Intertextuality is a term to indicate that all texts, whether written or spoken, whether formal or 
informal, whether artistic or mundane, are in some ways related to each other. It is a particularly apt 
term to understand current media culture, with its still increasing abundance of images, sounds, 
characters and stories. The term comes from literary studies but was taken up by critical media 
scholars in the 1970s and 80s to examine particular popular genres. Currently, the term has found 
some currency among media psychologists as well. In this entry, the provenance of the concept of
intertextuality is described, using James Bond and Lady Gaga as iconic examples. Furthermore, 
different levels and dimensions of intertextuality are explained. It is shown how intertextuality is 
not only an intentional product of artists, writers and media producers, but also of particular 
processes of interpretation and reading. 
1. What is intertextuality
Intertextuality is a term to indicate that all texts, whether written or spoken, whether formal or 
informal, whether artistic or mundane, are in some ways related to each other. It is a phenomenon 
that is particularly relevant to understanding the meanings of mass media and online content, 
because, more often than not, a particular piece of media content like a sports blog, crime novel or 
commercial, is related to other media content. Since the term derives from literary studies all distinct 
pieces of media content are referred to as ‘texts’, including audio and visual aspects. The term 
‘intermediality’ is often used as well to emphasize that the relations between texts do not only occur 
within one particular medium (with, for instance, television commercials picking up elements of 
television shows) but also occur between different kinds of media, the obvious example being books 
made into movies or the other way around. The media industries themselves favor the term 
‘multiplatform’ or ‘cross-media’ for content that is deliberately produced across different kinds of 
media and merchandise. Disney content is the ultimate example with ‘brands’ like Pocahontas 
produced as film, book, game, costumes, bed linen, bread boxes, mugs and more. 
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In the academic context of media and communication studies the term has a particular provenance 
in early 20th century European thought and contemporary literary studies. Many scholars identify the 
Russian literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin as the first to describe in the early 20th century how texts 
never have meanings in themselves but are the product of relations with other kinds of texts. French 
post World War II philosophers like Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva picked up and developed this 
idea, with Kristeva in particular introducing the concept of intertextuality itself: ‘any text is a mosaic 
of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another’ (Kristeva, 1986, p.37). US 
television scholar John Fiske produced the best known elaborations of ‘intertextuality’ for the media 
and communications discipline; in his 1988 book Television Culture he examined the textual flows in 
and around television, their mutual relations and the way audiences watch and enjoy television by 
bringing in associations with other texts and media. 
It is the relation between intertextuality and the way audiences make meaning that is central to this 
entry. First, the depth and breadth of intertextuality will be further displayed by working through an 
extended example about James Bond, which will lay the groundwork for a more formal exhibition of 
the various dimensions and features of intertextuality, culminating in a discussion of ‘simulacra’ as 
excessive intertextual formations. The discussion will then move to the way audiences (called 
‘readers’ in this context) make meaning of intertextuality and how critical cultural studies and media 
psychology differ in their approaches to research about this topic. 
2. An extended example: James Bond
In 2005, British actor Daniel Craig began his career as James Bond in Casino Royale, the 22nd episode 
of the famous film series. Half-way the film, the camera catches him emerging out of the ocean, 
dressed in tight blue trunks, water dripping from his highly muscled upper body and legs. Critics and 
Bond fans alike immediately recognized the scene from the first Bond film, Dr. No from 1962, in 
which Ursula Andress, similarly scantily dressed, stepped out of the ocean into the gaze of the
camera and the audience. When Craig started as James Bond, the 1962 scene had become an iconic 
introduction of the sexy Bond girl, repeated already once in Die Another Day of 2002, featuring black 
actress Halle Berry emerging from the blue ocean in an orange bikini. Craig’s scene was thus a clear 
intertextual reference to earlier James Bond movies. There was a wider intertextual dimension as 
well: initially, parts of the Bond novels were serialized in Playboy, stressing that Bond should be seen 
as the classic patriarchal male hero surrounded by sexy submissive women. Craig’s display of the 
sexy male body was all the more unique and pleasurable because of its contrast to more common 
cultural images of female bodies as objects of the gaze and male bodies as carriers of the action. It 
was also an image anticipating the following Bonds featuring Craig; in each and every one there is at 
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least one scene where his toned naked body is almost fully displayed to the audience. As a result, the 
actor has landed high on successive magazine and internet lists of Sexiest Man Alive. 
Craig’s swimsuit scene is only one of the many examples of the ‘intertextual space’ constituted by the 
Bond franchise. With each imminent new release, TV stations begin rerunning older Bonds while TV 
and cinema commercials show scenes including the product lines of the sponsors of the upcoming
film. The renewal of the Bond actor produces incessant speculations about possible new candidates 
in show news, celebrity magazines, twitter feeds and more. When the name of black actor Idris Elba 
came up as a possible successor to Craig, intense and divisive discussions whether Bond could be 
black appeared in various social media and news forums, one of the arguments in favor being that if 
the US could have a black president, MI6 could certainly have a black agent. Some of the arguments 
against would go back to the description of Bond in the original Ian Fleming novels as being white 
with black hair and blue-grey eyes, thus claiming authority of the novels over the film. Other 
digressions from the original novels have met with similar disdain, for instance when Craig’s Bond in 
Casino Royal answered the iconic Martini question ‘shaken or stirred’ with ‘ do I look like a give a 
damn’, and later drank Heineken beer instead. All of these examples testify to the fact that a James 
Bond movie is always more than a self-contained text from which audiences derive meaning and 
pleasure. Of course there will be novice audiences for Bond who will miss many of the intertextual 
finesses that the true fans will pick up on. But newcomers, too, will bring in intertextual knowledge 
and compare, for instance, Bond to other action heroes or spy narratives they do know. 
Both the long-running of the Bond franchise and its intertextual richness have made it a popular 
topic for academic reflection, beginning with Bennet and Woollacot’s 1986 work Bond and beyond; 
the political career of a popular hero. In it they compare, among other things, the Bond of the original 
Ian Fleming novels with the Bonds in the various films, concluding that the film Bond is a somewhat 
more relaxed and amiable personality, than the dark and cynical character of the novels. They 
describe how changing social and geopolitical circumstances are reflected in Bond, especially in the 
framing of the enemy; a phenomenon that has become all the more clear after the fall of the Iron 
Curtain when decades of East-European and Russian enemies of Bond were replaced by the Chinese, 
multimedia conglomerates or – in the recent Spectre – surveillance and intelligence agencies running
wild. Spectre, for that matter, is also an older enemy of Bond, already present in the 1971 Diamonds 
are forever. Bennett and Woollacott also pointed out the traditional gender relations in Bond, a 
theme later picked up by other authors, especially Robert Caplan in Shaken or Stirred: the feminism 
of James Bond (2012). In it, he describes how the Bond girl served as a strong counterforce to the 
new wave of feminism appearing in the mid-1960s and 1970s, by portraying and celebrating 
traditional femininity - vulnerable and passive. However, the influence of the second wave women’s