You can’t escape it! Everything you’ve ever seen or read sticks somewhere in your memory and affects your understanding of the world. Latent IntertextualityĮven when an author isn’t deliberately employing intertextuality, though, intertextuality is still there. We can call this deliberate intertextuality. When a heavy metal artist makes references to Norse mythology, or when a novelist draws on the works of Shakespeare as inspiration, these choices forge a relationship between the old text and the new. Sometimes, intertextuality is the result of an author’s choice. Scholars, however, have debated whether there might have been other aspects of Gandhi’s writing, such as his aesthetic style, that also influenced King in a more latent way. Much of this intertextuality was deliberate, with King explicitly crediting Gandhi as one of his influences. Martin Luther King’s writing was heavily influenced by the work of Mohandas Gandhi, especially in the area of nonviolent resistance. Sometimes, fan fiction becomes extremely successful in its own right – 50 Shades of Grey was originally written as Twilight fan fiction. For example, a Lord of the Rings fan fiction might tell the story of minor characters or add new characters to the world of Middle Earth. In fan fiction, authors enter the fictional worlds of other authors and create their own stories. Examples of Intertextiality Example 1įan fiction is a great example of deliberate intertextuality. Remember: every text (again in the broadest sense) is intertextual. In order to understand intertextuality, it’s crucial to understand this broad definition of the word “text.”Įvery text is affected by all the texts that came before it, since those texts influenced the author’s thinking and aesthetic choices. This applies to all texts: novels, works of philosophy, newspaper articles, films, songs, paintings, etc. Intertextuality (pronounced in-terr-text-yoo-a-lih-tee) is not a literary or rhetorical device, but rather a fact about literary texts – the fact that they are all intimately interconnected.

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