Intertextuality

The term intertextuality was introduced by Julia Kristeva to mean that any given text does not stand independent of other texts, events, or objects, but interacts with those to produce a mosaic of ideas. Kristeva was working off of Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of dialogism, which explains the primacy of context over text, the hybrid nature of language, and the relation among utterances. Both Bakhtin and Kristeva suggest a three-part nature of textual dialogue: The act of interpretation involves not just author and addressee, but a third entity as well, a super-addressee. The superaddressee term expands earlier theories of textuality such as formalism by problematizing the concept of the closed text since a wide variety of influences is always streaming in from outside social discourses.

The significance of this move away from fixed dialogue to open discourse is central to the field of curriculum studies, which William Pinar describes as a complicated conversation. No longer can we read a text or view a film without becoming aware of embedded meanings, sometimes heard only as undertones. If, as Louis Althusser observed, we are always already positioned by semiotic systems, then it becomes the task of the curriculum theorist to lay bare the prepositions. The province of the curriculum theorist interrupts assumptions about uncomplicated interpretations. Meaning making as an act of interruption can therefore be subversive or it can be illuminating and playful. In a culture of mass consumerism with access to the World Wide Web, it is essential to be able to read texts in all their various forms so as to see (and hear) how these shape agendas.

Here is where the work of curriculum studies becomes necessary, even unique, among disciplines. Pinar and Madeleine Grumet have argued that curriculum is a moving form, based on the root meaning of currere; its focus is on that which flows within subjects. How can curricular theorists ignite sparks in their students and from their publications so as to explore how subjectivities have been positioned? Such a project is both reflective and active, critically engaging outside social forces in complicated conversation.

Intertextuality can be seen as a verbal or gerundive enterprise that contextualizes any text (including the self) by blurring, parodying, layering, remaking, and so on. Intertextuality is a living pedagogy, the very nature of curriculum studies, which turns to such studies as women and gender, psychoanalysis, place, spirituality, post-colonialism, history, auto- or biography, institutionality, and aesthetics in order to examine the plurality of forces that come in to play on subjects and within texts. Of these studies, cultural studies is perhaps the latest and most explosive of areas; unusual, taken-for-granted, seemingly innocuous objects are meaning shapers. Consider Barbie for understanding gender training, gaming for understanding teen violence, and tattooing for understanding body art: These can be seen as a horizon against which curriculum studies critiques the social milieu.

Literature may be one of the oldest forms of intertexuality, as old as the Bible itself with its cross referencing between Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Two examples of postmodern literature illustrate. The British playwright Tom Stoppard is wickedly intertextual, deliberately pilfering characters from, most notably, Shakespeare, who himself pilfered plots from earlier tales. Rosencrantz and Guilderstern Are Dead is a direct reference to two minor characters from Shakespeare's Hamlet who take center stage in Stoppard's farcical rewrite. Stoppard's theme—what we witness is unrelated to truth—always challenges the respect with which we view sacred cows. In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, the Dick and Jane readers of 1940s middle-class, White, heterosexual America are juxtaposed against the main storyline of an ugly, poor, Black child who only wants to be blond, blue-eyed, and White like the iconic Shirley Temple. Morrison disrupts accepted coded notions of beauty, class, identity, and race through her skillful weaving of intertextual references.

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