Rules of Engagement INTERTEXTUALITY AND NARRATIVE

Earlier in the year, I was teaching a class about audience consumption, engagement and reception of film. In defining engagement, I provided an example that I knew for sure certain students would be consuming.

‘Who will be seeing the new Avengers movie next week?’ I inquired. Immediately, four or five hands shot up.

‘And what do you expect it to be like?’ I asked one of them.

‘I don’t know,’ came the reply with a shrug.

‘You don’t know?’

‘Nope.’

‘So why are you so keen to see it, then?’

‘Because it’s The Avengers!’

Although franchises weren’t the juggernaut that they are today back when I was growing up on a healthy diet of popular cinema, sequels were nonetheless a welcome commodity. A sequel was an opportunity to return to a text that was loved the first time around; whether it was Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (Richard Marquand, 1983), Back to the Future Part II (Robert Zemeckis, 1989) or even Ghostbusters II (Ivan Reitman, 1989), it was a chance to revisit that world and its stories and characters, and audiences had expectations of what they were getting back into. We wanted to feel the same excitement that we had experienced the first time around, the same love or tension.

My student’s reply fascinated me, not due to her vague response – something that I have become used to when asking students to describe an emotional relationship with a text – but due to her expressing a relationship with the text that didn’t even seem to be based on emotions. It simply was.

Does it matter whether students engage with the texts that we show them, or is it the construction of the narrative that is most important? As graduate teachers, we are shown the importance of student engagement – the