The analytic tools described below can be seen as bridges between theory and practice, where the work of mediating the false dichotomy between institution and experience, and text and reality takes place.
As Griffith and Smith (2005) pointed out, discourses are not just statements;
they are the products of relationships and interchanges among researchers, public
institutions, popular media, and texts of popular culture. Inter-textuality
refers to the relationships among texts. Kristeva introduced the term “inter-textuality”
in 1984 to popularize in Europe the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. A basic tenet of
this concept is that no text is unique. It is a product of, and refers to (intentionally
or not), other texts, and these references, these inter-relationships among
texts, govern their meaning in that “any text is the absorption and
transformation of another”
(Kristeva, 1984, p. 35). Bakhtin (1981)
raised this principle in his concept of dialogism when he pointed out that when
we talk or write we use language and phrases that have been used before in different
contexts; these utterances are never entirely our own. Foucault’s concept
of discourse, as Lemke (1995) argued, may be interpreted as a “general
theory of inter-textuality for the purposes of history”
(p. 29) in
that Foucault’s concept of discourse formation is grounded in evidence
of regularity of statements across seemingly unrelated texts.
In this study, attending to the inter-textual relationships between child
and family literacy research, policy desires, public institutions, and the targeted
audiences for literacy advice provided insights into the political economy of
this advice. The paths along which literacy research becomes literacy advice
was thus an important consideration in this thesis, particularly in the 1980s
and 1990s when a vast increase in literacy advice texts available to mothers
in print and in images was paralleled by an uniformity in their recommendations.
Another aspect of inter-textuality is the relationship among those who produce,
distribute, and consume texts. One comes to an understanding of texts as discursive
formations, and to an understanding of how these discourses change (Fairclough,
2001), by attending to the diverse locations of the voices within these inter-textual
“conversations.”