Discourse AnalysisApplied Modern Languages

Asist. dr. Diana Mdroane

Email: dmadroane@litere.uvt.ro

Discourse Analysis Lecture 5IntertextualityAlmost every word and phrase we use we have heard or seen before. Our originality and craft as writers come from how we put those words together in new ways to fit our specific situation, needs, and purposes, but we always need to rely on the common stock of language we share with others. If we did not share the language, how would others understand us? Often we do not call attention to where specifically we got our words from. Often the words we use are so common they seem to come from everywhere. At other times we want to give the impression that that we are speaking as individuals from our individuality, concerned only with the immediate moment. []

Discourse Analysis Lecture 5

On the other hand, at times we do want to call attention to where we got the words from. The source of the words may have great authority, or we may want to criticize those words. We may want to tell a dramatic story associated with particular people with distinctive perspectives in a particular time and place. And when we read or listen to others, we often dont wonder where their words come from, but sometimes we start to sense the significance of them echoing words and thoughts from one place or another. Analyzing those connections helps us understand the meaning of the text more deeply. (Bazerman 2004: 83)

Discourse Analysis Lecture 5No text stands alone or in isolation. New meanings are dependent on previous meanings. Any stretch of discourse unfolds in connection with other discourses and genres, which it reproduces or, most often, transforms in its own social, cultural, and historical context. This discursive feature is called intertextuality. One of the researchers and philosophers who laid its theoretical foundations was the Russian scholar Mikhail Bakhtin. Other names associated with the study of intertextuality are Julia Kristeva and Ronald Barthes.

Discourse Analysis Lecture 5Intertextuality can be defined as: (1) the interrelationship of all texts; the meaning of a text is in part inherent in the extent to which it resembles or contrasts with other texts; and (2) the exploitation in a text of elements from another text or of direct or oblique references to another text; or another part of the same text, e.g. quotation, reported speech, semi-quotation or echoing of another text, paraphrase, stylistic parody (Bloor & Bloor, 2007: 175).

or as:

Discourse Analysis Lecture 5The explicit and implicit relations that a text or utterance has to prior, contemporary and potential future texts. Through such relations a text evokes a representation of the discourse situation, the textual resources that bear on the situation, and how the current text positions itself and draws on other texts. While this is now a widely recognized phenomenon, there is not a standard shared analytic vocabulary for considering the elements and kinds of intertextuality. (Bazerman 2004: 86)

Discourse Analysis Lecture 5The analysis of intertextuality reveals how other texts participate in the creation of meaning in new texts. What strategies do writers and speakers use to include other social actors voices and viewpoints in texts? To what purpose and general effect (reinforcement, reformulation, contestation)?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Arno_1gZ1Ro

Discourse Analysis Lecture 5Bazermans levels of intertextuality (pp. 86-88):

1. The text may draw on prior texts as a source of meanings to be used at face value. This occurs whenever one text takes statements from another source as authoritative and then repeats that authoritative information or statement for the purposes of the new text. In a U.S. Supreme Court decision, passages from the U.S. Constitution can be cited and taken as authoritative givens, even though the application to the case at hand may be argued.

Discourse Analysis Lecture 52. The text may draw explicit social dramas of prior texts engaged in discussion. When a newspaper story, for example, quotes opposing views of Senators, teachers unions, community activist groups, and reports from think tanks concerning a current controversy over school funding, they portray an intertextual social drama. The newspaper report is shaping a story of opponents locked in political struggle. That struggle may in fact preexist the newspaper story and the opponents may be using the newspapers to get their view across as part of that struggle; nonetheless, the newspaper brings the statements side by side in a direct confrontation.

Discourse Analysis Lecture 53. Text may also explicitly use other statements as background, support, and contrast. Whenever a student cites figures from an encyclopedia, uses newspaper reports to confirm events, or uses quotations from a work of literature to support an analysis, they are using sources in this way. 4. Less explicitly the text may rely on beliefs, issues, ideas, statements generally circulated and likely familiar to the readers, whether they would attribute the material to a specific source or would just understand as common knowledge. The constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, may, for example, lie behind a newspaper editorial on a controversial opinion expressed by a community leader, without any specific mention of the Constitution.

Discourse Analysis Lecture 55. By using certain implicitly recognizable kinds of language, phrasing, and genres, every text evokes particular social worlds where such language and language forms are used, usually to identify that text as part of those worlds. This book, for example, uses language recognizably associated with the university, research, and textbooks. 6. Just by using language and language forms, a text relies on the available resources of language without calling particular attention to the intertext. Every text, all the time, relies on the available language of the period, and is part of the cultural world of the times.

Discourse Analysis Lecture 5How is intertextuality realised in texts? How do we recognise it?

Bazerman talks about techniques of intertextual representation (2004: 88-89):

1. direct quotation. Usually identified by quotation marks, block indentation, italics, or other typographic setting apart from the other words of the text. While the words may be entirely those of the original author, however, it is important to remember that the second author, in quoting the writing, has control over exactly which words will be quoted, the points at which the quote will be snipped, and the context it will be used in.

Discourse Analysis Lecture 52. indirect quotation. This usually specifies a source and then attempts to reproduce the meaning of the original but in words that reflect the authors understanding, interpretation, or spin on the original. Indirect quotation filters the meaning through the second authors words and attitude and allows the meanings to be more thoroughly infused with the second writers purpose.

3. mentioning of a person, document or statements. Mentioning a document or author relies on the readers familiarity with the original source and what it says. No details of meaning are specified, so the second writer has even greater opportunity to imply what he or she wants about the original or to rely on general beliefs about the original without having to substantiate them, as the news reporters do with respect to proponents and critics.

Discourse Analysis Lecture 54. comment or evaluation on a statement, text, or otherwise invoked voice.

5. using recognizable phrasing, terminology associated with specific people or groups of people or particular documents.

6. using language and forms that seem to echo certain ways of communicating, discussions among other people, types of documents. Genre, kinds of vocabulary (or register), stock phrases, patterns of expression may be of this sort.

Discourse Analysis Lecture 5Translation across contexts/recontextualization. Each time someone elses words, or words from one document or another part of the same document, are used in a new context, the earlier words are recontextualized, and thereby given new meaning in the new context. Sometimes the recontextualization goes unnoticed as the earlier meanings are not far from the meaning in the new context.[] Sometimes the recontextualization may also put the words into a less friendly or more critical context, or some context that comments on, evaluates, or puts the other words at a distance. An opponent of an abortion rights act may call it the so called reproductive choice act. The phrase so called signals a criticism of the way his opponents use the word choice. (Bazerman 2004: 90)

Discourse Analysis Lecture 5Intertextuality can also be associated with social domains, discourses and genres, resulting in particular patterns.

Academic writing:

(examples from Bloor & Bloor 2007)

The babys cry is a complex auditory stimulus that varies in intensity from a whimper to a message of all out distress (Gustafson and Harris, 1990). As early as the first few weeks of life, individual infants can be identified by the unique vocal signature of their cries. Recognition of their own babys cry helps parents locate their infant from a distance and is especially advantageous once their babies move on their own (Gustafson, Green and Cleland, 1994). (L. Berk, 2000, Child Development, 5th ed. Boston and London: Allyn and Bacon, p. 134)

Discourse Analysis Lecture 5Media (news story):

Caught just in time: 'Bombers were about to plant MORE devices but plot was spoiled by release of CCTV photos'The Boston bombers were planning more attacks across the city and were already building the bombs to do this says the city's police commissioner Ed Davis.Davis says it's his belief that 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his 26-year-old brother Tamerlan 'were going to attack other individuals' and Davis says that's based on the evidence at the scene and the cache of weapons the brothers had at their disposal.However, Davis claims releasing photos of the two Boston Marathon bombing suspects 'forced them out of their hideout' and spurred them into Thursday and Friday's deadly night time car chaos and gun battle with law enforcement.'It forced them out of their hideout and they decided to commit further violent acts. But its my belief that they were already manufacturing explosive devices. Further violent acts were inevitable,' Davis told The Boston Globe. (Daily Mail)

Discourse Analysis Lecture 5Literature and film:

Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice (1813)Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy

BBC production Pride and Prejudice Mr. Darcy played by Colin FirthThe Lake Scene (1995)

Discourse Analysis Lecture 5Bridget Joness Diary Helen Fielding (1996) Bridget Jones and Mark Darcy

Bridget Joness Diary film (2001)Starring Colin Firth as Mark Darcy

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlwZMlIGwM0

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=american+drim+puya

Discourse Analysis Lecture 5Music:Puya feat. Connect-R Americandrim versuri :

(Refren Connect-R) x2 I can be what i want to be Losing my identity Cause i got a lot of life in me Let me live my American dream(Strofa I Puya) McDonalds, Michael, Notorious BIG George Bush, Coca Cola si MTV Hollywood, Mike Tyson, Iraq 11 septembrie, ce dezastru, pacatFBI, CIA, Hamburger, Hot Dog Bill Gates, Windows, Microsoft Acum nu te mai duci la munca, te duci la job Mai de mult ziceai adidas la picioare de porc Chill man, janes english, no Nu mai avem cartiere naspa, avem ghetou Raperii au flow, sunt underground yo Totul este cool, nimic nu e misto

Discourse Analysis Lecture 5For what purposes can we analyse intertextuality?

Intertextual analysis might, for example, help you identify which realm of utterances an author relies on and how, or how an author tries to ensure the readers see the subject through a certain set of texts, or how an author tries to position himself or herself in relation to others who have made statements, or to understand how a researcher is attempting to characterize, rely on and advance prior work in her and related fields, or to understand how students are assimilating and developing a synthetic or critical understanding of subject materials. (Bazerman 2004: 91)

ReferencesBazerman, Ch. 2004. Intertextuality: How Texts Rely on Other Texts. In Ch. Bazerman and P. Prior (eds.). What Writing Does and How It Does It: An introduction to analyzing texts and textual practices. Mahwah, London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 83-96.Bloor, M. And Bloor, Th. (2007). The Practice of Critical Discourse Analysis: An Introduction. London: Hodder Education.