A pedagogical stylistics of intertextual interaction: Talk as Heteroglot Intertextual Study in higher education pedagogy

This article presents a pedagogical stylistics of intertextuality in interactive literary study talk. It analyses case study data representing one higher education seminar discussion, where a tutor and student interpret a focal text through reference to diverse intertexts. The article asks: How do participants enact intertextual literary analysis in conversation? How are intertextual voices introduced? How do intertextual voices relate to focal texts and position readers’ orientations to them? The transcript represents the interplay of participant and text voices around Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett. The article examines the intertextual invocations made by participants in interaction including their pedagogic function. It adopts a methodology combining pedagogical stylistics with a conversation-analytic mentality. Commentary adapts Lemke’s four categories of intertextual connection (cothematic, co-orienting, coactional and cogeneric) to describe functions of intertextual invocation in talk, adding two new categories of co-illumination and cogeneration. The results suggest participants in literary study talk use intertextual invocations to develop insights, position the responses of others and sustain co-constructed interpretation. The article proposes the term Talk as Heteroglot Intertextual Study (THIS) to describe this pedagogical format, with linked terminology to identify its multivocal, deictic and organisational traits. This pedagogical stylistics helps researchers and teachers describe and understand the development of intertextual analysis in literary study talk.