Intertextuality In Documentary Now !
As a member of the parody genre, Documentary Now!, its episode “Gentle and Soft” in particular, inherently employs a more overt intertextuality than what is most commonly at play in televisual texts, because the foundation of this genre is in the humor created by references to other texts, genres, events, or people. This blatant intertextuality also exists in the program because of the integration other program’s creators in the television industry and the program’s adjacent industries, primarily, the music industry. Thus, intertextuality is the basis of the text’s structural categorization as a parody and the intertextual knowledge that viewers have affects the ways that they consume the text and what meanings they receive from it. As such,
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employs the divide responsibility model of intertextuality. This model divides different responsibilities and roles between different team members in media which fulfill multiple functions within each text, but media is not consumed equally. Instead, to understand a text we must place it in the context of the reader overall media consumption and ask what role it performs. This is the clear fit for “Gentle and Soft” and Documentary Now! as a series because it provides the viewers the agency necessary to make the various intertextual connections, and thus readings, of the text as possible based on their varied experiences with the program’s referents. The intertextuality of “Gentle and Soft” lies in the individual contexts in which each viewer of the episode consumes it; however, as stated by Newcomb and Hirsch, media is not consumed equally which is evident in the way that texts can mean multiple things at once, meaning that a text can mean one thing in and of itself and the intertext add other meanings. For example, the context in which one viewer may consume “Gentle and Soft” may differ from the context of another viewer if they do not consume the media explicitly intertextually referenced by the episode or if they are unfamiliar with the intertextually constructed generic literacies, created by previous interactions with texts, which lead to different reading strategies and intertextual relations to the
employs the divide responsibility model of intertextuality. This model divides different responsibilities and roles between different team members in media which fulfill multiple functions within each text, but media is not consumed equally. Instead, to understand a text we must place it in the context of the reader overall media consumption and ask what role it performs. This is the clear fit for “Gentle and Soft” and Documentary Now! as a series because it provides the viewers the agency necessary to make the various intertextual connections, and thus readings, of the text as possible based on their varied experiences with the program’s referents. The intertextuality of “Gentle and Soft” lies in the individual contexts in which each viewer of the episode consumes it; however, as stated by Newcomb and Hirsch, media is not consumed equally which is evident in the way that texts can mean multiple things at once, meaning that a text can mean one thing in and of itself and the intertext add other meanings. For example, the context in which one viewer may consume “Gentle and Soft” may differ from the context of another viewer if they do not consume the media explicitly intertextually referenced by the episode or if they are unfamiliar with the intertextually constructed generic literacies, created by previous interactions with texts, which lead to different reading strategies and intertextual relations to the