Topic 1 (session A) - Levels of language: Linguistic levels, style & meaning > Intertextuality > our analysis

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Our analysis of 'Twinkle, twinkle'

If you read the Lewis Carroll lines first and the 'Twinkle twinkle little star' rhyme second, unless someone pointed out your error (perhaps by telling you about when they were each written), you would assume that the allusive relation was the other way round and this could affect your understanding of the texts to some degree. Thus different intertextual assumptions (A before B; B before A) can help to explain how different readers can arrive at somewhat different understandings of the same words. But note that only one of the two intertextual relations constitutes the allusion involved here. The Carroll text alludes to (and indeed parodies) the nursery rhyme, and not the other way round.

In stylistics, and literary criticism more generally, accounts of textual understanding based on a personal ordering rather than the historical ordering would have to be inadmissable. Otherwise parodies and the like could not be properly explained. This is one of the ways in which critical assumptions about textual reading are different from what might be the case for some particular person's reading experience. Read more about the difference between real reading experiences and critical assumptions.

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