The Rhetoric of Intertextuality

Abstract

In this essay I discuss and exemplify a wide range of nontraditional concepts and texts as they relate to the rhetoric of intertextuality. As a result of this inquiry, I hope to give teachers of writing and their students new strategies for understanding and producing discourse. More specifically, I hope to give readers new ways of thinking about the rhetorical situation, invention, genre, arrangement, and audience.

I believe that many teachers of writing would agree that in addition to teaching writing we also teach critical reading, using “reading” in its broadest sense to include listening to and viewing nonverbal texts. ¹ (Critics in speech communication prefer the term artifacts.) Like the kind of critical reading our colleagues in speech communication practice and teach, the kind of critical reading teachers of writing practice and teach is rhetorical criticism.

In English departments the teaching of critical reading by scholars of literature is called literary criticism, but as Dominick La Capra points out, “[C]riticism no longer means, if it ever simply did, sui generis, literary criticism” (97), and in his book Literary Theory: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton argues that since literature has no proper object and no proper method, “How … can literary theory exist either?” (197). In “What is Cultural Studies?” Jonathan Culler asks the question, “What is theory?” His answer: “Much of what is central to theory … is only marginally concerned with literature” (340). With the advent of cultural studies, theory or criticism is a mixed genre.

In English departments today, the objects of criticism might include imaginative literature. But they might also include philosophy, history, mass media texts, the texts of popular culture, and so on. And the methods of criticism might include New Criticism, Russian Formalism, Structuralism, Deconstructionism, New Historicism, Archetypal Criticism, Gender and Race Criticism, Tropology, Rhetorical Criticism, and so forth. In many instances the terms, concepts, and methodologies come from outside the field of literary studies.

In speech communication departments, the teaching of critical reading is called rhetorical criticism. Initially, the object of criticism was the speech text or persuasive public address. Some critics argue that oratorical masterpieces ought to be the object of rhetorical criticism. However, Robert L. Scott and Bernard L. Brock contend that “the products of rhetoric are multitudinous” and should not be confined to speeches, public addresses, or editorials (7). Like their colleagues in English departments, scholars in speech communication departments advocate the criticism of a wide range of texts, including advertisements, film, television programs, music, visual images, media texts, the texts of popular culture, and so forth.

Early on, the dominant method of reading texts by speech communication critics was traditional criticism or Neo-Aristotelian criticism (not to be confused with Neo-Aristotelian or Chicago criticism in English departments). But critics such as Loren Reed argued that “Aristotelian rhetoric cannot be made to cover every aspect of all types of speaking” (421). Most rhetorical critics now agree that there is no single method that can be used to analyze all rhetorical discourses. Consequently, they began to embrace a variety of critical approaches, including dramatistic and pentadic criticism, dialogic criticism, fantasy theme criticism, and so forth. And like their colleagues in English departments, they have also embraced a wide range of contemporary critical methodologies, including Neo-Marxist criticism, feminist criticism, gender criticism, ideological criticism, poststructuralist criticism, postmodernist criticism, and so forth.

Does this mean that rhetorical criticism is dissolving into literary criticism or some amorphous form of criticism, or that literary criticism is dissolving into rhetorical criticism? It may appear that way, but in my view it may be better to talk about poetic or rhetorical functions than about literary or rhetorical objects. So despite their similarities, rhetorical criticism can be distinguished from literary criticism or other modes of criticism by its emphasis on the intended effect of the object of criticism on its readers, and by its emphasis on the interrelationships that exist between the text and its source or the text and its audience.

In this essay I shall move beyond discussing traditional texts, media texts, and popular-culture texts to discussing the intertext, or more specifically the rhetoric of intertextuality. As far as I can determine, there have been few attempts by rhetorical critics to discuss the rhetoric of intertextuality. As a result of this inquiry into the rhetoric of intertextuality, I hope to enable teachers of writing and their students to understand new strategies for producing discourse and to add to our understanding and refinement of rhetorical theory. More specifically, I hope to give teachers and students alternative ways of thinking about the rhetorical situation, rhetorical invention, genre, arrangement, and audience by discussing and exemplifying such concepts as adaptation, recycling, appropriation, parody, pastiche, and simulation as they relate to postmodern forms of intertextuality.

As I pointed out earlier, there have been very few articles connecting rhetoric to intertextuality. One reason may be, as Charles Bazerman points out, “because the term has been introduced through literary studies and has been defined and elaborated in ways that focus on issues of most interest to literary studies, rather than those issues of most interest to rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies” (53). Another reason may be that some critics have a narrow view of rhetoric, confining it to deliberative, judicial, and ceremonial occasions in the civil realm, rather than to “rhetoric as ranging over the whole of human affairs,” especially in “the realm of art and aesthetics” (Gaonker 26).

“In practice,” writes George Kennedy, “almost every communication is rhetorical in that it uses some device to try to affect the thought, actions, or emotions of an audience” (4). Like Kennedy, both Chaïm Perelman and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar have a broad view of rhetoric. To Perelman, all rhetoric aims to win “the adherence of the minds addressed” (6). Consequently, there is no need to limit rhetoric to the study of oratory. To Gaonkar, rhetoric has been extended “to include discourse types … that the ancients would have regarded as falling outside its purview” (26).

According to many critics, the term intertextuality was coined by Julia Kristeva. For example, in Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva defines intertextuality as “the transposition of one (or several) sign system(s) into another” (60). And in “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” referring to the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, which she introduces into French literary criticism, Kristeva comments that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (37). In other words, every text is connected to other texts by citations, quotations, allusions, borrowings, adaptations, appropriations, parody, pastiche, imitation, and the like. Every text is in a dialogical relationship with other texts. In sum, intertextuality describes the relationships that exist between and among texts. What follows is a discussion of the strategies of intertextuality.

Adaptation

The first mode of intertextuality is adaptation. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, an adaptation is “a composition that has been recast into a new form.” To Ingeborg Hoesterey, an adaptation is “the modification of artistic material transposed from one genre to another” (10). To Julie Sanders, “an adaptation signals a relationship with an informing sourcetext or original” (26). In her recent book, A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon comments: “If you think adaptation can be understood by using novels and films alone, you're wrong.” To Hutcheon, adaptation includes “not only film, television, radio, and the various electronic media, of course, but also theme parks, historical enactments and virtual reality experiments” (xi). “For the reader, spectator, or listener,” writes Hutcheon, “adaptation as adaptation is unavoidably a kind of intertextuality if the receiver is acquainted with the adapted text” (21). Finally, Hutcheon concludes that adaptation can be “a creative and interpretive transposition of a recognizable other work or works” (33).

Perhaps the most frequent kind of adaptation is the adaptation of novels and plays into film. For example, The French Lieutenant's Woman is considered by most critics to be “a brilliant adaptation of John Fowles's bestselling novel into film” (Martin and Porter 408). The adaptation of Shakespeare's plays into film are too numerous to mention, but I have counted at least six adaptations of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet into film, including Franco Zeffirelli's version, filmed when the leading actor and actress were seventeen and fifteen years old, respectively. And, of course, there is Baz Luhrmann's over-the-top, postmodern version of Shakespeare's star-crossed lovers, edited in MTV style.

But when one thinks of adaptation, one inevitably thinks of other kinds of changes in medium, from Broadway musical into film, comic book into movie, graphic novel into movie, board games into video format, and so forth. For example, most recently, the Broadway musical Dreamgirls has been adapted into a movie starring Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson. The movie, Ghost Rider, starring Nicolas Cage, was adapted from a comic book. The controversial movie 300, which one critic described as “a cross between a comic book and a video game,” is based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, which in turn is based on the famous Battle of Thermopylae, which pitted a force of three hundred Spartans against a massive Persian army (Muller P1). Hasbro, the owner of famous board games such as “Monopoly,” “Scrabble,” “Sorry,” and “Clue,” is making “versions of its board games that can be played on laptops, cell phones or in video format” (Hymorwitz B1). Finally, Marvel Entertainment is lending “its full library of superheroes to a new Dubai theme park” (Superheroes B4). These include Spiderman, the Incredible Hulk, and the X-Men.

What can one medium do that another cannot? According to Linda Hutcheon, some media are better than others at “telling” things. Some media can “show” things better than others. And some media are better at “interacting” (24–26, 35). Adaptation, then is the recasting of a rhetorical text into a new form.

Retro

The second mode of intertextuality is retro (sometimes called recycling). Retro is related to nostalgia, an idealized longing for the past. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the word retro refers to “a fashion, design, or style reminiscent of the past.” The word recycling refers to the process of “reconditioning and adapting to a new use or function.” To Stuart Sim, retro refers to the “reappropriation and recontextualization of older forms and styles.” It is not “a mere imitation,” but it “often involves an ironic attitude toward the earlier style” (297). To Paul Grainge, “retro borrows from the past without sentimentality, quotes from the past without longing, parodies the past without loss” (55). Retro is both “a commercial category and … a cultural practice” (56).

According to Peter Brooker, “Frederic Jameson has introduced the category of the ‘nostalgic mode’ … to describe the way contemporary postmodern culture pastiches the past, representing it at the level of cultural style” (153). Jameson argues that “we must conceive of this category in the broadest way,” not merely as a term that refers to films about the past (116). However, Linda Hutcheon argues that the nostalgic mode is not only an idealized longing for the past but also a representation of the past “in a self-conscious, parodic, and critical way, revealing its construction as narrative rather than a self-evident ‘History’ or unmediated ‘truth’” (qtd. in Brooker 153–54). We can only know the past (that is, “history”) “through textual traces in cultural and ideological mediation with the present” (Grainge 55). Although the term nostalgia, like that of retro, “typically conjures up images of a previous time when life was ‘good,’” today “nostalgia is prepackaged and sold as a commodity” (Wilson 21, 30).

Like adaptation, perhaps the most frequent kind of retro or nostalgia for the past can be found in movies and television shows. TV shows representing the 50s include Happy Days and Leave It to Beaver, whereas the movies representing the 50s include American Graffiti, Diner, and Back to the Future. Many people look back on the 50s as a time of innocence, good values, simplicity, and a strong economy. In contrast, the 60s has been remembered as a time of extreme social change (Woodstock, the Vietnamese war, hippies, flower children, self-expression, and love and peace on earth), great music (Elvis, the Beatles, the Grateful Dead), and drugs. Movies representing the 60s include The Big Chill, The Return of the Secaucus 7, and Easy Rider.

More recently, Steven Soderbergh's The Good German has been criticized as being “miscast and muddled,” as film noir, as a remake of Casablanca, and as “giving off a slight Chinatown vibe” (Muller P1, P7). On the other hand, Chris Rock's new film, I Think I Love My Wife, has been praised as a comedic remake and homage to Eric Rohmer's Chloe in the Afternoon. One movie reviewer also sees references to Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters in Rock's film (Coyle D8), while another talks about Rock's indebtedness to Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal (Whipp P9).

As far as other media are concerned, Shout! The Mod Musical, which had its inception as an off-Broadway show, recycles old song favorites from the 60s such as “Downtown,” “These Boots Were Made For Walkin',” “Son of a Preacher Man,” “Goldfinger,” “To Sir With Love,” and “You Don't Have to Say You Love Me.” The “jukebox musical” strings together songs in Laugh-in style. The lyrics themselves are used to show how women's lives were being transformed in the 60s (Trapiano 5). I have already mentioned that Hasbro, the owner of famous board games, is making versions of its games that can be played on computers and video. Hasbro is also considering reissuing the original version of games such as Can't Stop, revising older board games such as Monopoly and The Game of Life, and designing similar games (B1).

In styles reminiscent of the 60s, the big-knot tie, represented by the Windsor knot (named after the Duke of Windsor, who visited the US in the 30s), is making a comeback. The thick tie is commonly used by European executives along with a spread collar, but it has been only recently showing up again in the US, worn by such celebrities as Forest Whitaker, Sean “Diddy” Combs, and Tom Cruise (Smith P1). The retro look of the 60s is also being represented in the fashion world by women's styles reminiscent of the mod era: Twiggy-style mini dresses, the trapeze dress, lucite shoes, geometric patterns, and so forth. “But fearful the bold styles could flop, some retailers are watering them down. How to look just mod enough” (Tan P1). Retro, or recycling, is perhaps the most pervasive strategy of refashioning old rhetorical forms and adapting them to new uses.

Appropriation

The third mode of intertextuality is appropriation. The American Heritage Dictionary defines appropriation as “the act of taking possession of something or making use of something exclusively for oneself, often without permission.” Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright define appropriation as “the act of borrowing, stealing, or taking over others' meanings to one's own ends” (350). Crispin Sartwell defines appropriation as a term used “to explain how artists have appropriated (that is, explicitly and accurately copied) work by other artists and presented it as their own” (68). To many critics, the biggest difference between adaptation and appropriation is that the adaptor acknowledges a prior text whereas the appropriator does not, often taking a prior text without permission.

But is every act of appropriation an act of plagiarism? Crispin Sartwell claims that “copying, faking, plagiarism, borrowing, reproduction, and other practices that involve appropriation … have been central practices in the arts for as long as the arts have existed. No artist starts from scratch; every artist derives material from the past” (68). To many visual artists in the 80s, “copying is assimilation, reenactment is appropriation, appropriation is creation” (Schwartz 246).

Why do writers and artists appropriate the images and ideas of others? To Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, “appropriation is one of the primary forms of oppositional production and reading” (350). To Crispin Sartwell, appropriation is a “systematic subversion of the notion of originality” (68). To the appropriation artists of the 80s, appropriation means “turning the means of the mass media against themselves” by incorporating into their works images from advertising, film, the comics, television, the art of the past, newspaper photographs, magazine illustrations, and copious images from popular culture (135).

Perhaps the most frequent kind of appropriation can be found in modern and postmodern art and photography. I have already mentioned the so-called “image scavengers” and appropriation painters of the 80s, such as Robert Longo, Nancy Dwyer, David Salk, Robin Winters, and others who appropriated images from the mass media, popular culture, and the art of the past. What these artists did was to reedit, resituate, alter, or change what they appropriated in some way. The Pop art movement of the 60s anticipated the postmodern response to the cult of originality by incorporating images from movie stills, comic books, product packages (for example, Campbell's soup cans), advertisements, and popular culture. Sherrie Levine's “exact photographs of existing Edward Weston photographs,” which she titled After Edward Weston, is a good example of appropriationist art in photography, ostensibly, “to question the nature of authorship” (qtd. in Phares 75).

In Adaptation and Appropriation, Julie Sanders cites as examples of appropriation Kate Atkinson's appropriation of the stepmother figure in fairy tales (Human Conquest), Jean Rhys's appropriation of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea, and Graham Swift's appropriation of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, in his award-winning novel Last Orders (33, 83, 87, 140). Of course, one could argue that all of these works differ aesthetically from the works they ostensibly appropriate.

Because there is a long tradition of borrowing, copying, and imitating other works, “many artists are oblivious to copyright” (Phares 71). One of the more celebrated court cases was that of Jeff Koons, who used a note card, titled Puppies, by Art Rogers, as the basis of a sculpture carved from wood that Koons titled String of Puppies. Despite the fact that Koons's sculpture differed from the note card in many important ways (a different medium, different facial expressions of a depicted couple, blue-painted puppies), Koons failed to get permission from Rogers to create his sculpture, so Rogers charged Koons with copyright infringement (Inde 1–2). According to Vilis Inde, “Koons always looked for objects or images that he might incorporate into his future work” (1). Koons's lawyers argued “that the sculptor works in the postmodern tradition of art, which involves the appropriation of images found in society and ‘recontextualizing’ them to create an entirely new meaning” (2).

More recently, two New York artists, Clifton Mallery and Amnau Karam Eele, sued NBC, claiming that the writers of Heroes saw their artwork, which depicted a character like Isaac Mendez, the painter-heroin addict on the hit show Heroes. They claim that the creator of Heroes appropriated the idea of the artist who “claims he can paint the future” from their artwork (“New York Artists Sue” D8). In another lawsuit Carol Burnett is suing the Fox TV show Family Guy for failure to obtain permission to use her Charwoman character in an eighteen-second episode. A Fox television spokesman expressed surprise that Carol Burnett would sue, since she “made a career of spoofing others on television” (Lambert ES). This incident calls to mind (irony of ironies) the announcement by the Warhol estate “that they will prosecute anyone stealing Andy's images, when it was Andy who … infringed the copyrights of everything and everybody” (Schwartz 246). Finally, a group of artists, “inspired by the idea that appropriation and influence are inherent to the artistic process” are “posting their work on the Web for anyone to borrow or adapt” (Yabroff 11). Like classical imitation, appropriation is a rhetorical device of borrowing from and copying other works.

Parody

The fourth mode of intertextuality is parody. Parody, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, is “a literary or artistic work that imitates the characteristic style of an author or a work for comic effect or ridicule.” Parody is a practice that can be traced back to the Greeks and Romans, but like adaptation, appropriation, pastiche, and simulation, it is especially associated with postmodernism. To Chris Baldick, parody is “a mocking imitation of the style of a literary work or works” (185). To Kenneth Dover, “parody entails imitation, but an imitation which is intended to be recognized as such and to amuse.” Common to most definitions of parody are ideas of ridicule, incongruity, exaggeration, and “criticism of the original” (1114). Margaret Rose defines parody as a metafictional, intertextual, and comic form (283).

But Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Parody sees parody not only as “a form of imitation” but also “imitation characterized by ironic inversion, not always at the expense of the parodied text” (6). Contemporary parody, Hutcheon writes, “is an integrated structural modeling process of revising, replaying, inventing, and ‘transcontextualizing’ previous works of art” (11). However, Frederic Jameson believes that parody depends upon the belief that there is a linguistic norm, but if we no longer believe in a linguistic norm, then parody becomes impossible (114). To Hutcheon, “ironic inversion is a characteristic of all parody” (6). To Jameson, parody is not only impossible in a postmodern world, but it is replaced by a more neutral pastiche. Nevertheless, postmodern theorists continue to see parody “as one of the key strategies of postmodern style” (Sturken 361).

Like adaptation, parody can be found in a number of contemporary genres. For example, the film Airplane! is a hilarious spoof of airplane disaster films (Sturken 361). The movie This Is Spinal Tap parodies rock documentaries and heavy metal rock groups (Murfin 2003). Dressed to Kill is a parody of Hitchcock's Psycho, whereas Blowout is an aural parody of Antonioni's Blowup (Hutcheon 186). Both Raiders of the Lost Ark and Romancing the Stone seem to me to be parodies of 40s adventure films and serials.

In other media, Weird Al Yankovich parodies Michael Jackson's song “Beat It” with his version of “Eat It” (Murfin 330). Rene Magritte's painting “Le Balcon de Manet” is a parody of Edouard Manet's “Le Balcon,” whereas his painting “This is not a Pipe” is “a parody of the medieval and baroque emblem form” (Hutcheon 2–3). To complicate matters, Foucault's own study of Magritte is titled “This is not a Pipe” (Hutcheon 2–3). The French Lieutenant's Woman, which ostensibly parodies “the conventions of the Victorian and the modern novel,” has also been adapted into a film with the same name (Hutcheon 31).

Most recently, “the satirical newspaper The Onion” announced plans “to launch a video Web site” that “will parody the visual style and breathless reporting of twenty-four-hour cable news networks like CNN” (Schechner W3). The new show will be titled ONN (an obvious pun on CNN). ONN will also satirize Sunday-morning roundtable debates, asking such ridiculous questions as “Should America build a moat?” and “Does anybody remember life before the Segway?” (Schechner W3). According to Schechner, parodies of TV news shows have been around for years. He mentions “That Was the Week That Was,” “Laugh-in,” and “Saturday Night Live,” which is still going strong. The biggest difference between the parodies to be featured by The Onion and those created by other media is that The Onion “makes up stories about things that aren't happening” (Schechner W3). Parody, then, is an ancient rhetorical and poetic device that should be familiar to literary and rhetorical critics.

Pastiche

The fifth mode of intertextuality is pastiche. The American Heritage Dictionary defines pastiche as “a word or style produced by borrowing fragments, ingredients, or motifs from various sources.” Kathy Wales defines pastiche as “a ‘pasting together,’ a patchwork or medly of borrowed styles.” She calls it “another paratextual form, often difficult to distinguish from parody” (339). To Rose Murfin and Supryia M. Ray, “plagiarism is characterized by deceptive intent; pastiche involves open and intentional imitation or copy of the style of an original object or text” (160).

The word pastiche is derived from the Italian word pasticcio, originally “a hodgepodge of meat, vegetables, eggs, and a variety of other possible additions” (Hoestery 1). The Italian word has largely been replaced by the French word pastiche, which “by metaphorical extension” has been used to describe art, literature, music, and architecture “made up of fragments pieced together” (Dentith 194). To Frederic Jameson, “pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique idiosyncratic style… . But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter” (Postmodernism 12). To Charles Jencks, the architectural critic, pastiche is an example of “double-coding,” the combination of contemporary technology with elements borrowed from the classical past (15). Some related terms are bricolage, collage, and montage.

The term bricolage was introduced into critical theory by the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss to describe a kind of activity performed in primitive societies to complete a task, using whatever materials that happened to be lying around (Sturken and Cartwright 350). The word then began to be used metaphorically to describe a certain style of artistic composition. It is sometimes used as a synonym for collage and montage. A collage, however, is “a pictorial technique in which photographs, news cuttings, and other suitable objects are pasted on to a flat surface often in combination with painted passages” (Chilvers 114). Collage is sometimes associated with the surrealist painters, sometimes with the Cubists. The term montage, often associated with collage, is a term used most frequently in motion-picture editing to describe a technique of juxtaposing shots and sequences to achieve an emotional effect (Lagasse 1882). Photomontage is the combining of photographs or parts of photographs to produce a particular effect (Hawthorn 220). All of these terms have been sometimes used as synonyms for pastiche.

Examples of pastiche can be found in almost any medium. For instance, David Lynch's films have been cited for their use of “cliché and pastiche with images that exist for themselves rather than for any inherent meaning or interpretation” (Sim 207). Lynch's love of pastiche, parody, and cliché can be found in such films as Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. Ridley Scott's Blade Runner is often cited as an early example of a visually impressive use of pastiche. Quentin Tarentino's Pulp Fiction, Lars von Trier's Zentropa, Wim Wender's Wings of Desire, and Steven Soderbergh's Kafka all qualify as examples of postmodern pastiche.

In architecture and design, the “mixing of categories and genres became the style of 1970s Post-Modernism in all the arts” (Jencks 22). Jencks mentions Charles Moore's Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans, which uses an eclectic mix of materials, while harking back to the Roman classical past, and Michael Graves's Humana Building in Louisville, Kentucky, as examples of buildings that mix categories. Jencks also mentions Robert Venturi's controversial designs, “which reintroduced ornament and historical motif as generations of architectural meaning” and James Stirling's creative addition to the Tate Gallery (Sim 375).

John Fowles's novel The French Lieutenant's Woman has been variously described by critics as both parody and pastiche. Other literary examples of pastiche include Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot, Michael Crichton's Congo, and Ismael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo. According to Omar Calabrese, Crichton's novel Congo mixes genres (science fiction, suspense, espionage) and “quotes” from other sources (50–51). Reed's Mumbo Jumbo contains photographs, cartoons, footnotes, illustrations and a bibliography.

The diary form lends itself quite readily to pastiche. The diaries of Courtney Love, titled Dirty Blonde, were published in November of 2006. They contain letters from rehab, a letter written to her mother in crayon from boarding school when Courtney was twelve years old, letters from a correctional facility, scribbles, scraps, secrets, scrawled lyrics, lists, photographs, poetry, collages, and childhood relics. According to Jac Chebatoris, despite the public perception of Love “as loud, brash, and drugged out,” in her diaries she comes across as “intelligent, fearless, and witty” (66). Like parody and classical imitation, pastiche is a contemporary rhetorical form of borrowing, imitating, and pasting together other forms.

Simulation

The sixth and final mode of intertextuality is simulation. Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines simulation as “the act or process of assuming the outward qualities of an object or process, usually with the intent to deceive.” Jean Baudrillard defines simulation as “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality” (2). “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody,” he writes. “It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself” (4). “For Baudrillard Postmodern culture is dominated by the simulacrum … a copy which does not possess an original” (Allen 182).

If the simulacrum “puts into question the very concept of a true copy,” then how is imitation possible (Childers and Hentgi 279)? By “pretending” to imitate something real (Walker 121). However, the copy “precedes” the object or event. For example, in some driver-education programs, students are given simulated computer or video programs in which they are asked to mimic what actual drivers do behind the wheel of a real vehicle on the road.

Nevertheless, Baudrillard's main point is well worth considering. Much of what we see on television is reproduced and mediated, so that we cannot always “distinguish what is real and what is represented” (Camillo 35). One of Baudrillard's more audacious claims is that “the Gulf War did not take place, only a mediatized simulation which ‘we’ all watched” (Wheale 50). Most of us would be appalled by such a wild claim, but in an article titled “Stop This War Now,” right before she died, Molly Ivins claimed that the television event in which television viewers watched Iraqis pulling down Hussein's statue was staged, simulated, faked. The television cameras “made it appear to be a spontaneous show of Iraqi joy,” but viewers later discovered that a US tank had pulled down Hussein's statue with a cable, and only a few US soldiers, the press, and some Iraqis were there (B7). So much for reality!

To Baudrillard, Disneyland is a perfect example of simulation, with its “play of illusions,” its “Pirates, the Frontier, Future World, etc.” (23). It is a miniature of the “real America.” In fact, “all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation” (25). To Umberto Eco, not only Disneyland, but also theme parks and cities such as Las Vegas are not simply simulations of the real. They are hyperreal (Macy 192–93).

Most of us have long known that reality TV is not really real. Jeanne McDowell gives us five ways in which reality TV “fakes” it. It “stitches together clips from different scenes to make participants say what the makers of the show wish they had said.” It uses fake settings. For example, “on The Apprentice … Donald Trump's ‘boardroom’ is actually a stage set.” It uses misleading montage to make contestants look happy, unhappy, angry, jealous, and so forth. It relies on the “confessional” interview to make situations appear more dramatic. Finally, it overdubs to make it appear that contestants are doing more than they appear to be doing (62). In brief, reality TV shows fake, simulate, contrive, and edit in order to be more dramatic (60).

My last example of simulation is taken from a recent interview with the game designer, Will Smith, the author of the videogame Spore. When asked to describe Spore, Smith explained it as follows:

The core of it is, we want the players to create their own world. At every level, you manipulate a simulation of life, society, civilization, and exploration. And as you create each level, it's automatically shared with other players, so that people playing their own game are also creating the game worlds for everybody else. (33)

In Phantom Communities, Scott Durham questions the whole concept of the simulacrum. “Should we celebrate the postmodern culture of the simulacrum as an anticipation of the utopian wish for a purely aesthetic existence—for a world that affirms appearance and the free play of images as such, without any appeal to truth and judgment” (189)? In its rhetorical guise, simulation seems to be a form of imitation, but ironically simulation “puts into question” the idea of imitation.

I said earlier that I hoped this excursion into the rhetoric of intertextuality would enable teachers and students, in their roles as rhetorical critics, to understand new strategies for producing discourse and to give them alternative ways of thinking about the rhetorical situation, rhetorical invention, genre, arrangement, and audience. If, as Julia Kristeva contends, every text is an intertext, then the possibilities for rhetorical criticism are almost endless. And if intertextuality is inherently rhetorical, then what are the implications for rhetorical theory and criticism?

The first implication is that intertextuality can give us alternative ideas about the rhetorical situation. In traditional approaches to the rhetorical situation, rhetorical discourse comes into existence as a result of the exigence, the audience, and a set of constraints. Or speakers and writers create situations by speaking or writing about facts or events. If every text is an intertext, then every intertext is a context that issues invitations for readers or viewers to adopt a certain perspective for reading or viewing. Intertextuality can be said to create its own contexts in addition to the immediate rhetorical situation.

The second implication is that intertextuality can be a fresh source of invention for writers' ideas. In this context I am talking about invention not as lines of argument or modes of reasoning but as commonplace material in the sense of subject matter and striking ideas. In traditional sources these topoi or commonplaces could be found in other speakers or writers, in commonplace books, in indices, and in print media such as books and articles. But in the world of new media and electronic texts, ideas may be found in such nontraditional sources as comic books, graphic novels, board games, video games, amusement parks, theme parks, and the like.

The third implication is that intertextuality can be a fruitful source of ideas about genre. For example, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a nostalgic look at the earlier Indiana Jones films, which were themselves examples of the serials of the 30s and 40s. Romancing the Stone is both a parody of romance novels and a parody of the genre of adventure films. And what are we to make of such films as 300, a movie based on a graphic novel (Sin City), which in turn is based on an historical account of the battle of Thermopylae in which three hundred Spartans defended a narrow pass against a massive force of Persians? Bill Muller describes this film as a hybrid genre that is a hyperstylistic “cross between a comic book and a video game” (P1).

The fourth implication is that intertextuality can be a profitable source of ideas about arrangement, especially about narrative structure. There are strong narrative elements in film, comic books, graphic novels, and video games. For example, comics are narratives conveyed by means of a series of words and pictures that lend themselves well to film and electronic media. The story line of many comic strips and graphic novels can be easily adapted to movies such as Ironman, The Spectacular Spider Man, and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Not all video games are narratives, but many such as Tomb Raider, Myst, and The Oregon Trail have plots, conflicts, or narrative content. Theme parks, on the other hand, are based on themes taken from TV shows, movies, and musical events. The Hard Rock Theme Park in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, arranges its space into areas such as “The British Invasion,” “Cool Country,” and “Born in the U.S.A.”

The last implication is that intertextuality can be a fertile source of ideas about the effect of texts and intertexts on audiences. The primary aim of most media texts may be entertainment, but reader-response criticism has taught us that there are as many responses to intertexts as there are readers. Clearly not all readers or viewers respond to the same texts in the same way. For example, the film 300, which many viewers considered entertaining because of its comic-book, video game-like fantasy, “angered Iranians who say the Greeks-vs-Persians action flick insults their ancient culture and provokes animosity against Iran” (Karimi A18). More recently, the new Indiana Jones film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, riled Russia's Communist Party because it depicts “Harrison Ford as an archaeologist competing in 1957 with an evil KGB agent” (A2). The reader's response may not always be the same as the meaning of a text, but reader responses to a text may include entertainment, aesthetic pleasure, ecstasy, persuasion, instruction, catharsis, and even the ineffable.

Intertextual theorists argue that “readers experience each new text in terms of their experiences with previous texts.” But according to Richard Beach, many students “experience texts as autonomous entities with no sense of how they are related to other previous texts.” They have to be taught to make meaningful connections to prior texts. Only then can they “revise their prior knowledge” (38).

Notes

¹I thank RR reviewer Jeffrey Walker and Theresa Enos for their guidance in bringing this essay through the review process.