IB Diploma English A: Literature SL · Intertextuality: Connecting Texts
Mini-Lesson
Intertextuality: Connecting Texts
Intertextuality: connecting texts is the third area of exploration. Its question is how texts speak to one another — through comparison, shared genre conventions, literary traditions, allusion and rewriting. No text stands alone.
Foregrounds the concepts of creativity, transformation, representation and perspective.
Builds the comparative skill assessed in Paper 2 and in the two-work Individual Oral.
Across your nine works, you learn to read each one in dialogue with others.
Work through each screen, answer the questions as you go and collect ⭐ stars. Any named work appears only as a swappable, illustrative example — the IB reading lists are chosen by your school and rotate, so this lesson teaches the skills and ideas, never a set text. Press Start when you are ready.
First principles
What intertextuality means
Intertextuality — a term coined by the theorist Julia Kristeva in the 1960s — names the web of relationships every text has with other texts. A work is woven from, and answers to, what came before it.
Structural links: shared genre, form and convention.
Cultural links: participation in a tradition or movement.
The point for you: recognising a text’s conversations lets you read its choices as deliberate positions — to affirm, revise or reject what it inherits.
Quick check
Define it
?Intertextuality is best defined as:
Allusion
Allusion and echo
Allusion is a brief, indirect reference to another text, figure or event, relying on the reader to catch it.
An allusion imports meaning compactly: one phrase can summon a whole story.
It can dignify (aligning a modern scene with an epic) or deflate (ironic contrast between the grand source and the shabby present).
Illustrative only: a novel might name a doomed lover after a figure from myth, so the reader feels the ending arriving before it does. Use whatever allusions appear in your actual works — and never invent a source you cannot verify.
Quick check
Reading an allusion
?A modern novel gives its shabby, defeated protagonist the name of a great epic hero. The most likely effect of this allusion is:
Genre
Genre as a contract
Genre is a set of conventions and the expectations they create. Texts fulfil, subvert or transform them.
Every genre carries a contract: a tragedy promises a fall, a detective story promises a solution.
The interesting question is always what a text does with the shape it inherits — satisfying the contract, breaking it, or turning it to new ends.
Subversion signifies: a detective story that withholds its solution is making an argument about knowledge itself. The broken convention is the meaning.
Quick check
A broken convention
?A detective story sets up a murder and a brilliant investigator, then ends with the crime unsolved and unsolvable. The broken genre convention most likely signifies:
Sort it
Sort the intertextual move
Tap a card, then the category it belongs to.
📚 Allusion & echo
🏷️ Genre & convention
⚖️ Comparison method
Comparison
Comparison is a discipline
Comparison is a discipline, not a list. Strong comparison runs through a shared frame.
Choose a common axis: a theme, a technique, a form, a global issue.
Track both convergence (where the works agree or resemble) and divergence (where they part).
Integrate: each point holds both texts at once, rather than describing one and then the other.
Weak comparison is two mini-essays side by side. Strong comparison is a single argument that needs both texts to make its point.
Quick check
Real comparison
?Which is genuine comparison rather than two descriptions side by side?
Tradition
Traditions and the canon
Texts belong to traditions — lineages of form and theme that stretch across time and place.
A movement (Romanticism, Modernism, magical realism, and so on) supplies shared assumptions and techniques.
The canon is the contested set of works a culture treats as central — and asking who decides is itself a literary question.
Writers position themselves within or against a tradition; both are meaningful choices.
Quick check
Parody or pastiche?
?A text imitates and assembles the style of an earlier writer in evident homage, without mockery. This is:
Match it
Match the term to its definition
Tap an item on the left, then its pair on the right.
The term
What it means
Transformation
Transformation and rewriting
One of the most powerful intertextual moves is transformation — rewriting an earlier work.
Adaptation — carrying a story into a new form, medium, time or place.
Writing back — retelling a canonical text from the silenced figure’s point of view, changing whose story it is.
Parody mocks a source; pastiche imitates or assembles a style, often in homage.
Transformation as a concept: a rewriting is a reading. What a later text changes about an earlier one is an argument about the original.
Quick check
Writing back
?A novel retells a canonical story from the point of view of a character the original silenced. This transformation is powerful because:
Concepts
Creativity and representation
Two concepts anchor this area.
Creativity — originality is rarely creation from nothing; it is inventive recombination of what already exists.
Representation — comparing texts exposes how differently the same subject can be constructed, denaturalising each version.
Reading intertextually trains a habit of mind: never ask only what does this text say? but what is it answering, echoing, or refusing?
Quick check
Strong comparative thesis
?Which is the strongest comparative thesis for Paper 2?
Assessment
Where this area is assessed
Where this area is assessed.
Paper 2 is entirely comparative — one essay on two works, answering a general question. This area is its foundation.
The Individual Oral studies a global issue across two works, requiring you to connect them.
Your coursework and the learner portfolio are where comparative frames are rehearsed.
Discipline: a comparison must make a point that neither text alone could make. That is the test of genuine connection.
Recap
The big ideas to take away
The area: how texts connect — comparison, genre, tradition, allusion, rewriting (Kristeva’s intertextuality)
Allusion imports meaning compactly and can dignify or deflate — never invent a source
Genre is a contract texts fulfil, subvert or transform; a broken convention signifies
Comparison runs one argument through a shared frame — not two essays side by side
Transformation: adaptation and writing back — a rewriting is a reading