WORD · brick

Intertextuality

A text is never fully alone — it is shaped by other texts through quotation, allusion, calque, pastiche, and parody, the way a stone wall is shaped by the stones that came before it.

Intertextuality is the literary field's name for what the castle's canary wing calls reproduction: the channels through which one text's meaning is shaped by another. The channels vary by genre: academic prose runs on citation (formal, traceable, attributed); fiction runs on allusion and homage (informal, untraceable, often deliberately ambiguous); code runs on forking and reuse (mechanical, verbatim, the norm rather than the exception). The field's intertextuality norms determine what "copying" even means — which is why the moderate context (how distinctive the surroundings must be to hide a canary) is one craft per field.

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