Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
* This project would not have been possible without the generosity of the members of the Washington Improv Theater community, who opened their lives to me and let me be a part of their world as I was conducting this research. Thank you for your humor, your encouragement, your wisdom, and your patience. I am deeply grateful and indebted to Cynthia Gordon, Heidi Hamilton, Natalie Schilling, Deborah Schiffrin, and Deborah Tannen for rich critical feedback and for shaping me as a researcher and teaching me to be a better writer. I am especially grateful for feedback from Margaret Toye and colleagues at Bangor University's Department of Linguistics Research Seminar, Scott Kiesling and other participants at the 17th Sociolinguistics Symposium in Amsterdam, and Barbara Johnstone and the two anonymous reviewers from this journal. Finally to colleagues and friends in linguistics Inge Stockburger, Anastasia Nylund, Rebecca Rubin Damari, and many others for their inspirational work, encouragement, and advice. Finally, to Rachel Millward for providing me a quiet place to work as I was putting the final touches on this manuscript.
Introduction
In this investigation, I draw from ethnographic participation with a community of long form improvisational theater (improv) performers in Washington, DC to explore a type of language play based on intertextuality. Specifically, I focus on interactions recorded backstage (while performers are getting ready for their show) when group members spontaneously and collaboratively shift frames to create games. Adopting a process approach to intertextuality, or the relationships among texts, I explore how texts are entextualized, decontextualized, and recontextualized (cf. Bauman & Briggs 1990) in the creation of these games as a creative, interactional resource, which are a major aspect of how this community does being a community both onstage, and crucially offstage as well. Building on the work of Blommaert (2005:47), who suggests that entextualization "turns intertextuality into an empirical research programme," I investigate how the meaning and interpretation of use of entextualization is cued through framing. First, to understand the function of intertextual play, I consider which texts are used by group members and crucially how they are entextualized, illustrating how this process serves an important function in the why of intertextuality, demonstrating community reaffirmation, as evidenced in member socialization.