*Major claims and research questions:
-Attending to the ways texts draw on the discursive universe of which they are part enables a much clearer sense of how writing produces specific understandings, identities, communities, and pedagogical data (84).
-All textual products evince deliberate or unintentional influence from other texts and words that preceded them (83-84).
-As writers, identifying other texts to use is a part of intertextuality. However, it also involves the specific deployments of other texts, the purpose behind their invocation, and the writerly identity created through relationships to other texts (94).
*Assumptions about methods and methodologies:
-Analysis of a range of both explicit and implicit intertextuality is possible, but it is usually less difficult to account for the work performed by those more obvious and explicit intertextual moves than the implicit ones (89).
-Intertextual inquiries may open broadly, with a general research question, but they should move to specific focuses as quickly as possible to yield useful analysis (91).
-The selection of the text(s) for analysis is critical for intertextual projects (91).
-A thorough analysis of intertextuality may require a single, short text; whereas, if specific expressions of intertextuality or generic aspects of texts guide the analysis, a more voluminous body of texts may be subject to study (91).
-After texts have been chosen, data collection begins by noticing language use patterns and apparent anomalies. Then researchers can move to interpretation of that data (92-93).
*Key terms:
-Intertextuality—“The relation each text has to the texts surrounding it” (84)
-Intertextual reach—the amount and variety of a text’s circulation among other texts (89)
-Recontextualization—how words evoke different meanings and effects based on their use in a new discursive situation (91)
*Key citations:
Many sources seem to inform Bazerman’s work throughout the chapter, but explicit citations (aside from student work and a professional magazine used as examples for analysis and John Swales’ Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings) come only in the “further reading” section (95-96). However, of those listed, these appear to be most useful: Graham Allen’s Intertextuality and Amy Devitt’s “Intertextuality in Tax Accounting: Generic, Referential, and Functional”in Textual Dynamics of the Professions (Eds.) Bazerman and Paradis.
*Questions/Challenges the text raises for me:
-Bazerman makes issues of scope—the scope of questions and the size of the data pool—in research quite clear. The more features of intertextuality one wishes to highlight and explore, the more difficulty a large data set creates. This raises, for me, questions about moments in scholarship when researchers may have collected a large body material (hundreds of surveys, for example) and then choose especially "interesting" or perhaps “representative” responses to examine at length with the larger data set providing a background and context. How can the criteria for the selection of examples to be given more extensive treatments be articulated? Are they always?
-Bazerman also invites me to remain aware of the fact that whether certain meanings were intended in a given use of language or through a specific textual practice, discursive and material effects (what texts do) may not align with the writer’s intention. This produces an interesting question about how to treat texts offered up for analysis by research participants who are part of larger, mixed-methods research projects. How can researchers who come to know their participants through a variety of inquiry methods--individuals to whom they have some ethical responsibilities--take participants' claims into account while also attending the effects of their texts?
4 comments:
I heard in your last question resonances of a phrase that has been circulating a lot (and yet whose source I cannot remember, though I suspect the hand of Margaret at work): take the text on its own terms. I'm not sure if that's the same resonance that you intended, but I find your question compelling in that it raises the issue of how we take participants on their own terms and yet get the interpretative ends we seek in scholarship. What does it mean to take a participant at their word? Is there an obligation to a participant beyond reciprocal relationships that so many ethnographers speak of?
I am also intrigued by the seeming divide between texts and people...which raises the question of whether we should/could treat texts like people and people like texts and what the benefits of this would be. I think it's been historically or scholastically easier to treat texts as people, but no examples come to mind of the latter.
What is the personal equivalent of intertextual? Interpersonal?
TJ: I very much enjoyed this chapter and your account of it. I suspect that it might be because Bazerman's description of intertextuality spoke to some of my current questions raised in Becky's authorship class (as I'm sure is true for you as well). Since reading Foucault, Barthes, and Eagleton, I began thinking a lot about the concepts of "intertextuality" (resonant with Barthes' explanation that "The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture" 146) and "materiality" (resonant with Eagleton's illustration of the writer as a producer: “a worker rooted in a particular history with particular materials at his disposal” 68).
Taking the concepts of intertextuality and materiality (in consideration with your question about calling on methods for writer response through interview or survey when doing intertextuality research) led me to wonder about how writers might perceive how their own writing is constructed by materials. I began to wonder about whether most writers would have awareness about his or her own rhetorical choices in regard to the textual or digital materials they have to work with. And since I imagine that student writers especially may not be congnizant that the materials they work with are like “co-authors” for their final product (since materials will regulate much of what is produced), how do we probe writers about this? How might we frame our questions to elicit responses about how culturally-driven genres and materials influence writer's rhetorical choices?
Great questions from both of you, Amber and Missy, and you've gotten us on an interesting mode of inquiry, TJ. Your question, Amber, really resonates with me--how do we "read" people and analyze their actions and words--this brings to mind this week's readings from rhetorical theory.
How do you offer a rhetorical reading of a person's everyday life/vernacular rhetorics as opposed to a textual analysis? And how is intertextuality at work here? I'd love to discuss this on class--what spectrum of work falls under rhetorical analysis? What possibilites does it provide?
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