Emergent intertextual networks: Intertextuality in storytelling about intimate partner violence and the revisioning of social norms

Abstract

Intertextuality is the process of reiterating prior text or talk in a new context, taking up, forwarding, imitating, and updating prior discourse and its meaning potential in a new interaction. This process of repetition extends beyond verbatim repetition to includes social and institutional discourses. In this paper, I propose that intertextuality weaves together the actually produced text and talk of individual speakers with larger social and institutional discourses such that what emerges from any interaction is an intertextual network. An intertextual network is a complex interweaving of multiple strands of discourse developed in different discursive contexts and locations connected in interaction and coalescing in an emergent intertextual formation. The site of intertextual networks analyzed in this paper is narrative, in particular, narratives about intimate partner violence (IPV) told by victim/survivors of IPV. I assert, intertextual networks don’t exist prior to interaction. Instead, intertextual networks emerge from interaction, much like narrative and identity do. I analyze narratives, because they are explicitly intertextual in that narrative purposefully and nearly compulsively reiterates and reframes prior events and utterances. In the process of telling stories, intertextual networks emerge. Seen as emergent, intertextual networks cannot be understood to be neutral. Instead, intertextual networks are infiltrated and coopted by social and institutional discourses, which become part of the narrative intertextual network, and which do the work of the social and institutional discourses that make up part of the network. Related to narratives and their many layers of complexity, intertextual networks have the potential to include gaps and misalignments, places where personal, social, and institutional discourses don’t neatly align. In the context of IPV, victim/survivors use such gaps to reframe their experiences and revise the social and institutional discourses that are woven into the intertextual networks that impact them.