A storm as trigger: From ancient poetic text to a written piece of intertextual reception?

The two authors of this article have been conducting a joint research project for several years which seeks to train students in the sensitive literary reading of a Latin poetic text. The teaching scenario consists of several steps: 1. The students analyse the poetic form and content of a Latin text in the original language, in this case, an excerpt from Book 1 of Virgil’s Aeneid; 2. They compare the Latin text with a modern literary or other work, analysing its means of expression – in this case, an excerpt from E.E. Schmitt’s Traversée des temps; 3. They use the knowledge and skills gained from both the Latin text and the other work to create a text on the same theme in the school’s general medium of instruction, which is, in this case, French.
The article explores the following question: Can the texts produced by students in the final step be considered intertextual, given that they are written with reference to other texts? To answer this question, the authors first clarify the concept of intertextuality. Next, they summarise the teaching scenario which leads the students to produce their texts before subsequently conducting micro- and macro-level analyses to determine intertextual references to the two texts studied. The analysis reveals that the students’ written output can indeed be considered intertextual and that the teaching scenario lends itself to fostering intertextual writing, regardless of the languages involved.