LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 13:9 September 2013
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         S. M. Ravichandran, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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Intertextuality in Advertising

Debashish Panigrahi, M.Phil.
Prof. N. D. R. Chandra, M.Phil., Ph.D.

Abstract

The visual culture has radically changed our conception of the world and has widened the space for creativity. Media text like advertising has contributed a lot to the refraction, legitimisation and transformation of social practices. In such process it has become intertextual to varied texts drawn from different fields. The use of intertextuality in advertising is a conscious strategy that keeps viewers busy in the interpretive activity and thus makes ad texts attractive and memorable. In an advertising text intertextuality has numerous possibilities for existence and complicating the textual fabric. The digital technique further complicates the matter when it confuses the understanding of indexical and iconic signs. This present article explores the concept of intertextuality, its varieties and its strategic use in multimodal texts of advertising. It also assesses how the semiotic background of a text is modified to serve the purpose of a new context.

What is Intertextuality

Intertextuality has been a prominent issue in the critical analysis of texts. But its various interpretations have made it a complex term. Etymologically the word intertextuality means a text among texts. For structuralists a text has always been considered a closed structure, a compact whole, enjoying sovereignty having distinct boundaries. Interpretation for such a structure is stable and considered to be author-centred. The question that arises in such a context is if creation of the structure is not original on the part of the author and interpretive activity lies in the reader how can the text be a closed structure and self-contained. Roland Barthes has already proclaimed this when he spoke out thus: We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author- God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. ... the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at least to know that the inner 'thing' he thinks to 'translate' is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely; ... (1977:146)

The system one utilises to express himself is inherited and with it is inherited its semiotic background. Apart from that every discourse is a continuation of its former and so dependent on it. When the same discourse flows through various texts, involuntarily it will make all the texts dependent on each other and so intertexts. Michel Foucault also states that: The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network... The book is not simply the object that one holds in one’s hands... Its unity is variable and relative. (1974:23)

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Debashish Panigrahi, M.Phil.
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Zisaji Presidency College
Kiphire 798611
Nagaland
India
debashish_bls@yahoo.com

Prof. N.D.R. Chandra, M.Phil., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nagaland University, Kohima Campus
Kohima 797001
Nagaland
India
chandra592001@yahoo.com

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