Exploring Intertextuality In Commercial Advertisements: A Memetic Approach

Intertextuality is a term coined by the French semiotician Julia Kristeva in the late 1960s. It represents relationships between texts that every text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations, an absorption and transmission of another text. From then on, intertextuality has become one of the most important words of literary theory and cultural studies. Intertextuality in non-literary works such as advertisements also arouses scholars' interests. However, little research has been done on the analysis of the mechanism generating intertextuality. The birth of memetics provides a possible explanation for this question.Richard Dawkins proposes the term "meme" by imitating the word "gene" in 1976. A meme is treated as a unit of cultural transmission or a unit of imitation. Every piece of information can be called a meme if it is replicated through imitation in a broad sense. The forms of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases and so on. This theory enables us to analyze intertextuality from the perspective of meme spreading. Xu Shenghuan (2005) is the first scholar who analyzes intertextuality in literary works from the memetic perspective, illuminating the feasibility of the memetic approach to intertextuality. As intertextuality is ubiquitous not only in literary works but also in non-literary works, there is still room left for us to analyze intertextuality in commercial advertisements form the memetic approach and further prove that intertextuality results from spreading of memes.The thesis consists of five chapters, which are organized as follows:Chapter One serves as an introduction, covering the aims and significance, data collection and research methodology, and the layout of the thesis as well.Chapter Two is literature review. After introducing the origin, definition and classification of intertextuality, a review of advertisement is given including definition, function of advertising, and approaches of analyzing advertisement. As for previous studies on intertextuality in advertisements, they focus on the representations of intertextualtiy without pointing out the mechanism generating intertextualisty.Chapter Three establishes the theoretical framework for the study, where the origin, definition, and some relative terms such as memotype and memetic phenotype as well as characteristics and life circles of memes are discussed. At the end of the chapter, we explain the relationship between intertextuality and memes and suggest that intertextuality grows out of spreading and imitating of memes.Chapter Four analyzes intertextuality in commercial advertisements from the memetic perspective. It starts with intertextual nature of advertisements and basic notions of intertextuality in advertisements. Then the twenty-eight commercial advertising campaigns are classified into four types according to the intertextual approaches they employ, that is, citation, allusion, parody and cultural intertextuality. Detailed illustration is given to every sample to explain how memes spread and function in each type. We find that the former three types are approaches by which concrete language memes are transmitted while cultural intertextuality reflects the process in which memes of certain value or belief are spreading.Chapter Five summarizes the findings of the present study and acknowledges the limitations of the thesis. Some suggestions for further studies are also made.