Rethinking intertextuality in CDA

Intertextuality – instances of texts linking to other texts (explicitly, implicitly, by referring to them or incorporating elements of them) – is a key concept with which CDA accounts for discursive elements in social relations of power and solidarity. However, ‘intertextuality’ has not been widely operationalised to chart existing relations of power and solidarity at the levels of discourse and orders of discourse. This article develops the methodological framework for intertextuality in CDA and makes that framework more congruent with its potential to analyse and critique social relations of power and solidarity through intertextuality than has been the case until now. It introduces three concepts: the inter-text, networks of inter-texts and typicality. It discusses two methodological options for creating a corpus for analysing networks of inter-texts and presents new analytical categories which recognise intertextual reference to whole texts. Crucially, it emphasises absence and ambiguity as key analytical foci for intertextuality.