Here is the reading JAMES E. PORTER
Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne
Intertextuality and the Discourse Community
At the conclusion of Eco's The Name of the Rose, the monk Adso of Melk
returns to the burned abbey, where he finds in the ruins scraps of parchment, the
only remnants from one of the great libraries in all Christendom. He spends a
day collecting the charred fragments, hoping to discover some meaning in the
scattered pieces of books. He assembles his own "lesser library .. . of
fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books"
(500). To Adso, these random shards are "an immense acrostic that says and
repeats nothing" (501). Yet they are significant to him as an attempt to order
experience.
We might well derive our own order from this scene. We might see Adso as
representing the writer, and his desperate activity at the burned abbey as a mod-
el for the writing process. The writer in this image is a collector of fragments, an
archaeologist creating an order, building a framework, from remnants of the
past. Insofar as the collected fragments help Adso recall other, lost texts, his
experience affirms a principle he learned from his master, William of Basker-
ville: "Not infrequently books speak of books" (286). Not infrequently, and
perhaps ever and always, texts refer to other texts and in fact rely on them for
their meaning. All texts are interdependent: We understand a text only insofar
as we understand its precursors.
This is the principle we know as intertextuality, the principle that all writing
and speech-indeed, all signs-arise from a single network: what Vygotsky
called "the web of meaning"; what poststructuralists label Text or Writing
(Barthes, ecriture); and what a more distant age perhaps knew as logos. Exam-
ining texts "intertextually" means looking for "traces," the bits and pieces of
Text which writers or speakers borrow and sew together to create new dis-
course. ' The most mundane manifestationf intertextuality is explicit citation,
but intertextuality animates all discourse and goes beyond mere citation. For the
intertextual critics, Intertext is Text-a great seamless textual fabric. And, as
they like to intone solemnly, no text escapes intertext.
Intertextuality provides rhetoric with an important perspective, one currently
neglected, I believe. The prevailing composition pedagogies by and large culti-
vate the romantic image of writer as free, uninhibited spirit, as independent,
creative genius. By identifying and stressing the intertextual nature of dis-
course, however, we shift our attention away from the writer as individual and Intertextuality and the Discourse Community 35
focus more on the sources and social contexts from which the writer's discourse
arises. According to this view, authorial intention isless significant than social
context; the writer is simply apart of a discourse tradition, a member of a team,
and a participant in a community of discourse that creates its own collective
meaning. Thus the intertext constrains writing.
My aim here is to demonstratehe significance of this theory to rhetoric, by
explaining intertextuality, its connection to the notion of "discourse communi-
ty," and its pedagogical implications for composition.
The Presence of Intertext
Intertextuality has been associated with both structuralism and poststruc-
turalism, with theorists like Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida,
Hayden White, Harold Bloom, Michel Foucault, and Michael Riffaterre. (Of
course, the theory is most often applied in literary analysis.) The central as-
sumption of these critics has been described by Vincent Leitch: "The text is not
an autonomous or unified object, but a set of relations with other texts. Its
system of language, its grammar, its lexicon, drag along numerous bits and
pieces-traces--of history so that the text resembles a Cultural Salvation Army
Outlet with unaccountable collections of incompatible ideas, beliefs, and
sources" (59). It is these "unaccountable collections" that intertextual critics
focus on, not the text as autonomous entity. In fact, these critics have redefined
the notion of "text": Text is intertext, or simply Text. The traditional notion of
the text as the single work of a given author, and even the very notions of author
and reader, are regarded as simply convenient fictions for domesticating dis-
course. The old borders that we used to rope off discourse, proclaim these
critics, are no longer useful.
We can distinguish between two types of intertextuality: iterability and
presupposition. Iterability refers to the "repeatability" of certain textual
fragments, tocitation in its broadest sense to include not only explicit allusions,
references, and quotations within adiscourse, but also unannounced sources
and influences, cliches, phrases in the air, and traditions. That is to say, every
discourse is composed of "traces," pieces of other texts that help constitute its
meaning. (I will discuss this aspect of intertextuality in my analysis of the Dec-
laration of Independence.) Presupposition refers to assumptions a text makes
about its referent, its readers, and its context-to portions of the text which are
read, but which are not explicitly "there." For example, as Jonathan Culler
discusses, the phrase "John married Fred's sister" is an assertion that logically
presupposes that John exists, that Fred exists, and that Fred has a sister. "Open
the door" contains apractical presupposition, assuming the presence of a de-
coder who is capable of being addressed and who is better able to open the door than the encoder. "Once upon a time" is a trace rich in rhetorical presupposition,
signaling to even the youngest reader the opening of a fictional narrative. Texts
not only refer to but in fact contain other texts.2
An examination of three sample texts will illustrate the various facets of
intertextuality. The first, the Declaration of Independence, ispopularly viewed
as the work of Thomas Jefferson. Yet if we examine the text closely in its rhetori-
cal milieu, we see that Jefferson was author only in the very loosest of senses. A
number of historians and at least two composition researchers (Kinneavy, Theo-
ry 393-49; Maimon, Readings 6-32) have analyzed the Declaration, with inter-
esting results. Their work suggests that Jefferson was by no means an origi-
nal framer or a creative genius, as some like to suppose. Jefferson was a skilled
writer, to be sure, but chiefly because he was an effective borrower of traces.
To produce his original draft of the Declaration, Jefferson seems to have
borrowed, either consciously or unconsciously, from his culture's Text. Much
has been made of Jefferson's reliance on Locke's social contract theory
(Becker). Locke's theory influenced colonial political philosophy, emerging in
various pamphlets and newspaper articles of the times, and served as the foun-
dation for the opening section of the Declaration. The Declaration contains
many traces that can be found in other, earlier documents. There are traces from
a First Continental Congress resolution, a Massachusetts Council declaration,
George Mason's "Declaration of Rights for Virginia," apolitical pamphlet of
James Otis, and a variety of other sources, including a colonial play. The over-
all form of the Declaration (theoretical argument followed by list of grievances)
strongly resembles, ironically, the English Bill of Rights of 1689, in which
Parliament lists the abuses of James II and declares new powers for itself. Sev-
eral of the abuses in the Declaration seem to have been taken, more or less
verbatim, from aPennsylvania Evening Post article. And the most memorable
phrases in the Declaration seem to be least Jefferson's: "That all men are created
equal" is a sentiment from Euripides which Jefferson copied in his literary com-
monplace book as a boy; "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness" was a
cliche of the times, appearing in numerous political documents (Dumbauld).
Though Jefferson's draft of the Declaration can hardly be considered his in
any exclusive sense of authorship, the document underwent sill more expropri-
ation at the hands of Congress, who made eighty-six changes (Kinneavy, Theo-
ry 438). They cut the draft from 21 1 lines to 147. They did considerable editing
to temper what they saw as Jefferson's emotional style: For example,
Jefferson's phrase "sacred & undeniable" was changed to the more restrained
"self-evident." Congress excised controversial passages, such as Jefferson's
condemnation of slavery. Thus, we should find it instructive to note, Jefferson's
few attempts at original expression were those least acceptable to Congress. Intertextuality and the Discourse Community 37
If Jefferson submitted the Declaration for a college writing class as his own
writing, he might well be charged with plagiarism.3 The idea of Jefferson as
author is but convenient shorthand. Actually, the Declaration arose out of a
cultural and rhetorical milieu, was composed of traces and was, in effect,
team written. Jefferson deserves credit for bringing disparate traces together,
for helping to mold and articulate the milieu, for creating the all-important
draft. Jefferson's skill as a writer was his ability to borrow traces effectively and
to find appropriate contexts for them. As Michael Halliday says,
"[C]reativeness does not consist in producing new sentences. The newness of a
sentence is a quite unimportant and unascertainable property and 'creativi-
ty' in language lies in the speaker's ability to create new meanings: to realize the
potentiality oflanguage for the indefinite extension of its resources to new con-
texts of situation. . . . Our most 'creative' acts may be precisely among those
that are realized throughighly repetitive forms of behaviour" (Explorations
42). The creative writer is the creative borrower, in other words.
Intertextuality can be seen working similarly in contemporary forums. Re-
call this scene from a recent Pepsi commercial: A young boy in jeans jacket,
accompanied by dog, stands in some desolate plains crossroads next to a gas
station, next to which is a soft drink machine. An alien spacecraft, resembling
the one in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind, appears overhead.
To the boy's joyful amazement, the spaceship hovers over the vending machine
and begins sucking Pepsi cans into the ship. It takes only Pepsi's, then eventual-
ly takes the entire machine. The ad closes with a graphic: "Pepsi. The Choice of
a New Generation."
Clearly, the commercial presupposes familiarity with Spielberg's movie or,
at least, with his pacific vision of alien spacecraft. We see several American
cliches, well-worn signs from the Depression era: the desolate plains, the gen-
eral store, the pop machine, the country boy with dog. These distinctively
American traces are juxtaposed against images from science fiction and the
sixties catchphrase "new generation" in the coda. In this array of signs, we have
tradition and counter-tradition harmonized. Pepsi squeezes itself in the middle,
and thus becomes the great American conciliator. The ad's use of irony may
serve to distract viewers momentarily from noticing how Pepsi achieves its
purpose by assigning itself an exalted role through use of the intertext.
We find an interesting example of practical presupposition iJohn Kifner's
New York Times headline article reporting on the Kent State incident of 1970:
Four students at Kent State University, two of them women,
were shot to death this afternoon by a volley of National Guard
gunfire. At least 8 other students were wounded. The burst of gunfire came about 20 minutes after the guardsmen
broke up a noon rally on the Commons, agrassy campus gathering
spot, by lobbing tear gas at a crowd of about 1,000 young people.
From one perspective, the phrase "two of them women" is a simple statement
of fact; however, it presupposes acertain attitude-thathe event, horrible
enough as it was, is more significant because two of the persons killed were
women. It might be going too far to say that the phrase presupposes a sexist
attitude ("women aren't supposed to be killed in battles"), but can we imagine
the phrase "two of them men" in this context? Though equally factual, this
wording would have been considered odd in 1970 (and probably today as well)
because it presupposes a cultural mindset alien from the one dominant at the
time. "Two of them women" is shocking (and hence it was reported) because it
upsets the sense of order of the readers, in this case the American public.
Additionally (and more than a little ironically), the text contains anumber of
traces which have the effect of blunting the shock of the event. Notice that the
students were not shot by National Guardsmen, but were shot "by a volley of
. . . gunfire"; the tear gas was "lobbed"; and the event occurred at a "grassy
campus gathering spot." "Volley" and "lobbed" are military terms, but with
connections to sport as well; "grassy campus gathering spot" suggests apicnic;
"burst" can recall the gloriousight of bombs "bursting" in "The Star-Spangled
Banner." This pastiche of signs casts the text into a certain context, making it
distinctively American. We might say that the turbulent milieu of the sixties
provided a distinctive array of signs from which John Kifner borrowed to
produce his article.
Each of the three texts examined contains phrases or images familiar to its
audience or presupposes certain audience attitudes. Thus the intertext exerts its
influence partly in the form of audience expectation. We mighthen say that the
audience of each of these texts is as responsible for its production as the writer.
That, in essence, readers, not writers, create discourse.
The Power of Discourse Community
And, indeed, this is what some poststructuralist critics suggest, those who
prefer a broader conception of intertext or who look beyond the intertext tothe
social framework regulating textual production: to what Michel Foucault calls
"the discursive formation," what Stanley Fish calls "the interpretive communi-
ty," and what Patricia Bizzell calls "the discourse community."
A "discourse community" isa group of individuals bound by a common
interest who communicate through approved channels and whose discourse is Intertextuality and the Discourse Community 39
regulated. An individual may belong to several professional, public, or person-
al discourse communities. Examples would include the community of
engineers whose research area is fluid mechanics; alumni of the University of
Michigan; Magnavox employees; the members of the Porter family; and
members of the Indiana Teachers of Writing. The approved channels we can
call "forums." Each forum has a distinct history and rules governing appropri-
ateness to which members are obliged to adhere. These rules may be more or
less apparent, more or less institutionalized, more or less specific to each com-
munity. Examples of forums include professional publications like Rhetoric
Review, English Journal, and Creative Computing; public media like
Newsweek and Runner's World; professional conferences (the annual meeting
of fluid power engineers, the 4C's); company board meetings; family dinner
tables; and the monthly meeting of the Indiana chapter of the Izaak Walton
League.
A discourse community shares assumptions about what objects are appropri-
ate for examination and discussion, what operating functions are performed on
those objects, what constitutes "evidence" and "validity," and what formal con-
ventions are followed. A discourse community may have a well-established
ethos; or it may have competing factions and indefinite boundaries. It may be in
a "pre-paradigm" state (Kuhn), that is, having an ill-defined regulating system
and no clear leadership. Some discourse communities are firmly established,
such as the scientific community, the medical profession, and the justice sys-
tem, to cite a few from Foucault's list. In these discourse communities, as
Leitch says, "a speaker must be 'qualified' to talk; he has to belong to a commu-
nity of scholarship; and he is required to possess a prescribed body of knowl-
edge (doctrine). . . . [This system] operates to constrain discourse; it
establishes limits and regularities. . . . who may speak, what may be spoken,
and how it is to be said; in addition [rules] prescribe what is true and false, what
is reasonable and what foolish, and what is meant and what not. Finally, they
work to deny the material existence of discourse itself' (145).
A text is "acceptable" within a forum only insofar as it reflects the communi-
ty episteme (to use Foucault's term). On a simple level, this means that for a
manuscript to be accepted for publication in the Journal of Applied Psychology,
it must follow certain formatting conventions: Itmust have the expected social
science sections (i.e., review of literature, methods, results, discussion), and it
must use the journal's version of APA documentation. However, these are only
superficial features of the forum. On a more essentialevel, the manuscript
must reveal certain characteristics, have an ethos (in the broadest possible
sense) conforming tothe standards of the discourse community: It must demon-
strate (or at least claim) that it contributes knowledge to the field, it must demonstrate familiarity with the work of previous researchers in the field, it must
use a scientific method in analyzing its results (showing acceptance of the truth-
value of statistical demonstration), it must meet standards for test design and
analysis of results, it must adhere to standards determining degree of accuracy.
The expectations, conventions, and attitudes of this discourse community-the
readers, writers, and publishers of Journal of Applied Psychology-will influ-
ence aspiring psychology researchers, shaping not only how they write but also
their character within that discourse community.
The poststructuralist view challenges the classical assumption that writing is
a simple linear, one-way movement: The writer creates a text which produces
some change in an audience. A poststructuralist rhetoric examines how audi-
ence (in the form of community expectations and standards) influences textual
production and, in so doing, guides the development of the writer.
This view is of course open to criticism for its apparent determinism, for
devaluing the contributionf individual writers and making them appear mere-
ly tools of the discourse community (charges which Foucault answers in "Dis-
course on Language"). If these regulating systems are so constraining, how can
an individual merge? What happens to the idea of the lone inspired writer and
the sacred autonomous text?
Both notions take a pretty hard knock. Genuine originality is difficult within
the confines of a well-regulated system. Genius is possible, but it may be con-
strained. Foucault cites the example of Gregor Mendel, whose work in the
nineteenth century was excluded from the prevailing community of biologists
because he "spoke of objects, employed methods and placed himself within a
theoretical perspective totally alien to the biology of his time. . . . Mendel
spoke the truth, but he was not dans le vrai (within the true)" (224). Frank
Lentricchia cites a similar example from the literary community: Robert Frost
"achieved magazine publication only five times between 1895 and 1912, a peri-
od during which he wrote a number of poems later acclaimed .. . [because] in
order to write within the dominant sense of the poetic in the United States in the
last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, one
had to employ a diction, syntax, and prosody heavily favoring Shelley and
Tennyson. One also had to assume a certain stance, a certain world-weary
idealism which took care not to refer too concretely to the world of which one
was weary" (197, 199).
Both examples point to the exclusionary power of discourse communities
and raise serious questions about the freedom of the writer: chiefly, does the
writer have any? Is any writer doomed to plagiarism? Can any text be said to be
new? Are creativity and genius actually possible? Was Jefferson a creative gen-
ius or a blatant plagiaris Intertextuality and the Discourse Community 41
Certainly we want to avoid both extremes. Even if the writer is locked into a
cultural matrix and is constrained by the intertext of the discourse community,
the writer has freedom within the immediate rhetorical context.4 Furthermore,
successful writing helps to redefine the matrix-and in that way becomes crea-
tive. (Jefferson's Declaration contributed todefining the notion of America for
its discourse community.) Every new text has the potential to alter the Text in
some way; in fact, every text admitted into a discourse community changes the
constitution of the community-and discourse communities can revise their
discursive practices, as the Mendel and Frost examples suggest.
Writing is an attempt to exercise the will, to identify the self within the con-
straints of some discourse community. We are constrained insofar as we must
inevitably borrow the traces, codes, and signs which we inherit and which our
discourse community imposes. We are free insofar as we do what we can to
encounter and learn new codes, to intertwine codes in new ways, and to expand
our semiotic potential-with our goal being to effect change and establish our
identities within the discourse communities we choose to enter.
The Pedagogy of Intertextuality
Intertextualitys not new. It may remind some of Eliot's notion of tradition,
though the parameters are certainly broader. It is an important concept, though.
It counters what I see as one prevailing composition pedagogy, one favoring a
romantic image of the writer, offering asrole models the creativessayists, the
Sunday Supplement freelancers, the Joan Didions, E. B. Whites, Calvin
Trillins, and Russell Bakers. This dashing image appeals to our need for intel-
lectual heroes; but underlying it may be an anti-rhetorical view: that writers are
born, not made; that writing is individual, isolated, and internal; not social but
eccentric.
This view is firmly set in the intertext of our discipline. Our anthologies
glorify the individual essayists, whose work is valued for its timelessness and
creativity. Freshman rhetorics announce as the writer's proper goals personal
insight, originality, and personal voice, or tell students that motivations for
writing come from "within." Generally, this pedagogy assumes that such a
thing as the writer actually exists-an autonomous writer exercising afree,
creative will through the writing act-and that the writing process proceeds
linearly from writer to text to reader. This partial picture of the process can all
too readily become the picture, and our students can all too readily learn to
overlook vital facets of discourse production.
When we romanticize composition by overemphasizing the autonomy of the
writer, important questions are overlooked, the same questions an intertext view of writing would provoke: To what extent is the writer's product itself a
part of a larger community writing process? How does the discourse communi-
ty influence writers and readers within it? These are essential questions, but are
perhaps outside the prevailing episteme of composition pedagogy, which
presupposes the autonomous status of the writer as independent cogito. Talking
about writing in terms of "social forces influencing the writer" raises the specter
of determinism, and so is anathema.
David Bartholomae summarizes this issue very nicely: "The struggle of the
student writer is not the struggle to bring out that which is within; it is the
struggle to carry out those ritual activities that grant our entrance into a closed
society" (300). When we teach writing only as the act of "bringing out what is
within," we risk undermining our own efforts. Intertextuality reminds us that
"carrying out ritual activities" is also part of the writing process. Barthes
reminds us that "the 'I' which approaches the text is already itself aplurality of
other texts, of codes which are infinite" (10).
Intertextuality suggests that our goal should be to help students learn to write
for the discourse communities they choose to join. Students need help develop-
ing out of what Joseph Williams calls their "pre-socialized cognitive states."
According to Williams, pre-socialized writers are not sufficiently immersed in
their discourse community to produce competent discourse: They do not know
what can be presupposed, are not conscious of the distinctive intertextuality of
the community, may be only superficially acquainted with explicit conventions.
(Williams cites the example of the freshman whose paper for the English teach-
er begins "Shakespeare is a famous Elizabethan dramatist.") Our immediate
goal is to produce "socialized writers," who are full-fledged members of their
discourse community, producing competent, useful discourse within that com-
munity. Our long-range goal might be "post-socialized writers," those who
have achieved such a degree of confidence, authority, power, or achievement in
the discourse community so as to become part of the regulating body. They are
able to vary conventions and question assumptions-i.e., effect change in
communities-without fear of exclusion.
Intertextuality has the potential to affect all facets of our composition peda-
gogy. Certainly it supports writing across the curriculum as a mechanism for
introducing students to the regulating systems of discourse communities. It
raises questions about heuristics: Do different discourse communities apply
different heuristics? It asserts the value of critical reading in the composition
classroom. It requires that we rethink our ideas about plagiarism: Certainly
imitatio is an important stage in the linguistic development of the writer.
The most significant application might be in the area of audience analysis.
Current pedagogies assume that when writers analyze audiences they should Intertextuality and the Discourse Community 43
focus on the expected flesh-and-blood readers. Intertextuality suggests that the
proper focus of audience analysis is not the audience as receivers per se, but the
intertext of the discourse community. Instead of collecting demographic data
about age, educationalevel, and social status, the writer might instead ask
questions about the intertext: What are the conventional presuppositions ofthis
community? In what forums do they assemble? What are the methodological
assumptions? What is considered "evidence,"valid argument," and "proof'?
A sample heuristic for such an analysis-what I term "forum analysis"-is
included as an appendix.
A critical reading of the discourse of a community may be the best way to
understand it. (We see a version of this message in the advice to examine a
journal before submitting articles for publication.) Traditionally, anthologies
have provided students with reading material. However, the typical anthologies
have two serious problems: (1) limited range-generally they overemphasize
literary or expressive discourse; (2) unclear context-they frequently remove
readings from their original contexts, thus disguising their intertextual nature.
Several recently published readers have attempted to provide a broader selec-
tion of readings in various forums, and actually discuss intertextuality.
Maimon's Readings in the Arts and Sciences, Kinneavy's Writing in the Liberal
Arts Tradition, and Bazerman's The Informed Writer are especially noteworthy.
Writing assignments should be explicitly intertextual. If we regard each writ-
ten product as a stage in a larger process-the dialectic process within adis-
course community-then the individual writer's work is part of a web, part of a
community search for truth and meaning. Writing assignments mightake the
form of dialogue with other writers: Writing letters in response to articles is one
kind of dialectic (e.g., letters responding to Atlantic Monthly or Science
articles). Research assignments might be more community oriented rather than
topic oriented; students might be asked to become involved in communities of
researchers (e.g., the sociologists examining changing religious attitudes in
American college students). The assignments in Maimon's Writing in the Arts
and Sciences are excellent in this regard.
Intertextual theory suggests that the key criteria for evaluating writing should
be "acceptability" within some discourse community. "Acceptability" in-
cludes, but goes well beyond, adherence to formal conventions. It includes
choosing the "right" topic, applying the appropriate critical methodology, ad-
hering to standards for evidence and validity, and in general adopting the
community's discourse values-and of course borrowing the appropriate
traces. Success is measured by the writer's ability to know what can be presup-
posed and to borrow that community's traces effectively to create a text that
contributes to the maintenance or, possibly, the definition of the community The writer is constrained by the community, and by its intertextual preferences
and prejudices, but the effective writer works to assert the will against those
community constraintso effect change.
The Pepsi commercial and the Kent State news article show effective uses of
the intertext. In the Kent State piece, John Kifner mixes picnic imagery
("grassy campus gathering spot," "young people") with violent imagery ("burst
of gunfire") to dramatize the event. The Pepsi ad writers combine two unlikely
sets of traces, linking folksy depression-era American imagery with sci-fim-
agery "stolen" from Spielberg. For this creative intertwining of traces, both
discourses can probably be measured successful in their respective forums.
Coda
Clearly much of what intertextuality supports is already institutionalized
(e.g., writing-across-the-curriculum programs). And yet, in freshman comp
texts and anthologies especially, there is this tendency to see writing as individ-
ual, as isolated, as heroic. Even after demonstrating quite convincingly that the
Declaration was written by a team freely borrowing from acultural intertext,
Elaine Maimon insists, against all the evidence she herself has collected, that
"Despite the additions, deletions, and changes in wording that it went through,
the Declaration is still Jefferson's writing" (Readings 26). Her saying this
presupposes that the reader has just concluded the opposite.
When we give our students romantic role models like E. B. White, Joan
Didion, and Lewis Thomas, we create unrealistic expectations. This type of
writer has often achieved post-socialized status within some discourse commu-
nity (Thomas in the scientific community, for instance). Can we realistically
expect our students to achieve this state without first becoming socialized, with-
out learning first what it means to write within asocial context? Their role
models ought not be only romantic heroes but also community writers like
Jefferson, the anonymous writers of the Pepsi commercial-the Adsos of the
world, not just the Aristotles. They need to see writers whose products are more
evidently part of a larger process and whose work more clearly produces mean-
ing in social contexts.
now the questions! Guidelines: Respond to the following questions concerning James Porter's "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community"; the purpose of these questions is to get you thinking about the text's worth and how to understand it:
What does intertextuality mean to you?
What distinguishes assumption from iterability?
Why does Porter contend that most content is plagiarised and that originality is nearly impossible?
Writing is a "simple linear, one-way movement"; how is it not?
Why do you think it's necessary for you to read this in order to comprehend writing, and how may you use this essay to the composition of your formal essay?