Tie-Intertextuality, or, Intertextuality as Incorporation in the Tie-in Merchandise to Disney’sAlice in Wonderland(2010)

Abstract

Abstract Tie-in merchandise for Walt Disney’s and Tim Burton’s film, Alice in Wonderland (2010), dislocates and modifies prior theories of intertextuality in adaptation studies with the intertextual practices of corporate entertainment franchises. Poststructuralist and postmodern theories of intertextuality construct it as a subversive and democratizing operation, dispersing meaning among texts, dismantling high/low art hierarchies, and redistributing interpretive authority among artists, professional critics, and ordinary audiences. Even when tie-in merchandise for the Disney-Burton film is subversive of mainstream Disney aesthetics and ideologies, Disney and its licensed tie-in merchandising affiliates engage in rhetoric and practices that reincorporate dispersed and contesting intertexts, producing a portmanteau of ‘tie-intertextuality’. Consumers as well as products are tied in or incorporated as corporate intertexts through a rhetoric and iconography of acting, interactivity, inspiration, incarnation, and fidelity. The effect is more one of capitalist dialogics than of the Marxist dialectics academics have traditionally championed in theories of intertextuality.

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