; connexion; récurrence

Resumen

La propuesta de este artículo es discutir la intertextualidad. Argumentamos que la intertextualidad es tema de convergencia entre autores de distintas líneas de investigación, interesados en el estudio del lenguaje como práctica real y, asimismo, es elemento que está presente en distintos géneros y medios de comunicación. Tras una breve revisión de la literatura, se realiza un análisis de diferentes géneros presentes en la mídia impresa (periódicos), demostrando realización de la intertextualidad en cada uno de ellos. Al final, se exponen algunas implicaciones pedagógicas, subrayando la importancia de una nueva modalidad de lectura que considere la polivocalidad existente en todo y cualquier texto.

Palabras-clave:
intertextualidad; polivocalidad; discurso; conexion; recurrencia

Evocation is neither presentation nor representation. It presents no objects and represents none, yet it makes available through absence what can be conceived but not presented. It is thus beyond truth and immune to the judgement of performance. (Stephen Tyler, 1987 , p.199)

1 INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this paper is to discuss intertextuality. We have noticed that different people in different traditions and interested in the study of language from the perspective of actual practice (SELZER, 1993 - interested in technical and scientific discourse; FAIRCLOUGH, 1992 - interested in spoken and written language as socialcultural practice; BAZERMAN, 1993 - interested in writing as a social activity; BOLTER, 1991- interested in the interrelation of texts in the electronic environment) have been concerned with intertextuality and the interplay between texts and what would have already been said previously to texts. This plurality of interests converges around the idea “that a text can be read with perfect sense and coherence in so many uncorrelated ways, truly orthogonal, and sometimes even contradictory ways”, as Gould (ISER, 1993, p. 328) acknowledges. In fact, that is what intertextuality is all about: the relationship between writers and readers, between a text and (an)other text(s), between parts of the same text, between a text and its environment (the context) and framed by different perspectives and world knowledge. In addition, such a plurality also finds a parallelism in Derrida’s (1976, p. 162) view of the necessity to deconstruct the dichotomy centre/margin and introduce the issue of openness assumed with his notion of exorbitant.

Apart from the theoretical insights apprehended with the review of the literature concerned with intertextuality, this study also presents an analysis of different genre discourses within the overarching communication medium represented by newspapers. The aim is to show how pervasive intertextuality is in that medium and how important awareness of it is to readers, particularly those ones involved with critical reading activities. Thus, five examples of different genres from three American newspapers are analysed- from a simple denotative/ connotative perspective to the perspective of more sophisticated text structures (Basic Clause Relations and Basic Text Structures), as discussed by Winter (1986) and Hoey (1986, 1994, 1996). The texts analysed are: the title of an article, a snippet announcing a report in the internal pages of a newspaper, a joke, and two cartoons.

2 THE THINKABLE PRECEDENTS

We would like to start by paraphrasing Selzer (1993) as far as title obscurity is concerned. In the introduction of his book Understanding Scientific Prose he comments that its title contains an allusion so obscure that probably only he would recognise it. Such an allusion has to do with the fact that “science is indeed fundamentally rhetorical”. Differently from pejorative scientific views which acknowledge logic and empirical content as the only effective issues in scientific writing, he admits language of science as thoroughly human, and therefore, “messy, unpredictable, and inevitably coloured by its social and political circumstances” (SELZER, ibid, p.13). That is why it has to be analysed and understood taking those circumstances, voices and textual interconnections into account. I am afraid that the same may happen to the title of this paper. Despite McCloskey’s (1998, p. 177) assertion that “[t]here are some subjective, soft, vague propositions that are more persuasive than some objective, hard, precise propositions” I had better, following Selzer, explain the allusion present in The unthinkable unprecedented.

To start with, the expressions ‘unthinkable’ and ‘unprecedented’ used in the title of this paper have been taken from Terence Hawkes’ preface for both Belsey’s (1980) and Hutcheon’s (1989) books published as part of a series on contemporary approaches to language. In the general editor’s preface he refers to the impossibility of dealing with the new as it may not exist in the sense that, the moment it is achieved, it loses such a condition, becoming, then, raw material to ‘another’, still non-accomplished, ‘new’ thing. In fact, the new seems to be the eternal postponing of the unprecedented. Thus, Hawkes says:

How can we recognise or deal with the new? Any equipment we bring to the task will have been designed to engage with the old: it will look for and identify extensions and developments of what we already know. To some degree the unprecedented will always be unthinkable.

The new, so it seems, may not exist because, as Nadin (1987, p. 116) very perceptively recognizes, “[e]verything written here was written - or at least said - before (by someone the reader might recognize, by someone whose name sounds familiar, or by a rather obscure reader or writer) but now assembled in a different way”. This idea of recurrence is present, as Nadin points out, in Borges, Eco, Ecclesiastes, and Francis Bacon. She adds: “New problems? Not at all; maybe a new way of presenting them. Old problems? No; maybe a different interpretation of some well known ideas [...]” (NADIN, ibid.116). This idea finds fertile soil in authors like Bakthin (FAIRCLOUGH, 1995), Ong (1982), Bolter (1991), Tyler (1987), not to mention Hutcheon (1989). This last author views the “reappropriation of existing representations” and its use into new contexts as a way to recycle representational meanings. This occurs frequently in areas as different as literature, music, television, advertising, and photography. In the cinema it has achieved abusive levels with the generation of the profitable Hollywoodian ‘industry of sequels’, satirised by Tony Kornheiser (1997) in a humorous article in The Washington Post. He comments:

Sequels have made the whole action trend worse. Some time ago, someone in Hollywood apparently decided that if you have a successful movie, all you have to do is tart it up, give it a stupid new name featuring a colon, like “Jaws VI: Bite Me,” and people will pay to see it again. [...] William Shakespeare didn’t write knockoff sequels, did he?

Well, okay, there was “Richard III,” “Henry V,” “Henry V,” “Henry VI,” “Henry

VIII (I Am, I Am).”

Anyway, I fear we will always have sequels.

And I cringe at what is coming:

“Schindler’s Other List.”

“Schindler III: The List They Didn’t Want You to See.”

“The English Patient’s Dental Hygienist.”

“The English Patient 4: This Time It’s Personal.” “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids’ Heads.” [...] And, of course:

“The Silence of the Lamb Chops.”

Never ending expanded reactualisation, recurrence, reappropriation, then, seem to be the basis of what Ong (1982, p. 134) calls ‘the doctrines of intertextuality’, and Fairclough (1992, p. 103) refers to as ‘[t]he theory of intertextuality’. Arisen in the last few decades, they destroyed, as Ong points out, the “romantic notions of ‘originality’ and ‘creativity’” and, as he adds, made modern writers agonizingly aware of literary history and of the de facto intertextuality of their own works, [...] concerned that they may be producing nothing really new or fresh at all, that they may be totally under the ‘influence’ of others’ texts.

Bolter (1991, p. 202) notices that “this passing on of the text from writer to reader, who then becomes a writer for other readers, is nothing new; it is the literal meaning of the word ‘tradition’”. In fact, what represents the ‘new’ is the acknowledgement of those cross-references in a collective process that can be backwardly traced.

Yet, such an acknowledgement is not an isolated fact. It is part of a paradigmatic shift that privileges meaning instability, decenteredness, nonlinearity, authorlessness, less control over the reader and over text interpretation, dialogical/ heteroglossical features, and so on. It is a refusal to mastery, just to use Barthes’ (HUTCHEON, 1989, p. 37) terms.

Although the title of this paper mentions the ‘unthinkable unprecedented’, the content of this paper deals with its counterpart, i.e. the ‘thinkable precedents’ for the simple reason that, although retrospectively infinite, as Barthes (1974, p. 10) argues, they are potentially accessible through those precedents that scaffold our ongoing knowledge and experience (cf. Bolter, ibid.). As such, the thinkable precedents - intertextuality to Kristeva, interdiscourse to Pêcheaux - represent the ad hoc realisation of the unattainable unthinkable unprecedented.

The endless search for the “interwoven traces and echoes of other texts” is also present in Journet (SELZER, 1993, p. 247). She points out that

the ability to understand a text - its diction, syntax, organisation, genre, or topic - depends on the ability to differentiate it from other texts. But because such a process of differentiation is endless, any final meaning will be constantly deferred through a kind of “genetic indetermination”(Derrida, Writing and Difference, 292). The act of interpretation is thus inexhaustible.

Intertextuality, therefore, has to do with the reconstruction of those thinkable precedents “ranging,” as Tyler (1987, p. 90) states, “from the overt citation of other texts to allusion by failure to mention what ought to be mentioned, noting in the first instance by presence and in the second by absence”. This is typical of postmodern discourse which is founded on the creation of new meanings by means of those recurrent repetitions that make texts different when they are so equal, and so alike when they are so different.

3 VOICES FROM EVERYWHERE: THE TEXT OF INTERTEXTUALITY

The allusion to the (never ending) search for origins, boundaries, limits, definitive interpretations, leaves us with the conviction that we are as much worried about the past as we are, very comprehensibly, about the future. As a result, discourse is simultaneously ‘retrospective’ and ‘prospective’, in such a way that the here and now becomes just a stand-by position from/to other texts. In this respect, Fairclough (1992, p. 101-102), interpreting Bakthin’s ideas on the intertextual shaping of texts, mentions the responsive (retrospective) /anticipatory (prospective) aspect of texts.

However, it is well known that this kind of search inevitably tends to accomplish opposite results (the more we know, the more there is to know): the more boundaries are built to a text, the more boundless it tends to be as the interpretive paths are numerous, all of them depending on the readers’ constructed worlds of meaning and experience. Belsey (1980, p. 129) refers to this kind of open possibilities, this intertextuality, as interrogative text, where

there is no single hierarchy of discourses such that the reader is offered privileged access to the work’s ‘truth’. Instead the reader constructs meaning out of the contradictory discourses which the text provides.

In addition to being a result of this non-hierarchical openness, the making of texts from other texts is also viewed as a tense, contentious production. This idea is shared by Bazerman (SELZER, 1993, p. 21), who views the intertext as a “strategic site of contention”. According to him, intertextuality is

the battlefield for control of the cognitive universe within which new claims will be read - analysis of intertextual representation lets us see not only the rhetorical game being played, but also the struggle to define the rules and limits and stakes of that game.

This notion of a battlefield for control of the cognitive universe also echoes in Fairclough (1992, p. 102-103; 1995, p. 78) and Kress (1989, p. 32) when both discuss the close-knit relationship between intertextuality and hegemony. Apart from acknowledging this contentious aspect, Kress (ibid) adds the potential for change as an inherent aspect of texts. He suggests that as there is no text of a single speaker or writer, it is natural that all texts present traces of differing discourses. As a consequence, texts become the sites of struggle and contention for dominance, and linguistic and cultural change.

The multifaceted, polyphonic, view of text is corroborated by an expressive number of researchers. Thus, Barthes (BELSEY, 1980, p. 129) talks about a “multiplicity of voices that origin in the writable text”; Derrida (1979, p. 84) mentions the “differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to something other than itself, to other differential traces”; Selzer (1993, p. 8), interpreting Kristeva´s term “intertext”, refers to it as “that web of other, interconnected texts against which any piece of writing is inevitably constructed and interpreted and in cooperation with which accomplishes its social action”; Culler (as cited in Bolter, 1991, p. 163) points out that “[a] text can be read only in relation to other texts, and it is made possible by the codes which animate the discursive space of a culture” Finally, Ong (1982, p. 134) notes that “although texts are autonomous by contrast with oral expression, ultimately no text can stand by itself independent of the extratextual world. Every text builds on pretext”.

However, intertextuality only exists if and when the reader is able to acknowledge it, to make connections, to see cross-references in the text. “If one is deaf to the tune,” as Tyler (1987, p. 213) puts it, “one need not to dance to it”. However, the way we acknowledge it, connect different patches, see crossreferences in a text, and even our attitude in relation to the discourse used in the text, may vary as the relevance appointed by different readers to different aspects of the text also vary. Bazerman (SELZER, 1993, p. 28) comments that

Not everyone may read the literature in the same fashion. Other readers with different interests and perspectives might not select the same set of texts as the most relevant nodes of discussion, nor might they find the same stances and divisions in those texts.

Attributed relevance is constrained by several factors, including our personal traits, or social and ideological position. This leads us, therefore, to Bakthin´s view of the non-neutrality of discourse.

The mental availability to perceive all those interconnections comes as a result of the reader’s constructed world of meaning and experience (FAIRCLOUGH 1992, p. 83; Kress 1989:4). Thus, the issue arises, as put forward by Fairclough and Wodak (1997, p. 279), of how much contextual knowledge one needs for an interpretation. To state that “the world is what we say it is” should not be understood, as Tyler (1987, p. 172) argues, as “the world is all we say it is.” In other words, the issue posed here is: if we are inexorably condemned to being bounded to our own limits, how potentially farther should those limits extend in order to fulfil that search for the unprecedented? In other words, how much can we negotiate/subvert/ alter these limits if we read from an ideologically and socio-culturally situated position? In the following pages I intend to show instantiations of intertextuality where thinkable pretexts come into being only when interwoven with the reader’s world.

4 EXAMPLES OF INTERTEXTUALITY IN NEWSPAPERS

Newspapers represent one of the most outstanding sources of intertextuality. Like chapters of a long book, usually newspaper articles evoke past events in order to contextualize ‘new’ ones and make readers follow episodes and incidents perhaps already lost in memory but still somehow linked to present situations. The newspaper is a web in itself, interconnecting intra and extratextual events, mostly ephemeral, but that help in the construction and reconstruction of the interwoven fabric of daily life.

Example 1

Example 1, below, is the title of an article that appeared in a special section of the Washington Post, dedicated to The Rolling Stones:

with the matching for compatibility¹ present in all premises: 1 & 2; 2 & 3; and 1 & 3. In #4, a reader´s inference, there is the insertion of the new element other kinds of stones which triggers the reader’s schemata to out of the text (exophoric and inter-discoursal²) mental frameworks related to stones.

The selection of ´rock ‘n roll band´ to fill in the slot ´Stones` of the title, and then the name ´Rolling Stones`, to name the rock ´n roll band certainly will also occur due to the context where the title/article is inserted, i.e. a special section in the newspaper related to culture/music/art. The reader might perceive interdiscoursal cross-references such as: ‘diamonds are forever’, a well known sentence (by the way, who coined it?) very much used in ads and here associated to the allusion to the Rolling Stones and their enduring career.

Example 2

The last example of intertextuality (example 5) is depicted by a snippet. Snippets usually appears in the front page of a newspaper with the function of motivating readers to read specific material inserted in the inside pages. Its language is telegraphic and focuses on the most outstanding aspects of the article so that the reader feels interested in reading it. The snippet rendered in example 5 appears in the front page of the Art & Culture section of The New York Times. The language used is suggestive and the author plays with the words (trust/Rolling Stone/turned 30) in order to raise the reader´s interest and hopefully his/her schemata.

Two main points are to be considered in this snippet: First, the expression Rolling Stone (no ‘s’) which is cataphorically linked to the word ‘magazine’ and exophorically linked to the name of the famous rock ‘n roll band (with ‘s’). The other aspect to be mentioned is the allusion to the motto of the sixties: ‘never trust anyone who is over thirty’. People following the motto grew old, society has changed since the peace and love era, and so did the fans of rock‘n roll (‘YOU’ in the text). Well, yes, perhaps you might trust those people anyway (the ones who edit the magazine and all those people who are over thirty). The motto now might be ‘you can probably trust anyone over thirty (now that WE have just turned 30)’. Thus, the band is over thirty, the fans are over thirty, the magazine has also turned thirty. Those who used to fight against the status quo are the ones who embody it now.

No doubt the text in this snippet brings in evocations that make sense to post-war baby boomers facing new paradigms of social behaviour and the (then) trendy appeal to drugs, sex and rock n’ roll, but probably those ones who are in their twenties would attempt other sort of associations or connections.

Exemplo 2
A snippet (The New York Times, October 19, 1997).

Example 3

As short as the example above, example 3 carries notwithstanding more sophisticated intertextual features. To start with, the cartoon provides both verbal and visual referents which are finely tuned to effectively communicate its purpose. Apart from that, the reader has to have more elaborated schemata in order to complete the message resulting from the interwoven connections around words, picture, and the outside world of the cartoon, which is the world surrounding the reader.

To the less aware reader the interpretation might follow a plain, denotative, straightfoward path:

Example 3
Cartoon (The Wall Street Journal, November 6, 1997).

The situation presented in the cartoon is in a matching relation of compatibility with a social epidemic, or better, an ‘anti-social’ one: The text alludes to the claimed ‘horror’ New Yorkers have to socialising with strangers. In addition, it is not just a coincidence that the vehicle on the first plane in the cartoon is a truck without windows and keeping the same speed as the car on the left (trucks are supposed to go slower as they are bigger and heavier). This ‘speed’ feature, very characteristic of big cities and very typical of New York too, justifies Safire’s (1997) ironic comment about certain features of the New Yorkers’ behaviour which are reproduced in their daily ‘street’³ discourse:

“If we hurry, we can make the light”. Only New Yorkers say that to one another. Other Americans say in their whitebreadese, “If we hurry, we can start crossing the street before the green light changes”. (They are more literal and probably not in that much of a hurry, anyway. That is why they, and not New Yorkers, define a split second as a New York minute.)

The cautionary overtone of the message in the cartoon alludes to the denial of possibility of any kind of closer contact (´avoid eye contact´). This can also be found, as Safire (1996) points out, in the typical New York expression, fuhgeddaboutit. As he asserts, such an expression, mainly “the first syllable separated, and the second syllable taking the stress,” fuh-GEDDaboutit, implies much more a ´no way´ than a ´no problem´. As it was illustrated, the evaluative character of the cartoon is found inter and extratextually.

Intertextuality also resides in other connections one may make between this cartoon and other texts like jokes, puns, articles, depicting the fragmentation of relationships, mainly in ‘global’ places like big cities. No doubt, New York is an inexhaustible source of stories focusing on this anti-social epidemic, and newspapers are one of the most prolific of such sources. What one feels when one reads the cartoon is that the importance of being social is something unessential in NYC, and you rather fiercely bite (the apple) or are bitten.

Example 4

Example 4 corroborates the ideas presented above in example 3, and adds a subtle view of impoliteness to New Yorkers:

Exemplo 4
A joke (OLIVEIRA, 1999).

The further one goes the better to fully grasp the meaning of this joke. I remember telling it to my students and the question I could notice in their perplexed eyes was ‘So what?’ They understood the lines, but their lack of cultural knowledge in general (a basic source of intertextuality) did not allow them to make the appropriate connections that would lead to the understanding of the story as a whole (especially since jokes are one of the most culture bound genres).

Example 5

Although an old story, the cartoon in example five is an interesting instance of how intra- and inter- textual connections alternate in the understanding of a message. It is intratextual when we read the headline and associate it to the comment made by frog #1; and it is extratextual when we go outside the text (our schemata) to disentangle the key word ‘problem’ (in the bubble). A brief application of text structures (Basic Clause Relations and Basic Text Structures) is attempted here in a combination of the following three forms:

Example 5
A cartoon (The Herald Tribune, September 5, 1996).

Problem-Solution; Hypothetical and Real; and Matching Relation to systematise the relations among intra and extra texts arisen by the cartoon in example five. Just to remind readers, Clause Relations refer to text organisation concerned with examining how different clauses within a text and across texts interact, compare (matching for compatibility) and contrast (matching for contrast. (see also McCARTHY, 1991; COULTHARD & JOHNSON, 2000). As pointed out by Winter (1986), there are two main types of clause relations, as viewed under the perspective of the encoder: a) Problem-Solution (P-S); and b) Hypothetical-Real (H-R). The pursuit of both patterns is to describe how the message is structured considering the interconnection of clauses to produce a sensible and coherent text. The H-R structure, as Winter (ibid) claims, is used as the basis text structure to report our response to the perceived truth of somebody: “The Hypothetical member presents the statement to be affirmed or denied as true. The Real member presents the affirmation or denial of the enclosed statement” (WINTER, ibid, p. 103). Hoey (1996, p. 152) notes that “matching relations are frequently marked by clear parallels of syntax and lexis”. With example five we want to demonstrate how intertextuality creates such parallelisms and cross movements in the textual level, i.e. when two (or more texts) are marked by resonance of each other. Thus, we have:

The headline triggers the reader’s schemata (extratextually) in order to fit the expression PRINCE CHARLES (his identity, what is going on, to whom he is going to pay such an amount of money, why he is getting divorced, the country where he is from, etc.). The information contained in the headline represents a final step of a whispering (our schemata says so) process. Therefore, ‘voices’ from lawyers, TV interviews, photos taken by paparazzi, contradictory ‘official’ photos, doctors, mother-in-law, mistress, children, polls for/ against either side, the Parliament, and so many others, invisibly crowd the cartoon and are summarised by the word PROBLEMS in the bubble.

The text in the bubble, on its turn, which purposefully is in central position, serves as a link between problem #1 (on the left) and problem #2 (on the right). Frog #1 plays the commentator between the endophoric YOU₁ (frog #2), the exophoric YOU₂ (the potential readers, and the covert HE (Prince Charles).

Frog #2, on the other hand, also triggers an exophoric reference by allusion to the tale of the prince who, cursed by a witch, becomes a frog (definitely not Prince Charles!). Now frog #2 has to find a princess to kiss him and, this way, undo the curse (that is his problem). Thus, opposing situations are very clear here:

1. a prince trying to get rid of a princess (for whom, by the way, he hasbecome a frog);

2. a frog trying to turn into a prince again, and in this case a princess isabsolutely necessary.

The environment, as it could not be different, is a swamp which, in this case, fits well endophorically and exophorically. The intertexts called upon (consider Prince Charles’ affair with another lady, Princess Diana’s affairs with other gentlemen, the atmosphere of palatial intrigue, the reporting of the intimate language used by the prince in his phone calls to his mistress, etc.) correspond to the framework and (muddy) foundation of Prince Charles’ problem.

Another visual element to be considered is the expression of the eyes in both the drawings of Prince Charles and of frog #2: The same expression of unhappiness (the first, probably for the money to be paid and for the shuffling situation; the second for the difficulty in reversing its present situation). Anyway, as the situation involves power (from the association of money and breeding), certainly he will get rid of his problem. However, to the fictitious frog-prince, as well as to the rest of the mere mortals, i.e. all the other ‘YOU’ around (proletariat), problems may not be so easily solved.

As it is well known, language in cartoons act interdependently with pictures, but sometimes the visual is much more loaded with meaning than the verbal side. Even without the text in the bubble, the cartoon would have accomplished its message. However, the author decided to maintain the text, perhaps just to depict frog #1 being cruel to frog #2; or to show frog #1´s discourse recreating asymmetric parameters of power and leading to the reproduction of inequalities (frogs vs. non-frogs or non-royals vs. royals).

The feeling of contempt among (apparent) equals is clear (when frog #1 considers the problems of the royalty more important than frog #2’s problems (probably to parody the worship British people have in relation to the royal family).

Obviously, all these various facets will exist only if the reader, in Grice’s (1975) terminology, cooperatively connects as many precedent texts as possible so that the message be adequately achieved. In this respect, Iser (1989, p. 7) comments that “[w]hen the reader has gone through the various perspectives offered him by the text, he is left with nothing but his own experience to judge what has been communicated to him”. Ultimately, it is the reader, therefore, who is the decision-maker, and every time he decides what path to take he is reconstructing the text in a different way, following his/her social/cultural/discursive history (cf. KRESS, 1989; FAIRCLOUGH 1992; MEURER, 1996).

5 CONCLUSION AND PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

By way of conclusion, a question should be raised. Why should one be concerned with intertextuality? Probably, I dare say, because intertextuality could be viewed as a potential source of possibilities of interpretation that might strengthen textual democracy. This is in accord with Tyler’s (1987, p. 197) comment on the importance of overt and covert texts historically retrieved from everywhere that contribute, not to reproduction, but to the reconstruction of incremental realities:

[p]ostmodern writing rejects [this] modern mimesis in favour of a writing that “evokes” or “calls to mind,” not by completion and similarity, but by suggestion and difference. The text is not to be seen as a depiction or revelation within itself in what it says, but is to be “seen through” by what it cannot say, to show what it cannot say and say what it cannot show.

The pedagogical contribution to the field concerned with the analysis of discourse should be perhaps to help students realise that reading is not only a question of bureaucratically identifying rhetorical devices and spotting ideological features, but also to use such devices and features to understand and reconstruct social practices (GIDDENS, 1984; Meurer, in press). Reconstructing intertextuality is a way to learn how manipulative, power engendering, language is and how this can be reinforced by the medium/mode used. As Derrida (1976, p. 130) has noticed

the power of writing in the hands of a small number, caste, or class, is always contemporaneous with hierarchization, let us say with political difference; it is at the same time distinction into groups, classes, and levels of economicpolitico-technical power, and delegation of authority, power deferred and abandoned to an organ of capitalization.

Thus, students should practice an alternative way of reading that could provide them with different answers according to the different paths they take; a different way of reading that could provide acknowledgement of others’ precedent contributions and foreground texts-to-be; that could help them question, as Kristeva (1980) argues, our conventional ideas of reader, writer, and text, and consider the multiple voices inside a text. That seems to be a fruitful way to democracy: from the known to the unknown, from the precedent towards the unthinkable unprecedented.

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• *
  Acknowledgement - The author thanks the contribution of an anonymous reviewer who provided a number of recommendations to an earlier draft.

• 1
  Compatibility positions: Term used as opposed to ´contrasting positions´, or ´incompatibility´,” the other possibility for the Matching Relations proposed by Winter and related to intra-textual semantic relations holding between clauses or groups of clauses.” (cf. Hoey, 1996:151))
• 2
  Inter-discoursal: the voices of another discourse type. Cf. Cook, 1992)
• 3
  By ‘street discourse’ we mean the colloquial and very much local vernacular that encapsulates the New Yorkese flavour. It is related to specific cultural urban features and situations of New York, appropriated by those who ´belong to the city´ and used outside professional premises. It includes jargon related to city life (downtown, streets, traffic lights, underground, bus station, hurry) and framed by that blasé look at those who are not part of that inner circle.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  16 Sept 2024
• Date of issue
  Jul-Dec 2004

History

• Received
  11 May 2004
• Accepted
  15 Sept 2004