2. 350 D. K. HARTMAN
ally-informed research. Another is to look at what the idea of intertextual-
ity itself has come to mean as it has been appropriated and articulated by
this theorizing and research. And the final is to, in a modest sense, decon-
struct reading.
My means for achieving these ambitions are straightforward. I begin by
examining the findings of intertextually-informed research that have had
some impact on our conception(s) of the text, the reader, the author, and
the context. These studies were selected because they: (a) expressed
explicit theoretical grounding in intertextuality, (b) were published
recently (in the last 6 years), and (c) reflected a variety of methodologies
for data collection and analysis. In the process of discussing the implica-
tions of the studies’ findings, I highlight the renderings of intertextuality
across the studies and in turn use intertextuality as a kind of “strategic
device” for seeing the assumed meanings and views of the text, the reader,
the author, and the context that we are not usually disposed to see. I con-
clude by discussing the implications of wedding intertextuality and read-
ing.
The risk in undertaking this, or any other, venture is that when ambi-
tion runs ahead of means, the result is often disaster. To keep my means
in stride with my ambitions, I have been mindful that I speak on behalf of
what others meant when they appropriated intertextuality in their
research, and in a very real sense I am reappropriating their appropria-
tions of the text, the reader, the author, and the context, as well as the
idea of intertextuality. The extent to which my reading of their readings
resonate, hinges on your reading of what follows. I have also been mind-
ful that my ambition is not to totally and completely deconstruct reading
into a heap of rubble, but to dismantle reading to the extent that intertex-
tuality as a “strategic device” allows.
APPROPRIATING/ARTICULATING
To a large extent our view of reading has been framed by a commonsensi-
cal, as well as scholarly, vision of reading that goes something like this: An
author (in a context), writes a text, that is read by a reader (usually in a
different context). I examine the effect that postmodern theories of inter-
textuality and intertextually-based research have on this vision in the fol-
lowing, beginning with the text.
The Text: E Pluribus Plures
The text has been rendered by intertextually-informed research in two
ways. Both, influenced considerably by literary theory and semiotics,
require an altered notion of what constitutes a text. Although we usually
3. Deconstructing the Reader, the Text, and the Context 351
think of the text as the object one reads—a textbook, a section of a pas-
sage, or the alphanumeric code printed on a page—it need not be con-
fined to the boundaries of printed language. A text includes both
linguistic and nonlinguistic signs. A text can be an utterance, a gesture, a
thought, a structure, a function, or a piece of art, music, or drama (Rowe,
1987; Short, 1986; Siegel, 1984); in this more inclusive sense, a text is any
sign that communicates meaning.1
The Text as a Site of “Interior” Dialogue
One rendering of the text has been to see it as a site where “interior”
dialogue is represented; where an interplay of absorbed voices dialogi-
cally “speak” within the text. Kamberelis and McGinley (1992) found the
texts written by five 4th-graders to represent this interior dialogue. By
segmenting each child’s text into utterances (i.e., linguistic units marked
off by the boundaries of “who is speaking,” p. 206) and then tracing out
the source, type, and function of each utterance by using interview, obser-
vational, and artifactual data, the view of textuality that emerged was one
rampant with vectors to other texts, utterances, images, and motifs that
informed its construction, not one of a unitary, monologic textual voice.
From this perspective, the text is never an ex nihilo (i.e., out of noth-
ing) creation; it presupposes other texts and has a multiplicity of sources.
It is polyphonic and double-voiced; it is a multivocal field of play where
texts are superimposed upon texts, upon still other texts. “Every text ech-
oes another unto infinity” (Plottel, 1978, p. xv). And on this field, textual
resources, utterances, and architectures are juxtaposed and in turn dis-
persed into other texts.
Even the Latin derivation of the word “text” (n. textus)—which means
woven, as in a fabric or structure—further suggests that the composition
of any text is interwoven with previous resources that give it a particular
texture, pile, and grain. As an ideogram, the text is a kind of “textile,”
with the threads of the warp trailing off in one direction and those of the
woof in another. And although the text itself is a woven network of codi-
fied threads in progress that fill a particular time and space, the threads
are all anchored elsewhere. In this way, the text is not a unitary, seamless
whole, but can be fragmented and atomized into constituent elements
(e.g., utterances), and these elements represent a life of their own and
that of others.
The Text as a Site for “Exterior” Dialogue with Other Texts
Another rendering of the text has been to see it as a site in dialogue
with other textual sites; where an interplay of linked voices dialogically
4. 352 D. K. HARTMAN
“speak” across texts. Cairney (1990, 1992), Lehr (1991), and Short (1992)
found that elementary students reading across sets of conceptually related
texts (i.e., trade books and other students’ writing) viewed texts in this
“externally” dialogic way. By tracing the connections that students gener-
ated across the texts they read, the view of textuality that emerged was one
of an open-bordered text, where the artificial borders of separation and
univocality suggested by the physicality of the text blur by its being situ-
ated in a field of other texts.
From this viewpoint, the text exists as part of a complex dialogue
rather than an isolated monologue. It is networked with other texts—spa-
tially and temporally—into a virtual “metatext” (Landow, 1992) that has
“nomadic centers” (Deleuze, 1968) of meaning that drift according to the
context of other texts in which it resides; there is no stable, central mean-
ing. By its nature, the text is expandable, implicated, and linked into
other texts. As a result, the text exists as an in-potentia (i.e., potential)
space, representing a virtual presence that is only realized for the moment
in proximity to other texts.
Taken together, both the “interior” and “exterior” views suggested by
these studies depict a different anatomy of the text. Rather than possess-
ing an inherent, hidden, inner, center presence or voice (as is the case in
essentialist beliefs), utterances echo through and across texts with bidirec-
tional traces and alternative leitmotifs threading through any given text.
The view of the text that emerges is that of a cento, a space where various
discourses, motifs, and images are situated together into a patchwork
intertext that resembles a collage/montage of others’ voices.
The implication of this view is that looking at the text in isolation is dis-
torting. The notion of an individual, discrete, univocal, pristine text
becomes increasingly undermined and untenable. Instead, the text
becomes an enunciative field where intratextual utterances index extra-
textual signs rather than some central signifier. The text becomes a dis-
course of dispersion rather than logocentrism, of dynamic signifiers
rather than spatial fixity, of centrifugal rather than centripetal voices.
That is, the text is an indeterminate, provisional, unfinished work,
open to new amplification and interpretation, engendered by its existence
in a complex set of shifting relations. The fixed, unitary, centered text
assumed in most reading research and classroom materials (i.e., the “text
itself ” tradition) gives way to a dispersed, multivocal, decentered text that
is “a differential network, a fabric of traces referring endlessly to some-
thing other than itself, to other differential traces” (Derrida, 1979, p. 83).
The condition of the intertextual text proclaims that it is not closed; its
nature is to overrun all the limits assigned to it. From out of many texts,
the text becomes many more.
5. Deconstructing the Reader, the Text, and the Context 353
The Reader: First Person Plural
The reader has been rendered by intertextually-informed research in at
least one way. Hartman (1991a) construed intertextuality as a kind of cog-
nitive metaphor to explain the meaning making of eight able high-school
students as they read a five-passage tableau. Each reader silently read the
passages and reported aloud their thoughts during a 2 1/2- to 3-hour ses-
sion. By tracing out the source(s), “location,” spatial/temporal proximity,
aspect, type, and function of textual resources that the students alluded to
in their think-aloud episodes, the view of the reader that emerged was
one of a centoist who synthesized various discourses, motifs, and images by
stitching together the textual voices of others into a patchwork intertext
that resembled a collage/montage.
Employing the inclusive conception of text discussed previously,
thoughts and ideas in the mind were conceived of as being texts also. In a
Bakhtinian (1981, 1984) sense, these texts of the mind were the “voice” of
another and reflected the content, style, and sociopolitical stance of each
reader’s discourse communities and imaginative means (John-Steiner,
1985). Each text was rampant with intertextual vectors or strands that
connected to things outside itself (Barthes, 1986), and resided in a reser-
voir-or “cauldron,” as Tolkien called it (Cooper, 1988)—of textual
resources in the mind, which served as a multivocal, heterarchical network
of resources from which current and future meaning(s) could be con-
structed.
From this vantage point, when the reader constructs meaning, she gen-
erates intertextual links among textual resources to fit a particular con-
text, borrowing, adapting, appropriating, and transforming texts in her
mind. This entire act is an orchestrated effort to mobilize potential texts,
which generate interconnections among many textual resources, resulting
in a web of meaning-an evolving mental web that Pearson and Tierney
(1984) call an “inner text.” These inner texts represented the interplay of
many textual resources where the reader has borrowed, transformed, and
intersected the texts of others to construct her own.
While assembling these inner texts from past as well as evolving texts,
the reader also uses her current experiences with the text to revise her
past texts and the connections among them. These revised past texts are
in turn used to further revise her currently evolving inner text. Hoesterey
(1987) calls this the “intertextual loop,” where the reader uses new
insights from her current inner text to revise the composition and config-
uration of past texts, and then loops these revised perceptions back to
understand the current text. This reciprocal, “multilectical” process (Stan-
field, 1985) makes it possible for the reader to generate meanings that are
constantly under revision and being reconstructed ad infinitum.
6. 354 D. K. HARTMAN
The reader’s inner texts resemble a web of connections that are acti-
vated or deactivated among textual resources. As a result, a single textual
resource in the mind of the reader takes on different meanings in differ-
ent contexts. Put another way, the same text is reappropriated according
to an infinite number of possible relational schemes to represent different
inner texts. Connections are strengthened or weakened among textual
resources, such that the act of reading is seen as the deconstruction and
reconstruction of textual links.
Put in this light, the reader becomes one who “transposes texts into
other texts, absorbs one text into another, and builds a mosaic of inter-
secting texts” (Hartman, 1990, p. 2). She weaves multidimensional webs
of intertextual links in the mind, contingent on a large number of factors.
Her role is much more than finding the appropriate schema, activating it,
and filling in the slots; a view of the reader implied by some of the pre-
vailing cognitive views of reading (e.g., Anderson & Pearson, 1984).
The reader, then, can be characterized as one who positions herself on
a multivocal field of play where she juxtaposes textual resources—cracks,
contradictions, and all—in various architectures (Bataille, 1988). She
enters and works within “textual worlds” constructed by appropriating
various author(itie)s, reading texts in terms of a plurality of other texts.
The status of the intertextual reader proclaims that while she is but one
person, the textual voices of many speak dialogically through her mean-
ing making. The reader is a palimpsest, marked by the utterances of oth-
ers.
The Author: I Am Because We Are
The author has been rendered by several intertextually-informed stud-
ies in at least one way. Ackerman (1989), Greene (1990), McGinley (1992),
and Spivey and King (1989) used intertextuality as a cognitive construct
to explain the composing operations of secondary and postsecondary stu-
dents as they wrote from sources about various academic topics; and Kam-
berelis and McGinley (1992) examined the composing operations of
fourth graders as they wrote about themselves, their families, their com-
munity, and their cultural histories. By tracing out the ways in which tex-
tual resources had been ventriloquated, appropriated, and rearticulated,
the view of the author that emerged across these studies—like that of the
reader—was also one of a centoist who synthesized various discourses,
motifs, and images by stitching together the textual voices of others into a
patchwork intertext that resembled a collage/montage.
Employing the inclusive conception of text discussed previously, the
author shares a striking resemblance to that of the reader who borrows,
7. Deconstructing the Reader, the Text, and the Context 355
adapts, appropriates, and transforms textual resources that come to him
secondhand and stylized, already imbued with the utterances of others. In
the words of Kristeva (1974), the author engages in the “transposition of
one (or several) sign-system(s) into another” (pp. 59-60). This signifying
process is accomplished by drawing on the genotext (the plurality of tex-
tual voices available to the author at any given time and place) to articu-
late the phenotext (the presently visible discourse; Kristeva, 1986). He
constructs “textual worlds” by appropriating the texts of various
author(itie)s, juxtaposing texts in terms of a plurality of other texts. In
this sense, the author is a multidimensional space through which the
utterances of others speak.
This view of the author has been aptly described by Simon (1969) in his
novel La Bataille de Pharsale by the work of two men on an abandoned
combine. The machine that once functioned as a whole becomes a con-
glomeration of fragments as the two workmen dismantle the combine and
carry away some of the pieces. These pieces are “taken away to replace
ones in another machine or, simply, to be used as they were, that is, as
iron bars, planks, or rods for fences” (pp. 149-150). Thus, the fate of the
combine and the activity of the workmen provides a metaphor for the
fragmentation of one textual sign-system and the reintegration of the
fragments into others by the author. There is the deconstruction of a pre-
vious text and the reconstruction of another that combines preexisting
others. What is presented is an infinitely renewable and renewing process
of the author at work.
From this perspective, the author as a solitary actor and voice who orig-
inates and gives existence to the text borders on myth. Although the his-
torical/mythological author is no doubt responsible for the lions share of
the work, composing the text is a collaborative production, no matter how
disproportionate the shares. The unified self that is commonly assumed
to exist “behind” or “within” the text gives way when the author is viewed
as a text himself, indexically collaborating with the textual utterances of
others. This joint aspect of textual production foregrounds a revised
vision of the author: the author as plural. As Barthes (1974) explained,
“this ‘I’ which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other
texts” (p. 10). By acknowledging the unacknowledged collaborations with
other authors, the limited attribution and univocal vision of the tradi-
tional authorial self becomes self evident. In its place, a multiauthor
vision resurrects the author as a dialogic “self,” and emphasizes the col-
lective author(ity) of all those whose voices inscribe the composition.
The author, then, re-sounds with the collective nature uttered in the
writing act. The uniquely original, ensconced, exclusive work of a single
author is in Barthesian (1977) terms, put to death. Multiple conscious-
nesses reflect the dispersed and distributed nature of the author. And the
8. 356 D. K. HARTMAN
voices of these other consciousnesses speak as the author(s) of the text.
The status of the intertextual author proclaims that while he is but one
person, he is a plurality of others’ social voices that dialogically speak
through him. The author is a social derivation, and comes to exist because
of who we are.
The Context: The Past in Future Tense
The context has been rendered by intertextually-informed research in
two ways. Both renderings view the context—which literally means
“accompanying text”—as the situational/positional space in which a text
resides in relation to other texts, and the referencing and indexing forces
that impinge on these textual relations. But beyond this commonality,
intertextuality has been used to articulate two spheres of the context. The
narrower, more traditional, sphere is that which is immediate, present,
and located “inside” the linguistic textual environment (i.e., the text(s) in
front of the reader); whereas the broader, more inclusive, sphere extends
to all that is remote, nonpresent, and found “outside” the linguistic tex-
tual environment.
The Context as an Endogenous Sphere
The endogenous rendering of the context emphasizes a linguistic per-
spective on the context. Employing the narrower linguistic conception of
text discussed previously, the semantic, structural, and syntactic positions
of each word, idea, event, and character in the text(s) make up the con-
text. The endogenous context resembles the notion of a context(ual) clue,
where words and phrases that surround a written language unit and influ-
ence its meaning are of concern (e.g., Anderson & Nagy, 1991). By trac-
ing out the “location” of texts that readers referenced as they read across
five passage, Hartman (1991a) found two types of linguistic textual envi-
ronments. The primary endogenous context included those connected
textual resources that were traceable to the text they were currently read-
ing (i.e., within the text connections), and the secondary endogenous con-
text referred to those connected textual resources that were traceable to
one of the texts they had read previously in the study (i.e., between the
texts’ connections). The view of context that emerged was one where lin-
guistic textual resources functioned referentially in an environment where
potential intertextual links existed within and across passages.
From this viewpoint, the context is not merely an aggregate of undiffer-
entiated linguistic signs on a page. It is a syntagmatic environment where
9. Deconstructing the Reader, the Text, and the Context 357
the presence of a word, phrase, idea, event, or character is defined against
the other words, phrases, ideas, events, and characters that surround it:
both intra- and intertextually. It is fraught with potential relations between
one element of a text to another, where the referenced textual resources
serve to inform the other in some way (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). The
context, in this sense, is a complex of shifting linguistic textual relations
that can be indexed by their semantic and spatial/temporal relation to
each other. In all, it is a space where anaphoric and cataphoric relations
are realized.
The Context as an Exogenous Sphere
The exogenous rendering of context is much more inclusive and empha-
sizes a sociolinguistic and sociocultural perspective on the context.
Employing the more inclusive conception of text discussed previously, the
social, cultural, historical, and ideological dimensions of the context are
conceived of as being texts also. In this sense, the context includes that
which is constructed during any local social interaction as well as the his-
torically and culturally inscribed textual forces that impinge on any par-
ticular reading event. For example, Bloome and Egan-Robertson (1992),
Rowe (1987), and Short (1986) located intertextuality in the material cir-
cumstances of young children’s social interactions as they engaged in the
discussion of texts that they had read and written. By identifying the
form, function, strategy, genre, and type of event in text-appropriating
situations, the view of the context that emerged was one where social, cul-
tural, and historical ideologies strongly influenced “what texts may be
juxtaposed and how those texts might be juxtaposed, by whom, where,
and when” (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1992, p. 25).
From this vantage point, the context represents those immediate and
distant cultural rules that have evolved historically to signal which textual
resources can be included (and which are to be excluded), and how those
textual resources can be connected (or why they cannot be connected) in a
particular event. Special attention is given to the construction of those
(con)texts that preceded the event that is currently unfolding, and to the
consequences of the event on subsequent events in similar or different
(con)texts. Of particular importance, is how “contextualization cues”
(Gumperz, 1982) from previous events signal appropriate social interac-
tions and meaning making strategies in the current and anticipated
events. In this sense, the context becomes the episteme—the historically
evolved and socially determined governing ideas, relations, and practices-
for appropriating, articulating, and transposing texts (Foucault, 1972).
The meaning that the reader constructs from the text, then, is never a
10. 358 D. K. HARTMAN
direct transference or copy from the author or the text, but is mediated,
transformed by some set of implied or explicit rules for establishing the
horizon, or interpretive possibilities, for the text (Todorov, 1984).
This view of the context implies that a textual utterance does not
derive its meaning from itself, but from the interplay of other utterances
that went before and will come after it. It is in the company of other texts
(i.e., the context), and in the conversation with other texts, that any tex-
tual encounter has the potential to be proposed, recognized, or acknowl-
edged, and have social consequences (Bloome & Egan-Robertson, 1992).
In short, these conditions necessitate the consummation of any textual
intercourse.
Taken together, both the endogenous and exogenous views suggested by
these studies depict the context as spheres that shape the interplay of
texts in specific environments, and are themselves charged with politically
and ideologically dialogic forces. The view of the context that emerges—
like that of the text—is that of a cento, a space where the joining of textual
utterances in the patchwork intertext arises out of a continuing sociocul-
tural dialogue of discourses, motifs, and images. The difference being
that the endogenous sphere locates the dialogue in the referential and
cohesive features of the text, whereas the exogenous sphere locates it in
the social and historical negotiations among people. Yet in both cases, the
context resembles a collage/montage of others’ voices. The space in which
a text resides impinges upon and is impinged upon by others. And in this
way, the past speaks through the present to that which will become future.
REFLECTING/PROSPECTING
If you have followed me to this point, you are probably ready for some
discussion of what this intertextual view of reading might mean. What it
means, of course, depends on who appropriates what, when, and where.
My reflections on what intertextuality and reading mean together, follow.
In turn, they may speak to those of your own.
The text, the reader, the author, and the context
How then does intertextuality, as rendered in the previous pages,
transfigure our conception(s) of the text, the reader, the author, and the
context? In general, I think it foregrounds a very different view of read-
ing. And this difference is really a revision of the common conceptual
units we have come to use in our work: the text, the reader, the author,
and the context. Taken together, these differences form a shift away from
11. Deconstructing the Reader, the Text, and the Context 359
the everyday world of reading reflected in our language, toward the inter-
textual one presented in the preceding pages. What follows are four over-
lapping themes made visible by these shifting visions.
Beginnings and Endings
An enigma presented by this intertextual view of reading is in knowing
where the text, the reader, the author, and the context begin and end. To
be sure, there is a place in the text to which one can point—the first or last
letter, word, sentence, or paragraph—and identify as the beginning or
end; there is a point where the reader’s eyes first fixate on the text and
progressively saccade and regress their way across the page (or monitor)
until there is no more print or time; there is a point when the author’s
pen first presses against the page (or fingers on the keyboard) and etches
its way until the ideas or pages are no more; and there are spatial/tempo-
ral dimensions around a particular word in a page that provide the lin-
guistic context for its meaning, and the classroom environment that
provides the social context for meaning making. But such notions of
beginnings and endings are cultural constructions which have evolved
from pragmatic, methodological, or other reasons. Reading need not be
confined to the boundaries of a temporal activity or physical entity. The
dialogic nature of reading depicted in the previous pages undermines
these commonsensical notions of beginning and ending (Said, 1985).
How can we think about beginnings and endings? The insights made
possible by intertextuality extend our vision in both directions as well as
raise additional questions. For example, if the text at hand is composed of
other texts that establish relationships of continuity or discontinuity with
previous texts in anticipation. Of potential texts, how far back or forward
must one go to locate the primal or terminal limits of the text? If the
reader and the author are both agents through whom the textual utter-
ances of others speak, how far back does one need to trace the utterances
to identify their genealogical origin, or anticipate their potential influ-
ence to know when reading and writing end? And if the context is a space
where referencing and indexing forces impinge on the relations among
texts, how far back or forward do the forces need to be traced to say that
the impact of the context has been accounted for, controlled, or
explained? While answers to these questions are beyond the scope of this
article, they illustrate the bounded view of beginning and ending implied
by our common notions of reading.
To think, then, that reading begins and ends at this point or that point
is to miss the point of its dialogic nature and structure: Any reading event
is intricately bound to a larger dialogue that has preceded and will follow
12. 360 D. K. HARTMAN
it. Although isolating it for close analysis may be revealing, it is also dis-
torting. Just as a camera lens can magnify an object at the expense of the
background (which becomes a blur), so can our conception(s) of the text,
the reader, the author, and the context become distorted by too narrow a
view of where each begins and ends. It provides only a limited frame on a
larger “reality.” Intertextuality reframes these points beyond our existen-
tial vision.
Classical and Quantum
Intertextuality provides still another rendition of reading that violates
our sensibilities of ordinary experience. Using the language of physics,
intertextuality foregrounds a contrast between a classical and quantum view
of reading. From a classical (or Newtonian) perspective, the objects of our
senses-the text, the reader, the author, and the context-comport them-
selves according to common-sense notions like “things can only be in one
place at a time” and “things have a stability to them” (determinate). On
the surface, our sensory input leads us to believe that the text, the reader,
the author, and the context are exclusive categories/entities, can only be in
one place at a time, and are well circumscribed. For example, there is a
boundary that demarcates the subject (e.g., the reader) from the object
(e.g., the text), and vice versa. By relying on our sensory input, the text,
the reader, the author, and the context signify permanent, constant, and
fixed entities that interact-that is, act on each other.
But from a quantum perspective, the surface characteristics of the
objects we sense mask un-commonsense notions like things can be in two
places at once (or nowhere at all) and things are highly unstable (indeter-
minate). Beneath the appearance of things, the text, the reader, the
author, and the context are caught up in the give and take of discursive
practices that render them indistinguishable. For example, the reader
looks more like the author at times, composing and revising an “inner
text,” and the text becomes a sphere where historically and culturally
inscribed forces of antecedent contexts impinge on the reader. Where one
begins and the other ends is a matter of perspective. By advancing a view
that looks beyond sensory input, the text, the reader, the author, and the
context signify changeable, variable, and unfixed constitutions that inter-
animate—that is, co-constitute the life of each other.
The effect of these two views is to suggest that reading has complemen-
tary aspects (Bohr, 1934). While the classical view illuminates the elements
of reading as determinate, the complementary quantum view reveals
them as indeterminate. Taking one perspective precludes the possibility
of simultaneously taking its complementary perspective. For example, the
13. Deconstructing the Reader, the Text, and the Context 361
determinate classical view of reading represented through our language
has for a considerable time obstructed our seeing its indeterminate quan-
tum complement. But taken together, the complementary views provide a
multiperspectival vision of reading.
Singular and Plural
There is still another rendering of reading that seems impossible in
our macroscopic, everyday world, but is possible in the realm of intertex-
tuality: The text, the reader, the author, and the context are plural in
nature. That is, they are constituted by a plurality of textual sources,
voices, and utterances, rather than a singular origin, essence, center, or
presence (Derrida, 1978). The individual text is transformed into a virtual
text; the univocal reader and author into polyphonic agents; and the
monologic context into a dialogic sphere. In short, the notion of a sole
centering voice is (dis)integrated.
Because our conception of the text, the reader, the author, and the con-
text have been largely based on univocal, rather than multivocal, render-
ings of the subjects and objects of reading, a certain degree of distortion
has interfered with our vision of each. This distortion in our “received”
observations of reading has led us to perceive a text as single-handedly
written and comprehended in a context—that is, to have a physical single-
ness. But the paradox of an intertextual perspective is that between and
beyond these observations, the artifact, actors, and circumstances of read-
ing manifest preexisting others. They reflect a dispersed and distributed
constitution, multiple consciousness, a social derivation, and a dialogic
origin. In other words, through the text, the reader, the author, and the
context the virtual presence of other texts are present—named and other-
wise.
This suggests a duality to reading; a singular-plural duality where the
text, the reader, the author, and the context are each one and more than
one. As a result, a more appropriate way to indicate the simultaneous sin-
gular and plural nature of each is to think of them as the text(s), the
reader(s), the author(s), and the context(s).
Cento and Centoist
The governing metaphor voiced in the previous discussion of the text,
the reader, the author, and the context is that of a cento and centoist.
Almost out of circulation, the term cento in its original Latin form meant a
garment of patchwork. Applied to literature, it came to mean a work that
14. 362 D. K. HARTMAN
was a literary patchwork, made up of bits and pieces from other authors’
writing (Holman & Harmon, 1992).2 Now, animated by intertextuality,
cento is extended to mean a space where various discourses, motifs, and
images are situated together into a patchwork intertext. It is a collage/
montage of other’s textual voices, voices that come secondhand and
already stylized. The one who assembles the cento, the centoist, works
with the materials at hand, but does more than the verbatim stitching of
the source patches that an amanuensis would do; he or she reappropriates
and rearticulates the textual resources with an ideological and political
charge of his or her own. In this way, a difference is produced in the inter-
play between the “always already” (i.e., the already familiar, the custom-
ary) and the “disseminated” (i.e., the novel, the new; Derrida, 1981). And
what emerges is the cobbled composition of the text, the reader, the
author, and the context.
Intertextuality
The effects of appropriating intertextuality to understand the text, the
reader, the author, and the context have also had a transactional effect on
the idea of intertextuality itself. Put another way, in the process of being
appropriated, intertextuality itself has been rearticulated. As depicted in
the previous section on reading-related research, intertextuality is a multi-
faceted notion. It is not an idea that remains pure, constant, and idealized
across time and context, but is mutable and reflects the context in which it
appropriated. It can manifest itself differently depending on the condi-
tions of its appropriation.
My previous discussion of intertextual theory and research illustrates
this quite well. For example, when intertextuality is located in the material
circumstances of the text, it reflects the perspectives of literary theory and
semiotics; when intertextuality is located in the material circumstances of
the reader and author, it reflects the perspectives of cognitive psychology;
and when intertextuality is located in the material circumstances of the
context, it reflects the perspectives of linguistics and sociolinguistics. The
sociohistorical context of each study mediates the rendition of intertextu-
ality that is invoked. And although there are commonalities among the
views of intertextuality employed by each study, the material conditions of
each provides a differing epistemic frame on intertextuality.
Historically, intertextuality has evolved most visibly within the context
of literary theory, namely postmodernism and deconstruction—ideas that
reflect a commitment to multivocal spaces. As a result, intertextuality rep-
resents a discourse of dispersion, not unity. It not only recognizes the con-
15. Deconstructing the Reader, the Text, and the Context 363
textual influences of one text on another, but is itself affected by
contextual factors. Just as there is a certain amount of indeterminacy in a
text’s meaning and it remains “open” to new amplification and interpre-
tation based on the contextual web in which it resides (Barthes, 1986), 50
is intertextuality in literacy research. It is an idea replete with indetermi-
nacy and openness, depending on the signifying system in which it
resides.
The bottom line in all this is that the ways in which intertextuality is
appropriated and reflected in the reading-related research discussed pre-
viously reveal the contexts in which each study and all of them reside. One
of the 8 readers in the study I conducted provided a metaphor that cap-
tures this point (Hartman, 1991a, 1991b). During the debriefing inter-
view I asked the readers: “If you had to choose a metaphor to describe the
way you thought while reading the passages, what would that metaphor
be?” One young man said:
It’s like a whole sphere of jewels or a circle of jewels, and each jewel reflects
every other jewel and every other jewel is reflected in it.
When I asked him to tell me more about his metaphor he said:
It’s about the effects of events on other events. It’s a metaphor for the rever-
berations of lives on each other. Everything reflects everything else. (1991b,
p.5)
I think his metaphor parallels in a rather remarkable way the “influ-
ence” and “reflection” of our own histories on our own and each others
work. We mirror the “circle” of texts in which we reside. Thus, intertextu-
ality is a prismatic construct, refracted by the sign system and history
within which it works. To focus on anyone or anything in the circle is
simultaneously revealing and distorting.
As I see it, the intertextual perspectives represented in reading-related
research do not represent a well balanced and well orchestrated examina-
tion of intertextuality at work in the text, the reader, the author, and the
context, and never will. Intertextuality is not a melodious, rhythmic voice
at work. Instead, it is a discordant, nonrhythmic voice. To use some of
Charles Suhor’s (1991) words, intertextuality is not like the symmetry of a
Bach fugue, but more like the improvisational lines of a jazz musician
(p. 21).
To expect and demand that absolute uniformity, order, and constancy
be the case with the appropriation of intertextuality in reading-related
research is to create a false intertextual mythology. If the underlying
structure of cacophony is more cacophony, then the closer we look at
reading through the intertextual metaphor, the more schismatic, diverse,
16. 364 D. K. HARTMAN
ill-structured, and “multilectic” our research, practice, and theory will
become. Intertextuality resonates with uncertainty and suspended dis-
course turned back on itself. It is composed of overlapping and diverging
narratives and mixed metaphors. It simultaneously runs with and against
the grain. It provides the means for complementary visions of both the
activity we call reading and itself.
Deconstructing Reading
As I stated at the outset, the thrust of this article was to articulate the
intellectual and material consequences of constituting the text, the reader,
the author, and the context in light of postmodern theories of intertextu-
ality and intertextually-informed research. In the process of doing this I
have necessarily noted the difference between how we have traditionally
rendered these common conceptual units and how they have been reap-
propriated by a number of reading-related studies with explicit theoreti-
cal grounding in intertextuality. The process of this rerendering has
served, in a modest way, to deconstruct reading—to give a vano lectia (i.e.,
“variant reading”) of reading itself.
To provide a variant reading of reading is to imply that we have been
misreading it all along. And this is precisely my point. In the act of com-
prehending, something is excluded. In the way we have come to under-
stand the text, the reader, the author, and the context, we have excluded
those insights made possible by an intertextual reading of each. This is
precisely de Man’s (1983) point in Blindness and Insight: Constructing one
insight involves not seeing other possibilities. Blindness becomes, then, a
practical effect of insight. For me to then suggest that the “real” reading
of reading is that portrayed by intertextuality is for me to miss my own
(and de Man’s) point: that intertextuality is a misreading also. Those
insights made possible by it exclude still other possible insights.
But short of backing myself into an infinite regress and deconstruct-
ing reading into nothingness, using intertextuality as a “strategic device”
to deconstruct reading does serve a useful purpose. It makes us aware
that we have not come to understand reading as it is—where an author
(in a context), writes a text, that is read by a reader (usually in a differ-
ent context). Rather, we have come to see it as it has been constructed by
the language practices of our culture(s) and what they have brought
together for us. Thus, reading as we have come to know it is a “received
version” of the text, the reader, the author, and the context, underwrit-
ten and prefabricated by sociocultural forces that operate on us. And it
17. Deconstructing the Reader, the Text, and the Context 365
takes the insights made possible by intertextual renderings of reading to
register our blindness.
FINAL REMARKS
The utility of intertextuality, then, may prove to be that it will prompt
those of us in the reading research community to struggle with the
intended and unintended meanings framed by the concepts of the text,
the reader, the author, and the context. If it does this, then we will have
begun to co-constitute a future different from the past and present. If it
does not, then we will perpetuate the past and present into our future
work. The former is to envision reading as living reanimated by scholarly
inventiveness and insight; while the latter is to see reading as dead-
strapped to the scholarly autopsy table. Intertextuality proclaims there
are no eternal visions of reading, only visions contained in sociocultural
frames.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The research reported in this article was supported, in part, by a grant
from the Faculty Research Fund of the School of Education at the Univer-
sity of Pittsburgh. I am grateful to my colleagues Rick Donato and
Michael Helfand at the University of Pittsburgh and Jeanette Allison
Hartman at Indiana University of Pennsylvania for the careful readings
and feedback they provided on earlier versions of this article.
NOTES
1. For the sake of clarity and consistency, I will generally use “the text” to
refer to the physical, linguistic object, and “text,” “a text,” “textual
resource,” and “textual utterance” to refer to the more inclusive concep-
tion of a linguistic or nonlinguistic sign that communicates meaning.
2. A related term, pastiche (the French word for parody), is often referred to as
synonymous with cento. It implies that a particular literary, artistic, or
musical work is made up of phrases, episodes, shapes, patterns, forms,
melodies, and chords borrowed from the works of others. While the origin
of cento is rooted in garment making and quilting, the etymology of pas-
tiche (which comes from the Italian for “pie of meat or macaroni”) is
located in the Italian pastry chef ’s habit of combining various ingredients
so that a whole new, distinct taste is produced in a new-fashioned pie, tart,
eclair, puff, cake, or bread (Myers & Simms, 1989).
18. 366 D. K. HARTMAN
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