Intertextual Comprehension: Above 5.0 on the Richter Scale

I bought this book oh, idk, maybe in high school, possibly JC, early in late adolescence or adulthood. Look at the price! Unfortunately, the flood of 1986 took way too many of my books and papers; fortunately, it spared FLD. It’s been with me for ever it seems, a constant reminder of possibility.

When I bought this autobiography in, say, 1973, I had an idea of what I was getting. I had come across it in the town library after school when I was in fifth grade in 1963 and read the first part then and there. I walked home through the ravine just before dark fell. My head was spinning. I’d read the part where Frederick at eight years old was sent to Baltimore from a rural plantation. The mistress took a liking to him, and she decided to teach him to read. The Master put a quick stop to it. Frederick was forbidden from reading lessons. As we know, that didn’t prevent him from becoming arguably the most powerful abolitionist orator of the period and a writer for the ages. I was shocked to realize how fortunate I was to have been taught to read.

My comprehension of this text in 1963 had little to do with prior knowledge of political ideology as a contest between ways to allocate social goods (Gee, 2014). I did, however, comprehend the narrative as fact, not fiction. The story was lived history, not literature, just as I was lived history. I got it. I was very lucky, and I was very sorry. This was tectonic plate work in its infancy. On it I could build.

The missing piece in our figured world of reading comprehension is intertextuality. Fairclough (1989) makes a strong case for intertextuality as an essential consideration in critical discourse analysis, both vertically and horizontally. For example, in this example, readers can make intertextual links to deepen comprehension with documents like the Constitution, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Fugitive Slave Law, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, etc., to fully comprehend the import of the “trace and cue” (Fairclough) embedded in the phrase “powerful abolitionist orator.” It’s possible that reading in history remains a fill-in-the-blank surface affair for too many readers because the focus of comprehension is narrowed within the four corners of the text—and tested in that way.

To complicate matters, when I read Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed five years later in 1980 or so I had Frederick on my mind. I’m not sure I could have been so viscerally drawn into Freire’s powerful insights into oppression without Frederick. Clearly, teaching intertextual comprehension horizontally in a topical frame is going on in schools. Library papers, term papers, reports, etc., tasks that involve synthesizing information across texts are happening. But underneath may be the assumption that this kind of activity is somehow “writing,” that the reference list is made up of a collection of separate texts, and so intertextual elements become an issue of citation rather than synthesis and building expert comprehension. We may conflate “writing” with tectonic plate building. We may even be blinded to these plates by a textbook comprehension bias.

This vertical building of tectonic plates of knowledge through conscious intertextual cognitive and collaborative activity, something school can teach to and promote—how might it play out in practice? It seems as though it must first be made visible and theorized as a higher form of comprehension. I suspect many, like me, have been blinded by a bias toward comprehension as the result of reading a text.

What stories can you share about intertextual comprehension in your experiences?