Area of Exploration - Intertextuality: Connecting Texts

Non-literary texts and literary works are chosen from a variety of sources, literary forms and media in a way that allows students an opportunity to extend their study and make fruitful comparisons. Their study focuses on intertextual relationships with possibilities to explore various topics, thematic concerns, generic conventions, modes or literary traditions that have been introduced throughout the course. The focus is on the development of critical response grounded in an understanding of the complex relationships among texts.

This area of exploration focuses on the concerns of intertextuality, or the connections between and among media, text and audience involving diverse traditions and ideas. It focuses on the comparative study of texts so that students may gain deeper appreciation of both unique characteristics of individual texts and complex systems of connection. Throughout the course, students will be able to see similarities and differences among diverse texts. This area allows for a further exploration of literary and linguistic concerns, examples, interpretations and readings by studying a grouping of texts set by the teacher or set in close conversation with a class or groups of students. Students will gain an awareness of how texts can provide critical lenses to reading other texts and of how they can support a text's interpretation by expanding on it or question it by providing a different point of view.

Intertextuality: connecting texts can be approached in a variety of ways, such as:

• through the study of a group of texts from the same text type or literary form (for example, advertisements, drama or short stories respectively)

• a study of chronological development (for example, the tale, the elegy, political oration, the newspaper)

• a consideration of mode (for example, satire, action-adventure, parody)

• an exploration of a topic or concept (for example, fame, gender, power, social code, values, the hero)

• an investigation into a theoretical perspective or debate in language or literature (for example literary value, feminism, cognitive theory, critical discourse theory).

This area of exploration aims to give students a sense of the ways in which texts exist in a system of relationships with other communicative acts past and present. Students will further engage with literary and linguistic traditions and new directions by considering the following guiding conceptual questions:

1. How do texts adhere to and deviate from conventions associated with literary forms or text types?

2. How do conventions and systems of reference evolve over time?

3. In what ways can diverse texts share points of similarity?

4. How valid is the notion of a classic text?

5. How can texts offer multiple perspectives of a single issue, topic or theme?

6. In what ways can comparison and interpretation be transformative?

Possible links to TOK

Links to TOK in this area are related to the question of how the interaction of a text with other texts, brought about explicitly by the author or established by the reader in the act of reception, influence the perception of them and their meaning.

What are the boundaries between a literary text and a non-literary text, and how are these boundaries determined?

What kind of knowledge about a text is gained when compared and contrasted with other texts?

Does knowledge of conventions of form, text type and of literary and rhetorical techniques allow for a better and deeper understanding of a text?

How are judgements made about the merit of a text? What makes a text better than others?

Is the study of texts better approached by means of a temporal perspective, grouping texts according to when they were written, or by means of a thematic approach, grouping them according to the theme or concern they share? What impact does each one of them have on knowledge of the discipline?

How useful are classifications of texts according to form, text type and period? How do they contribute to the understanding of communication and its development?