Intertextuality as an interpretative method in

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Intertextuality as an interpretative method in qualitative research Ilana Elkad-Lehman and Hava Greensfeld

Levinsky College of Education and Michlalah Jerusalem College

This article seeks to present and exemplify to the qualitative researcher the term intertextuality as a concept and as a method that may offer a framework for the analysis and interpretation of short narratives or life stories. Intertextuality as a central concept in the study of culture is particularly suitable for qualitative research, central to which is the subjectivity of the narrator, the story, and the listener/researcher, as well as the relative and indeterminate dimension of knowledge. However, using intertextuality as an interpretative method in various types of texts mandates the researcher’s awareness and abilities in areas that this article discusses. In light of the methodological objective of the article, we selected narratives that represent different types of intertextual linkage on different interpretative levels, on different levels of complexity, and on different levels of ideas. The intertextual reading to be demonstrated detects the combination of various types of cultural components in the narrative as a means of representing the world of the narrator; it takes into account a possible macro context in the narrator’s story, its style and structure, the narrator’s implicit personal interpretation, and the researcher-interpreter’s option to reread the narrative. Keywords: analysis and interpretation of life stories, intertextual interpretation, literature teacher educators

Introduction Intertextuality can offer a conceptual and methodological framework for constructing an interpretation in qualitative research. The aim of this article is to offer a theoretical outline to those involved in qualitative research, which can be applied to the reading and interpreting of narratives, life-stories and other texts, Requests for further information should be directed to: Ilana Elkad-Lehman,Levinsky College of Education, 15 Shoshana Persitz Street, Tel-Aviv, Israel 69378, Email: [email protected] Narrative Inquiry 21:2 (2011), 258–275. doi 10.1075/ni.21.2.05elk issn 1387–6740 / e-issn 1569–9935 © John Benjamins Publishing Company

Intertextuality as an interpretative method in qualitative research 259

and to exemplify such a reading. Our hypothesis is that intertextuality as a cultural concept is especially suited to research that stresses the subjective, relative and inconstant elements of knowledge. Intertextual reading can thus contribute perception and depth to the understanding of texts and aid in the hermeneutic process of qualitative research. Despite the importance of culture and context in the process of analyzing and constructing an interpretation of narratives, minimal attention has been paid to a central concept that constitutes a way of thought and a method of analyzing literature and cultural phenomena in both modern and post modern research — intertextuality. An example of the use of intertextuality, is the situation in which interviewers asked interviewees to construct their life-story as if it were a biography (Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, & Zilber, 1998); the question itself encouraged interviewees to adopt architextual (Genette, 1997) familiar literary patterns, such as the confessional story, picaresque novel, bildungsroman, travelogue, or fairy tale. Every storyteller consciously or subconsciously organizes the material within the framework of an existing tradition of structure and style, following the story patterns he or she has heard. The storyteller adopts preset literary prototypes (such as ‘once upon a time in a far-away country …’ or ‘There’s a proverb…’) from his cultural world; she will use fixed patterns, literary genres, forms of intertextuality such as parody, and stylistic blue-prints. The narrator fashions the characters in the narrative according to cultural conventions (protagonist and antagonist), and will portray them accordingly. Archetypes and mythical figures may be integrated into the narrative as well; it becomes a dialogue of sorts with stories heard in the past. Qualitative research has examined intertextuality from restricted points of view, with respect to reading and writing, (e.g., Sipe, 2001; Pantaleo, 2006; Callahan, 2002), reading books and documents (Bloome, & Carter, 2001), representing data in qualitative research (for example: Bagely & Cancienne, 2001) and as a way of writing qualitative research (Watson, 2006). Intertextual reading is rich in potential, and though the term is widely used, we are not aware of any studies using intertextuality as a methodological concept to aid the qualitative researcher in analyzing and interpreting narratives or other texts. This is the methodology we suggest in the present article.

Intertextuality and hermeneutics Hermeneutics, the art of interpretation, is central to twentieth century philosophy. Its primary representatives are Martin Heidegger, his pupil Hans-Georg Gadamer and the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce. The manifold aspects of intertextuality are vital to hermeneutics. Hermeneutics was initially used in a theological

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260 Ilana Elkad-Lehman and Hava Greensfeld

context: the concealed will of God, encoded in the words of the Holy Scriptures, could be revealed and understood by means of hermeneutics. In later days it became a discipline applied to secular literature as well (Levi, 1986). Heidegger maintained that the desire to interpret the world is an intrinsic human characteristic. Insights gained through the hermeneutic process express personal understandings of human existence. Thus, hermeneutics is not an esoteric occupation with a variety of texts, but rather an important and continual activity common to all human beings. It is our very inability to state the “right interpretation” with any certainty, owing to the “hermeneutic circle” that invites us to enter that circle, to interpret while staying in touch with the universe. Gadamer (1989) questioned whether understanding can indeed be achieved at all; in his view all understanding is interpretation. He argued that perception is a process that exists by means of lingual utterances, a process of fusion of horizons in a two-way interaction between reader and texts, between present and past cultures. The thought of Heidegger and Gadamer represents a turning point in the reader’s approach to written texts (Levi, 1986). The essence of this modification is in the shift from the principle of mimesis to the principle of semiotics (Peirce, 1965). In other words, a literary work is no longer seen as an imitation of reality, with the reader’s eye focused on the correspondence between the text and reflections of the world or the author; now, the reader concentrates on the ways in which he himself shapes the meaning of the composition. According to Peirce we try to invest meaning in every stimulus we receive from our surroundings; we “construct” the significance of situations according to their context, previous knowledge at our disposal, or elements from our personal and cultural world. All these enable us to provide new and different meanings to known situations or texts, in a continual, ongoing process according to changing stimuli. Defining the concept “intertextuality” is no simple matter. Researchers coming from diverse paradigms have constructed their own discourse over the term using different “languages” and varied denotations. In addition, the concept has been modified over time (Allen, 2000). We will first consider the etymology of the word and then survey some central implications of the concept, concentrating on its extensive cultural connotations in general terms alone. The word “text” originates in the Indo-Iranian word “tec,” meaning handicraft, especially weaving. In Latin, the word “textus” means a woven fabric or its consistency, its texture. The verb “texere” means to weave, to combine into a composition, hence the word “textile,” Latin for cloth or tissue. “Intertext” is also Latin, meaning to intertwine threads and form a piece of cloth. In modern semiotics, “intertext” refers to a dialogic interaction between at least two systems of “signs”. Its main use has been in the research of literature and cultures. The Russian philosopher, literature and art critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), is considered the father of modern



intertextuality. Beginning in the 1930’s, Bakhtin called for replacing the Galilean perspective — the uniform way of seeing things in which human beings are the center of the universe — with a perspective that leaves room for the “undefined,” and for heteroglossia, the simultaneous existence of diverging voices (Bakhtin 1981). Bakhtin argued that every linguistic utterance is the unique expression of a social interaction within a specific social context, conditioned by past utterances and planned in advance by the speaker. The speaker takes into account what has been said in the past, considers how his words will be received by the listener, and expresses himself accordingly (Bakhtin 1981). In his view, all speech is dialogue. Dialogues exist between voices representing social classes, ideologies, eras and genres. The interrelation between utterances lends a unique “presence” and “voice” to each speaker. Every story thus expresses an individual voice and shows association with a specific social, national, ideological or religious group. Julia Kristeva built on Bakhtin’s theoretical concepts about linguistics and literature. In 1966 she coined the phrase “intertextualité” and contended that intertextuality is a comprehensive semiotic cultural phenomenon. Faced with any “text,” be it oral, written, painted, performed, or any cultural phenomenon such as the setting of a table or a ceremony, our experience is influenced by previous encounters with it, encounters that have imprinted our consciousness with a related “text.” Every word or cultural presentation conceals an endless potential of associations; the interrelation between “texts” is thus unavoidable and unclosed. Reading creates a three-dimensional space between the addresser (the narrator of a story or author of a written text), the addressee (the listener or reader) and the text. In this space, the linear succession of words creates an endless mosaic of connections (Kristeva, 1968, 1980). As one reads or listens, one’s previous experiences with texts are brought to life. The texts being encountered are associated with others known from the past, making one’s reading “intertextual.” The reader’s personal experience, knowledge, world, ideological and political practices are all texts creating a network. Reading is a hermeneutic process based on this network. Hermeneutics originates in the dynamic movement between texts. It does not look for consolidation or stability; on the contrary, hermeneutics seeks the fluctuation between meanings that the interpreter constructs. Horizontal axis (subject addressee) and vertical axis (text-content) coincide, bringing to light an important fact: each word (text) is an intersection of words (texts) where at least one other word (text) can be read. In Bakhtin’s work, these two axes, which he calls dialogue and ambivalence, are not clearly distinguished. Yet, what appears as a lack of rigour is in fact an insight first introduced into literary theory by Bakhtin: any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double. (Kristeva, 1980, p. 66)



Kristeva’s ideas, like those of her colleagues such as Barthes, undermined the traditional standing of the author as the creator of a one-time “literary opus” with unique and eminent status. Barthes held that the author is no more than a “scribe” who collects things written in the past and makes them into a “text”. Recalling the etymological root of the word “text”, in the sense of “tissue, material,” Barthes contended that every “text” is comprised of warp and weft; the artistry is in weaving one thread next to the other, with the whole complex range of relations between them. The contemporary writer does not create the original web; rather, he or she weaves a text using the “threads” of things written and read in the past. In contrast to Bakhtin, Kristeva and Barthes, who treated phenomena of intertextuality in a broad cultural and semiotic context, others have confined intertextuality to the interrelations between literary works, or between works in another single artistic medium. The semiotician Sebeok (1985) countered Bakhtin’s theories, contending that intertextuality itself is proof of his own theory. He maintained that: Works of art — especially literature — are produced in response not to social reality but to previous works of art and the codes and conventions governing them… (Sebeok, 1985, p. 657)

Ben-Porat (1976), similarly, contended that the term “intertextuality” refers to all the phenomena that derive from the interrelations between a given text (or part of a text, such as a title) and any previous or contemporaneous corpus. She classified intertextual phenomena from a literary perspective. This led her to limit her discussion to intentional intertextuality alone, which she called “rhetoric intertextuality”. In other words, Ben-Porat focused on literary works in which the links the author establishes with previous texts are created intentionally, e.g., via literary allusions. The scope of such interrelations is broad, including translations, adaptations, re-writes, a range of hints, pastiche, parody, etc. The most distinctive instance is parody, in which both writer and reader must be familiar with the same source text. Ben-Porat examined only literary texts, using two criteria: 1. the extent to which the source text is concealed, that is, how overt or covert the connection is between the text we read and those underlying it; 2. the amount of material added to the new text in comparison with the source text. Genette (1997) described intertextuality by means of the palimpsest metaphor. A piece of parchment has an ancient text written on it; this becomes erased until it is nearly invisible; a new text is then written on the parchment, yet some traces of the former writing remain; these at times are barely legible, but may also become quite clearly discernible. Genette defines this as a hypertext or “second-degree text”: it was created from the outset on the basis of a former source text, which he termed the hypotext. The interrelationship between the upper (new) layer, the



hypertext, and the source text beneath it, the hypotext, may be explicit, implicit, or even deliberately concealed. One famous example of such a work is Ulysses by James Joyce. A circumspect reading of the upper text, the hypertext Joyce wrote, requires the reader to be familiar with Homer’s Odyssey, the underlying text or hypotext. If the hypotext is not known to the reader or has been forgotten, the status of the new text, the hypertext, changes: it will be read as an independent composition and understood on its own terms. Sarig (2002) studied the relationship between these textual layers in its entirely using a systematic model based on four dimensions, each placed on a continuum. This enables a view of a number of relationships between upper and lower texts. The combination of these dimensions reflects the potential richness of intertextuality. By using this model the relations between the upper and lower text examined are schematically shown by using four continuums. The first continuum shows the thematic and ideological relationship, ranging from no thematic, ideological, or poetic linkage (including, for example, “empty allusions” — quotations that have no meaning in the context) to a deep-rooted connection, both thematic and ideological, between texts. The second continuum shows the nature of the re-working by examining the changes made as the source text was transposed into the new one: were the changes minor or extensive; did massive rewriting distort the original text? The third continuum shows the elaborations included in the new upper text (expansion, complexity, development of theme): to what extent and at what depth is the lower source text present in the new text? Is it only minimally noticeable or dominant? The fourth continuum shows the extent to which the upper text refers to the original one: is the source text manifest, mentioned explicitly, quoted directly, or is it only implicitly present, hinted in a manner that may not lead to recognition of the source text, or establish a clear link with the new text?

Narratives about professional development The narratives that will serve to illustrate our approach were collected as part an extensive research project concerning the professional development of the academic staff of teachers in the departments of literature and natural science in teachers’ colleges in Israel. In the current study we term them “teacher educators.” We interviewed fourteen teacher educators using a set of tested criteria (Greensfeld & Elkad-Lehman, 2007). The interviewees’ identities were kept in strict confidence. The interviews took place in two stages. The first stage was a semi-structured in-depth interview, in which the interviewee told her/his story (Johnson, 2002; Warren, 2002) in response to a broad question: “Tell us about your professional life and your attitude to your chosen profession.” We then asked the interviewees to tell



us about processes of change they had experienced in their way of thinking and, finally, we requested them to reflect on the process: “Can you re-construct the situation or the moment in which you experienced an awakening or new awareness of professional thinking? How did it happen?” Additional questions included: “Why at that point in particular? Can you illustrate how this awareness came about?” We also asked interviewees to tell us about difficulties they had encountered during the process. Each of them was asked to word a heading or metaphor to describe the development he or she had undergone. We expected these phrases to reflect the essence of the change. To conclude this stage, we showed interviewees a number of illustrations depicting the change process graphically; they were invited to react to them by choosing one or by suggesting another illustration to describe the change they underwent. In the second stage, we asked interviewees to give us feedback on the interview. This also granted us the opportunity to clarify certain points in the interview and collect additional information. The chance the interviewees had to voice their opinions enhanced their sense of sharing with us in the project and mitigated the sense of our controlling role. Each interview lasted between an hour and a half and three hours; each took place at the location and time chosen by the interviewee (Warren, 2002). Both researchers were present at the interviews, one as interviewer and the other as observer. We believed that an interview should be a dialogue, although we realized that this was not at all self-evident (Bakhtin, 1981). We had hoped that each of our presence aid in conducting the dialogue using the professional language shared by interviewer and interviewee. Thus, the one of us who teaches the natural sciences interviewed science teacher educators; the other interviewed her fellow literature teacher educators. By permission of the interviewees we taped all the sessions. Each of the interviewees received a transcript, so that additions and corrections could be made. We accepted every request for changes. During our study we made the participants part to our finds.

Intertextuality — An interpretative method in the qualitative research of life-stories The act of reading […] plunges us into a network of textual relations. To interpret a text, to discover its meaning, or meanings, is to trace those relations. Reading thus becomes a process of moving between texts. (Allen, 2000, p. 1)

Interpreting life-stories and narratives, whether written or oral, thus requires attentiveness to a network of textual relations. Social and ideological associations, on the part of narrator, reader, and listener, play a central role in the construction of the meaning. The stories “echo” the cultural, social, ideological and political



context in which they were conceived and in which they are heard or read. Stories thus do not bear a single static meaning, but the potential of multiple meanings. Meaning is, in effect, construed in the “sound box” of the listener-interpreter’s world. Intertextual associations are essential to a deeper understanding of the text. In the following pages, we will describe the interpretative method we used for our work. Our approach is based on holistic narrative research, which considers the interview as a thematically and linguistically complete, comprehensive narrative unit (Polkinghorne, 1991; Rosenthal, 2006; Lieblich et al., 1998). The story told is seen as an independent literary work. The importance of using literary devices for the analysis of non-literary units has been recognized (Culler, 1997). On the basis of these insights, we adopted the technique of “close-reading” to study the interviews, a tool borrowed from the field of literary criticism (Rimmon-Kenan, 1989). Our analysis was carried out using reader-response theory (Iser, 1978), with special attention to linguistic components and the ways interviewees used them. Various intertextual elements were also taken into account (Genette, 1997) on a variety of levels (Sarig, 2002). A literary reading of non-literary texts requires the reader to withhold conclusions and look beyond the literal contents. Time and attention are needed to detect the implications of stylistic devices, rhetorical turns of phrases, and emotional reactions of both speaker and listener. This sort of reading, of course, will also detect thematic elements in the text similar to a reading yielded in research according to grounded theory (Charmaz, 2002). At the root of a literary reading, however, is a different approach: it demands a strategy of examining the entire range of linguistic, stylistic, and esthetic components that make up the text. This would include attention to repetitions, rhyme and rhythm, uses of metaphoric language, noting symbols, linguistic and stylistic usages, literary genre, and the implicit intertextual network. The interpretative approach that we suggest is based on repeated listening and reading of the story the interviewees told. This includes our “listening” with an “inner ear” at various points, even at the paratextual stage, to expectations before the interview, primary reactions after the interview, and during repeated reading of the transcribed text. These multiple readings reveal a number of components making up the story, spurring the interpreter to question the function of each element in the story on several levels: content, rhetoric impressions on the reader, and the overall meaning. We looked for the focal points of various categories and for descriptive and narrative passages, and identified key characteristics of the interview/story. Repetitions and word choices were examined with attention to changes such as increasing intensity in the use of verbs or adjectives, transitions from active to passive voice, etc. Shifts in the linguistic register and digressions from the central topic were identified. Repeated readings enables an examination



of metaphorical language, including questions of frequency, originality, structure of the metaphors used, and the descriptive purposes that metaphoric language serves. We identified the secondary characters in the story and the narrator’s relation to them, and tried to understand their function in the structure of the story. We took note of general linguistic parallelism as well as parallelism between characters and between primary and secondary stories. A recurrent question we asked was: who is telling the story and to whom? If there are covert addressees, who are they? What are the relationships between narrator and addressees, and how do they affect the story? What bearing does context have on the story? Does telling his or her story fulfill a need or motive, perhaps concealed, of the interviewee? While reading, we made annotations in colors, using different fonts to help us recognize repeated elements and recurring linguistic patterns. Interpreting these patterns involved defining their function and status in the story — such as whether they are rhetoric repetitions, motifs, symbols, etc. As another method of annotating, we drew two parallel time-lines. One charted the events in the order they were told by the interviewee — the sujet or continuum of the narration in literary terms (Rimmon-Kenan, 1989). The second charted the sequence of events in their chronological order, as reconstructed by the interpreters — the fabula (ibid). This parallel listing can serve as a key to a deeper understanding of the story, indicating central elements and narrative choices made by the narrator; this includes revealing things the narrator tried to convey or to hide. Each reading can alert the reader to a “sub-text” or other text linked intertextually to the upper text (i.e. the interview); the simultaneous reading of both texts may refer, in turn, to additional texts. The reader might recall these in a general way, or may seek out, read, and study them more closely. During this process, the interpreter examines the associations that may have caused the narrator to recall other texts, and tries to understand how they may guide in reading. Even when the genre of the upper text is an autobiography, associations may well introduce other genres as architext (Genette, 1997) be it overtly or covertly: a poem, a song, a travelogue, a folk tale, the re-examining, which leads the interpreter to the association, as well as to additional literary elements, with the purpose of establishing their function in the deeper meaning of the text. Re-reading the fundamental pretexts that came to mind in juxtaposition with the upper text (the interview) may well alter the reader’s understanding of the interview or certain parts of it. This will take place in the course of many re-readings of the text, each of them slightly different, each yielding different comments. At the end of this phase of interpretation, a construal is formed that takes all the various finds into account; alternately, several options are presented side by side, enabling the reader to choose the most acceptable ones and reject others.



All the life stories we heard offered a wealth of intertextual potential. In the case of an interviewee whose first language was not Hebrew but Arabic (or any other language), we may have missed some of the intertextual connections in their discourse due to cultural differences. The discourse of teacher educators specializing in literature was generally richer in literary references and allusions, even aside from the examples they gave from literature classes they taught. On the other hand, the discourse of teacher educators in the fields of sciences referred to the world of science in their interviews. Frequently the reference was quite clear, with interviewees making explicit statements or drawing specific intertextual connections. More than once, interviewees mentioned the source or even quoted it in full. In other instances, we were aware that the interviewee’s words referred to something and we could construct the connection by ourselves; at times we asked the interviewees for help or confirmation for our interpretation (See, for example, Greensfeld & Elkad-Lehman, 2007). A life story offers the researcher an abundance of details. The possibilities of inter-textual interpretation are manifold, and attention must be paid to every movement between texts. Due to limitations of space, we will offer examples from one life story only. The stories in full and examples of different methodological approaches towards analyzing them may be found in our book (Greensfeld, & ElkadLehman, 2008). In the light of the methodological aim of this article, we have chosen vignettes which represent different types of intertextuality (Genette, 1997) and different relations between texts (Sarig, 2002). The vignettes offered will help demonstrate the ways that intertextual reading can point the way to interpretation. We must point out, however, that this is our intertextual reading, which does not exclude other readings by readers whose have other worlds of associations.

A journey between texts: Vignettes from one life-story Daphna is a literature teacher with a doctoral degree, about fifty years old. She taught high school and college in the United States. Since she and her family immigrated to Israel eighteen years ago, she has been teaching literature at teachers’ colleges and at general colleges. Literature is central to her life; as she puts it, it’s a profession, a hobby, a source of love and happiness. She reads, keeps up to date, lectures and teaches classical and modern literature. Daphna and Ilana have a long-time acquaintance through their mutual involvement with literature. Her life-story includes an abundance of literary references to a wide variety of sources: Jewish classical texts, Hebrew literary and popular texts. The interview took place on September 11, 2002. Early on in the interview Daphna said the following:


268 Ilana Elkad-Lehman and Hava Greensfeld Every year in September a dream repeats itself; I dreamed it again last week. Every year — the year starts in mid September , that’s what the song tells us — just then I dream about some failure, some physical breakdown, that happens during my first meeting with my students.

Mid September Astar Shamir (lyrics and tune) The year starts in mid September With mounting fury leap Gusty winds fight all over Winter kills and reaps. They say the end of the world is near, At night darkness swells. All summer long the skies were red with pain, Down below the earth is burning. Amongst us madness comes and goes, We too are tricked by life, I look for some inner peace, but there is none, Where does all this lead us? The year starts in mid-September, Winter is the hardest of all. All my songs escape far from the fire They may not want to suffer. They say the end of the world is near. At night darkness swells, All summer long the skies were red with pain, Down below the earth is burning.

In the interview, Daphna made the connection between her words and the lyrics clear. She never explained the link, except for the association regarding the time of the year; she never dealt with the song, its writer or its place in her own story. All that was left to the listeners, who could construct the connection (or not) and the details if they wished. Connecting may yield meaning, but may also be irrelevant. During the interview itself, we didn’t see any special meaning in Daphna’s allusion. There was a wealth of linguistic and intertextual elements in the interview that drew our attention and suggested a clear general outlook (examples below). Even as we transcribed, read, and re-read the interview, we were not particularly interested in the song. But once we finished the first stages of analyzing and interpreting and began the second stage with special attention to intertextuality, we were lead back to the words and melody of Asthar Shamir’s Mid-September. “The year starts in mid-September,” the song begins. Not only the school year starts then, as Dafna said in the interview, but the Jewish year as well, so significant in Daphna’s traditional religious life. That time of year, marked by the Jewish month of Tishrei, with the New Year and Day of Atonement, called the High



Holidays, are mile-stones in the life of observant Jews. These mark an end and beginning point; the world is said to have been created in Tishrei. It is a time for contemplation on accomplishments and failures. The holiday cycle concludes with the Feast of Tabernacles and the season of reaping, marking the end of one agricultural year and the beginning of a new one. This succession of holidays embodies an archetypical sequence of life and death expressed in the unending cycle of seasons. Despite all this, however, we eventually realized that “mid-September” is no mere temporal detail, but offers an important key to understanding Daphna’s story. Reading the words of the song helped us see Daphna’s narrative from a different angle, one that jarred with the traditional and natural worlds symbolized by this specific time of the year. When Daphna said, “that’s what the song tells us”, it was almost as if she had summoned an additional voice, the voice of the song into our discourse. There was its melody, humming in the heads of those who knew it — a pleasant melody, almost too pleasant, overshadowing the words and the content of the song. Its words were grim: “They say the end of the world is near […] All summer long the skies were red with pain/ Down below the earth is burning […] I look for some inner peace, but there is none/ Where does all this lead us?” The song first became popular in 1986. Shamir said she wrote it after the events of the summer of 1982: the First Lebanon War; the massacre in Sabra and Shatila and the reactions these aroused in Israel (Shamir, 1986). All this and more that Daphna never mentioned explicitly during the interview echoed in the song she had so casually recalled. In the first minutes of the interview, Daphna had called our attention to the date, September 11, 2002, one year after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. The summer that was coming to an end had been one of numerous terror attacks throughout Israel, on public transportation, at major intersections, on the campus of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, among others. In one short phrase, Daphna’s words made Shamir’s song part of the interview and the outside world was brought into the quiet room where we were talking. “The earth is burning,” ends the song. Understanding the intertextual links offers the reader some insight into the macro-context anchored in the social discourse, and into the interview itself. The micro- context is clearly expressed in the interview: Daphna’s dream, focusing on her fear of failure in the first lesson of the school year. Insight into the macrocontext intensifies Daphna’s feelings and is significant for our perception of the political, social and economic aspects that shape her day to day life, though these may not seem essential to our understanding of the rest of the interview. The macro-context is important, however, when we come to interpret her story as a whole. One might wonder whether in quoting phrases from the song Daphna intentionally alluded to the associations and feelings of insecurity the song expresses.



Taking her extensive cultural background and her intertextual awareness into account, the answer might be positive; after all, Daphna herself linked her words to what she had quoted from the song. At the same time, though, her association may well have been only with the line she quoted, without conscious awareness (or memory) of the content of the entire song. Scholars such as Harold Bloom would not consider the intertextual linkage mentioned by the speaker herself as mere chance (Bloom, 1973). Following the intertextual concept, the listener or the reader builds a personal textual understanding and interpretation according to her or his social and cultural world. Only when we re-read did “heard” Asthar Shamir’s words: “All summer long the skies were red with pain, [….] / where does all this lead us?” Then the context of the interview intermingled with our understanding of the life-story she had told. The song Daphna mentioned is a popular rather than a classical text, yet it connects with her life-story on a profound ideological level, open to straight-forward as well as complex interpretation. On the other hand, the level of transposition of the source text (the song) into the new text (her story) is low, since the source cited is not elaborated beyond the citation of a single line. Throughout the interview Daphna made intertextual connections, subtly alluding to the world of literature and literary texts, the Bible, ancient Jewish texts, art, and music. All of these are part of her way of thinking and expressing herself, through an economic manner of hints conveying an entire world. Most likely, the context as well as the kind of dialogue we had dictated the nature of the discourse. Identifying the dialogic contact that exists between the speaker and the addressee, (Bakhtin, 1984), is essential to every intertextual interpretation, and by the same token to interpretation in qualitative research. Quite possibly, if she had been addressing an unschooled audience, Dapna would have phrased her story differently. But it was told to Ilana, a scholar of literature, and to Hava (who occasionally got an extra explanation); since Daphna knew the aim of our research she may well have, through us, been addressing fellow teachers of literature in the academic world, under the assumption that they were the natural audience who would read the findings of our research. Early on in the interview, Daphna made a textual reference is vital to understanding the entire life-story she told and the process she described She herself mentioned the source text, and quoted its words from memory. “When I was at the beginning of my way [as a teacher] I saw myself as in the first Mishna in tractate Abot , where Joshua receives the Torah (Law) from Moses and passes it on from one to the other .”

Moses received the Law from Sinai, and committed it to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the Prophets; and the Prophets committed it to the men of the Great Synagogue. ( Tractate Abot A/1 Translated by Herbert Danby, Oxford University Press)



In Judaism, the notion of the Torah — received from the Lord at Sinai to be passed on from generation to generation — is a central one. This handing down charts a hierarchy: from the Lord to Moses who beheld Him, from Moses to Joshua, a single leader who conveyed it to the elders, the prophets and the members of the Great Synagogue. The circle widens, the connection with the Lord is not as immediate as it was at first, though all the recipients take it upon themselves to cherish and keep the holy tradition, and continue transmitting it from generation to generation. This passing on is the starting point underlying the Oral Law and the tradition of Jewish biblical hermeneutics. The saying in tractate Abot hold articulates Jewish conceptions of faith and knowledge, as well as the place of humankind in the world. Daphna’s quote set us, her listeners, before a fundamental epistemological query: how do we know or learn? What are the origins of knowledge? What characterizes our knowledge? What are its limits? And with direct reference to Daphna, the teacher: how do we learn and teach? The saying from Abot gave Daphna a starting point to ask herself how her personality as a teacher had developed. In the course of the interview, she introduced a parallel instance of intertextuality, borrowed from a children’s game — an object is passed from hand to hand. This, evidently, was to aid listeners not versed in the world of Jewish tradition, or to soften the interface between the world of religion and that of academics. Speaking of teaching with the metaphor of a game, though, was not incidental. Later in the interview, Daphna said of places where she had worked that “teaching was the name of the game” — in two senses: teaching was the primary aim (rather than research or creativity), as well as a profession that gives joy to learners and teachers alike. I have something in my hand and it’s almost like in the game, where we say: “pass it on”; It’s as if there’s something out there that’s objective, and that’s what I’m supposed to transmit. This goes both for the corpus of texts and for methodology. Literature is a canon that I’m passing on. It took me a long time to understand that this objective thing is imprinted with the personal, subjective seal of my own teachers’ personalities and ways of teaching. I think I devoted more thought to what I was transmitting than I did to my students. The subjective seal is something I thought about later. I underwent a process. I think that what I did (then) was far less authentic than what I am doing today. In the past, I think, I concentrated more on the subject matter I was transmitting than on my students. Not how to receive the stick and pass it on, but as if they, my students, were the stick. I just didn’t think about them enough. Only later did I become aware of the subjective stamp.

Dafna felt that the imprint her professors, who had trained her to become a college teacher and researcher, had left on her had greatly impeded her personal development. To detect this realization, careful note must be taken to her choice of words



and remarks she made about the process of “freeing herself ” or about what she called her “emancipation.” In the full interview the noun “freedom” and the verb “to free” were repeated five times; “becoming free” — four times; “I became free” — four times; the word “emancipation” once. In total, she used fourteen terms dealing with the concept. Similarly, twice she said, “I became more authentic”; twice “I became more myself ”; “to give up my sham self ” was also used twice. All twenty of these phrases expressed the change she had experienced. My starting point as a teacher really was, in many respects, that of a university instructor. This served both as a kind of fetters and as an opportunity. Only with time did I realize the restriction , freeing myself of it made me a much more meaningful teacher. […] All along I see a very intense experience of learning. […] the grown-ups had authority over me; they supplied an Oedipal-psychological umbrella , at the same time they deeply loved the clever little girl. That gave me plenty of opportunity for self negation. The dominant feature was to be a pupil, to be the receiver. I never really was ‘grown-up’. The change, I think, took place when I immigrated to Israel […]. At each of the places I started to work I met a new circle of colleagues, which was then, and still is, important to me. The professional contact with my colleagues had its own color and qualities and played a significant role […]. My personality developed and changed, and my teaching is the upshot of this change. This change is also emancipation — it was a process of becoming free from Oedipal patterns , patterns which are highly important in teaching and imparting authority, and essential components in the patriarchal family structure.] I think that slowly, gradually I freed myself from the Oedipal shackles . This is a metaphor. I think so. I became more myself, I became more authentic.

Daphna constructed her story in a framework of contrasts. She positions herself at the age of twenty, when she started her academic teaching, in contrast to her teachers who were her examples. She presents herself as the “little girl” while they are the “grown ups” in every aspect: in age and knowledge, as the authority that passes on knowledge as in tractate Abot. In opposition to this position of “authority” she set emancipation and freeing herself. She repeated: “I was not grown up”; her role was to absorb knowledge from her teachers and pass it on. Looking back she said: “that gave me plenty of opportunity for self-negation”. In addition to the intertextual connection with tractate Abot there are hints in Daphna’s story to periods in history and anthropological issues concerning patriarchal family structures, in which young girls are guided by their male elders, wholly lacking in independence of thought and deed. In most cases they are prevented from acquiring knowledge in any formal framework (Woolf, 1945). Links of this kind bring to mind the position of feministic criticism on dynamics of power in society and education. The great teacher is presented as an oppressive figure thwarting



personal development. This may even be a part of hegemonic masculinity that subordinates women; these, though, are our associations and not part of Daphna’s story as she told it. And yet, in her narrative she did refer to Freud and his theory about patricide (Freud, 1952). An indirect link was her mention of the quarrel between Freud and his student, Carl Jung, who turned from an admiring pupil into a rebel and the founder of a new school of psychotherapy. Daphna’s independence, her autonomy and authenticity were, in her eyes, attained only when she freed herself of her teachers. The complexity of this process comes to light by following the inter-textual links she suggested. Freud’s thought was a central pillar in the development of Bloom’s theory on intertextuality (Bloom, 1973, 1982). Shakespeare and Feud, according to Bloom, already wrote all there is to write; authors after them can only copy, reproduce or rebel by intentionally misreading their writings. Moreover, Bloom contends, these two figures fashioned the Western world’s way of thinking: today, Freud is the “Great Father” whose writings compel people to talk about themselves in his words, whether or not they have read his works. We have become Freud’s texts, and people of Western culture have adopted the mental pattern of imitating them (Bloom, 1982). Bloom’s approach to literature, first expressed in his The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), and developed in his later research, was based on what he saw as Oedipal reciprocation between the poet and literary predecessors. Thus the creative process can be seen as a struggle for emancipation from the awe and influence of existing works. Daphna’s story tells of the castrating influence that great teachers and scholars of literature may have on students or young scholars, quite similar to that of the father or the established. However, Daphna did believe in the possibility of freeing herself and finding her own authentic voice, her voice as a teacher and scholar of literature. The way she constructed her story demonstrates the extent to which all of us think by means of, or even “pass through” the primary texts of human culture, be it tractate Abot or the writings of Sigmund Freud.

Epilogue Narrative research often presents us with personal stories that are personal myths. The narrator aims at understanding him or herself through a well-known story that he or she adapts, consciously or less so, to her/his own story (Polkinghorne, 1991). Applying intertextuality has helped us to bring such situations to light. These examples demonstrate the place and significance that conscious interpretation referring to intertextual elements has for narrative texts in qualitative research. Moreover, they make clear just how extensively the interpretative process is



dependent on culture, education, historical context, society, ideology and, above, all how greatly it is affected by the subjectivity of researcher. “I speak and speak […] but the listener retains only the words he is expecting. […] It is not the voice that commands the story: it is the ear.” (Calvino, 1974, p. 135)

Stories were told. We heard them. You heard them. What have you heard?

Acknowledgements This research was supported by the Levinsky College of Education and the Inter-Collegiate Research Committee in the MOFET Institute. We are grateful to all of the interviewers who devoted their time to us and shared their narratives.

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Intertextuality as an interpretative method in

Intertextuality as an interpretative method in

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