Last week’s post was about defining, or attempting to define, digital rhetoric. With very spectral answers from different scholars, I’ve come to find digital rhetoric as a multimodal approach to conversation and communication. This week we are met with a new idea, intertextuality. Two paragraphs from Doug Eyman’s “Defining and Locating Digital Rhetoric,” comment on another author, writing about digital rhetoric and intertextuality. But Eyman never gives the reader a direct definition. Seeing as such, I took matters into my own hands and researched Julia Kristeva who, as mentioned in the text, developed the term intertextuality, which is, from what I have gathered, the idea that every individual text is interconnected and made up of other texts, which continuously reference and build upon one another.
This very blog post is an example of intertextuality itself. This post is made of my thoughts, my reflections and opinions, but also, Eyman’s ideas and Kristeva’s too. Ultimately reminding me of one big conversation. As if multiple scholars and writers, theorists and philosophers from different times, and different places are all having one conversation-that conversation being a piece of text of course. Intertextuality is like a symposium that withstands the constructs of time. Connecting people through ideas and concepts shared throughout history. When I’m writing an essay or an article, I’m told to cite textual evidence or refer to other works. I’m told to expand my thoughts by reading somebody else’s. I find it poetic how texts from decades ago are still interacted with and utilized till this day. How words can stand the test of time.
Leave a Reply