An Intertextual Analysis Of Political Discourse From The Perspective Of Memetics

The present research is a critical analysis of the intertextuality of political discourse, which sets its theoretical basis on the Memetic Theory for the simple reason that the realization process of intertextuality in political discourse is similar to the meme transmission and replication to a large extent. Memetic explanation and interpretation of the realization of intertextuality in political discourse is conducive to the further understanding of the underlying power relations, ideology, implications delivered in it.It is a widely-accepted idea that intertextuality is the common feature of all texts. Intertextuality is the shaping of texts'meanings by other texts, and can refer to an author's borrowing and transformation of prior text or to a reader's reference of one text in reading another. The study of intertextuality is, to some extent, confined to the literary field. The Chinese scholar Xu Shenghuan (2005) carried out research on the intertextuality of literary works in terms of Memetics, which, in turn, gave implications to study intertextuality of non-literary works. This further provides support for the current study.Meme, from the perspective of Memetics, is a unit of cultural transmission which propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. This point overlaps the idea of shaping texts by other texts, which, actually, can be explained as imitating something from other sources to form the present one.Based on Fairclough's classification of manifest intertextuality and constitutive intertextuality and He Ziran's classification of meme replication, this paper forms a conceptual framework. Within this framework, this paper is a qualitative study which collects some materials relevant to politics, including mainly political speeches, partly some news reports on political events and a handful of political statements, to show how those politics-related objectives are achieved by the different approaches of intertextuality.Specifically, intertextual approaches such as quotation, allusion, reference, cliche and conventionalism which belong to the memotype of meme replication mainly contribute to manifest intertextuality; whereas parody belongs to the phenotype of meme replication. For constitutive intertextuality, generic intertextuality, thematic intertextuality, structural intertextuality and rhetorical intertextuality are discussed with examples.This research provides a new way to explain the intertextuality in non-literary field and gives some implications for further study on political discourse.