Monica Hanna

Professor Gonzalez

ENC 1102

2/22/2024

The research article Intertextualities: Volosinov, Bakhtin, Literary Theory, and Literacy

Studies, written by Charles Baserman, encapsulates the idea of what intertextuality is and how

we see it in everything we speak. To start, intertextuality is the intertwining of others' literary

works or speeches in your own work, believing that everything we say or write has already been

done before and we are just regurgitating what we heard previously. He believes that how we

utilize intertextualities and identify them can improve our writing, making us sound more

confident in what we are stating. Baserman brings out many different writers who discuss this

topic of intertextuality and support his argument.

The first argument was by the writer Volosino, who believed that intertextuality is beyond

just writing but within our "relations among utterances" (Baserman 1). Volosinov mentions that

language can only happen at the moment and cannot be understood from one situation to another.

Later, he states that every time we talk, we use a previous experience with language to carry on

the following conversation. According to Volosinov, we utilize text as direct or indirect quotes in

our language.

Another researcher Baserman introduces is Vygotsky, who studies psychology. The

argument that Vygotsky brought up is that no matter how private or unique we think, something

we did was. It will never be unique because that idea may have been obtained from another

circumstance. Vygotsky later discovered in his career that as a society we rely on others to talk
and have interaction with, which means that we need to hear something from another person to

be able to formulate an idea to communicate to others.

The last point Baserman talks about is from Genette's ideas. Gennete's goal was to find

intertextuality in literary texts. Gennete brings up many types of intertextuality such as:

hypertextuality, transtextuality, etc. I believe this was his weakest argument because he was

supposed to analyze how intertextuality affects us in how intertextuality writes us in the same

way we use it while writing, this argument goes over the different types of literary intertextuality

that can be seen in works. It does not explain how those works can affect our writing or how they

define us.

The most confounding thing I found was that after reading the article, I never had a

realization of just how much intertextuality is used even beyond writing such as seen in

conversations we have everdyday. I see intertextuality being used in my own research by using

quotes or points that other writers utilized in their writing that can further strengthen my own

argument. I fully pull in my ideas but accept help from different sources and give them credit for

their hard work. This matters because the less we are scared to use intertextuality, the stronger

our writing could become.