Intertextuality

To be honest, the concept of intertextuality is really a challenge for me as a foreigner. I didn’t grow up here so I really lack of the culture background. I found it was the hardest part to catch up the native speakers. Understanding the culture background is my biggest weakness during studying this major. I will try my best to understand these main concepts of intertextuality. The “Paratextual Knowledge” is the easiest domain for me to understand. The kinds of TV shows that contain paratextual knowledge require audiences has the basic culture within the community or the whole series. When I tried to analysis 30 Rock and Community last time I found this kind of shows have their unique audiences. The work place sitcoms like 30 Rock has the audiences who familiar with the job or interest it. Community attracts more young people and students. The audiences of these two TV shows have the basic culture background to understand the concept and the culture references. They like the shows because they can understand them and maybe get some same feeling form the characters. Also, I don't watch Friends because it has to many seasons and I have already missed first several seasons. It’s hard for me to start over or catch the storylines without watching the previous seasons. In addition, I just watched the Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 2 last weekend. The most audiences of it must have watched the last six Harry Potter movies. The audiences follow the storyline of this movie series so they kept following it. I think it’s also an example of paratextual knowledge. The audiences have already got the basic culture background like the history of all main characters and their final mission so they can understand the movie.

Hypertextual Production is very common in media industry. I am a big fan of Harry Potter movie series because I am kind of growing up with the story and those main characters in the movies. I remember I read the Harry Porter fictions firstly and I felt into the story at that time. Then Warner Bros filmed it into movie series since 2001. Harry Potter raised a magic wave thought out the entire world. It has theme park, games and millions of relative products now. The fans of Harry Potters are not only consuming the story and the movie but also the secondary media. The hypertextual production helps it becomes success and makes Harry Potters as kind of brand. In addition, the media company in Asia like buying the copy right of some famous comic books from Japan and making it into soap drama. For instance, a media company from Taiwan produced the most popular comic in 2004 called Meteor Garden in drama. It caused a well-know TV series boom in China. Then they released the movies after the TV series end. The main characters in the TV series became pop stars and they all published own music albums. Basic on its success, some companies form Korea, Japan, Thailand started buying the copyright of that original comic books and producing the different versions in different language through out the Asia. Every version attracted millions of fans to follow. They all produced own albums, movies, posters, T-shirts and etc in those countries. Hypertextual production is good for marketing and product promotion. However, the media companies have to be very careful about the copyright like the article mentioned. The Meteor Garden had several authorship problems in the end because there were too many versions and some there were some problem between the original author and the production company.


Metatextual discourse is another domain of intertextuality that I want to discuss. It’s common connection between two different texts. Some media companies use commentaries, previews and rating data to promote their productions. As my own understanding, metatextual discourse means one text provides comments to another.  This domain has been used as marketing method during production. It helps the companies raise the value of the media products and convinces audience to consume them.  In China, some big budget movies always invited famous author to write previews of them before release. Some movie fans will follow the critics’ recommendation to decide what to see.  They used the credibility of the critic to raise the movie’s value. The famous author’s critics attracted some potential audiences. As my own experience, I had argued with some of friends about the IMDb’s rating before. They always watched the rating before watched the movies. According to my friends’ points of view, IMDb could tell them the movie was worth to watch or no. I didn't agree it at all because the rating on IMDb was only a reference. Even though IMDb was a well known website with high credibility but I thought the rating data would affect our first impression of the movie.  The fans could definitely vote the movies in subjective perspective so the rating there weren’t always fair. In spite of the most top rating movies in IMDb were all valuable movies but I still thought it might miss some great movies. Every audience absorbed different information from a same movie. I always consider movie was valuable to watch by judging whether I could get useful information from it or not. I would not unthinking critic a movie based on other commentaries before I actually watch it.  I didn’t mean every metatextual discourse was untruthful but we have to be careful about letting the metatextua discourse blind our eyes.