Literary theory across genre chains: intertextual traces in reading/writing/talking literary theory in the high school classroom

ABSTRACT

What resources do students draw on to produce literary theory in the contemporary high school English classroom? This interactional sociolinguistic study traces the production and distribution of Lexical, Structural, and Thematic resources across genre chains in reading, writing, and discussing literary theory during an intensive 3-week short story unit. Drawing from the Bakhtinian concepts intertextuality and heteroglossia, this study shows how students’ engagement with literary theory has impacted the transformation of specific contested resources across genre chains. It concludes by posing some critical questions of literature pedagogy from the standpoint of Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic “events”.

KEYWORDS:

• Intertextuality
• Literary theory
• heteroglossia
• genre chains

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the students and their teacher who participated in this study and allowed me to record and observe their class. I would also like to extend my special thanks to Cynthia Lewis for her close reading of this article and her invaluable advice. Special thanks as well to the Language and Social Processes SIG of AERA for their mentorship program, where much of this manuscript’s foundations originated.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. In this Canadian province, 12^th Grade is the final year before high school completion. Students in 12^th Grade are typically 17–19 years old.

2. Chouliaraki & Fairclough, among others (cf., Dixon and Green 2005), further differentiate between “intertextuality” and “interdiscursivity”, where the former is the “presence in my discourse of the specific words of the other mixed with my words, as for instance in reported speech” and the latter is the “combination in discourse of different genres” (49). This separation represents Fairclough’s additional division, respectively, of “manifest” and “constitutive” intertextuality. For the sake of clarity, these various conceptualisations of intertextuality will be captured in this research by Wynhoff Olsen et al.’s (2018) categorisations of Intertextual Traces and Moves (see Findings for more detail).

3. In what will become relevant for Sophia’s emerging understanding, Ms. Penny’s total description of Marxist literary theory for the class was: “If you’re reading from a Marxist literary theory perspective you’re interested in status, wealth, how wealth is distributed, who’s in power.” Any other framing of the literary theory came from student presenters and students’ own research, leaving a substantial amount of room for interpretation of the theory’s contours.

4. Wynhoff Olsen et al.’s (2018) intertextual moves (Repeating, Reordering, Responding, and Extending) are themselves a revision of Oddo’s (2013) four categorises for understanding textual transformation: deletion, addition, relexicalisation, and reordering.

5. I note here Perry Anderson’s (1976) well-trodden critique that while classical Marxism emerged from the dialectics of the labour movement and revolutionary politics, Western Marxism has largely become an academic exercise, “a basic shift in the whole center of gravity of European Marxism towards philosophy” (49). This has produced, in turn, a number of thematic innovations. Or, to put it a bit more sardonically, “what had started life as an underground movement among dockers and factory workers had turned into a mildly interesting way of analyzingWuthering Heights” (Eagleton 2003, 44).

6. In Bakhtin’s theoretical armature, “prosaics” stands as a counterpart to “poetics”, which he criticises as too often serving as a synonym for literature as a whole. In crafting this term, Bakhtin seeks to craft a “theory of literature that privileges prose in general and the novel in particular over the poetic genres” (Morson and Emerson 1990, 15).

7. I note this witticism in passing, given to me in conversation by Slavic scholar Greta Matzner-Gore, that far too often we regard Bakhtin’s Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics as though it were actually Answers of Dostoevsky’s Poetics.

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Notes on contributors

Robert Jean LeBlanc

Robert Jean LeBlanc (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is Assistant Professor of ELA/Literacy at the University of Lethbridge, Coyle Fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Literacy Education, and Associate Editor for Language & Literacy.