IB DP Language A: Literature -- Intertextuality: Practice Questions

These are original questions written for Marlbridge, in the style and at the standard of the examination. They are not reproduced past-paper questions – the IB holds copyright in its own papers. Use these alongside the official past papers available through your school or the IB store.

Related: Intertextuality study guide and revision notes.

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Section A

1. Distinguish an intertextual “echo,” a “response,” and a “subversion.” [3]

2. State the three questions that should structure a genuine comparative analysis of two literary works. [3]

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Section B

3. A student writes: “Both novels are about grief, so they are easy to compare.” Explain why this statement, on its own, does not yet demonstrate the analytical skill this component rewards. [3]

4. Two studied works were written a century apart, in very different cultures, but both centre on a character who defies an arranged marriage.

(a) Explain why comparing these two works requires attention to their different historical and cultural contexts, rather than treating the shared plot element as sufficient common ground on its own. [4] (b) Suggest one way a comparative essay could use this contextual difference to say something neither work would reveal alone. [3]

5. Explain how preparing Intertextuality alongside Time and Space, rather than as two separate blocks of content, can produce a stronger comparative essay. [4]

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Section C

6. A comparative essay pairs a novel written from a colonising power’s perspective with a later novel that retells overlapping events from a colonised character’s perspective. Using the terms “echo,” “response” and “subversion,” explain how a student might characterise the relationship between the two texts, and why naming the relationship precisely matters more than simply noting the works are “connected.” [8]

7. Explain how the comparative skills developed for Intertextuality transfer directly to the individual oral. [6]

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Worked answers

1. An echo or homage borrows form or content admiringly from an earlier work. A response engages critically or in dialogue with an earlier work’s ideas, without necessarily rejecting them outright. A subversion deliberately overturns or undermines the conventions or assumptions of an earlier work or genre. [3]

2. What specifically connects the two works (a precise shared concern or technique, not just a broad shared topic); how each work treats that shared element differently; and what comparing them reveals that reading either work alone would not. [3]

3. The statement identifies only a broad shared theme (“grief”) without specifying how each novel treats grief differently, or what comparing the two treatments actually reveals. Two works can share a broad theme while saying almost opposite things about it, so noting the shared topic alone – without the second and third questions of the comparative structure – does not yet constitute analysis; it is closer to a starting observation than a finished comparative point. [3]

4. (a) A shared plot element (defying an arranged marriage) can mean something very different depending on the social, legal and cultural expectations around marriage in each work’s own time and place – what counts as a radical act of defiance in one context might be a much smaller act of resistance, or carry different consequences, in another. Treating the plot similarity as sufficient common ground risks flattening these real differences into a superficial “both stories are alike” observation. [4] (b) A reasonable answer: the essay could argue that comparing how each character’s defiance is narratively rewarded, punished, or received by other characters reveals what each surrounding society implicitly valued or feared about individual choice versus family or social obligation – a contrast that only becomes visible once the historical and cultural context of each work’s marriage customs is accounted for explicitly, rather than assumed to be equivalent. [3]

5. Understanding a work’s own historical and cultural context (Time and Space) is often the key to explaining why it echoes, responds to, or subverts another work in the specific way it does (Intertextuality) – for example, a work’s subversive treatment of a genre convention may only make sense once its original readers’ expectations, shaped by their own time and place, are understood. Preparing the two components together, rather than as separate blocks, means a student is more likely to explain the “why” behind an intertextual relationship rather than only describing “what” the relationship is, which is exactly the deeper level of analysis Paper 2 rewards. [4]

6. A student might characterise the later novel as primarily a response to the earlier one, since it engages critically and in dialogue with the colonising-perspective novel’s account of the same events, rather than simply admiring or imitating its form. Where the later novel actively centres a perspective the earlier work marginalised or excluded, that specific move is better described as a subversion: it deliberately overturns the assumption, built into the earlier work’s narrative structure, about whose experience is worth telling in detail. Naming the relationship this precisely – response and subversion, rather than a vaguer “echo” or simply “connected” – matters because it commits the essay to a specific argument about how the later work engages with the earlier one, which then gives the comparison a clear analytical throughline: every subsequent point about structure, voice or detail can be tied back to how it enacts that subversion, rather than the essay drifting into two separate summaries loosely linked by a shared setting. [8]

7. The individual oral pairs a work originally written in the studied language with a work studied in translation, connected around a common global issue – structurally, this is the same task as an intertextual comparison: identifying a specific point of connection between two works, rather than describing each in isolation, and explaining what comparing them reveals about the shared global issue that neither text would show alone. The three-question structure practised for Intertextuality (what connects them specifically, how each treats it differently, what the comparison reveals) transfers directly to structuring the oral’s spoken commentary, and the habit of accounting for each work’s own context, developed through this component’s connection to Time and Space, supports the oral’s expectation that candidates discuss how each work’s own context shapes its treatment of the global issue. [6]

Official syllabus

International Baccalaureate Organization, Diploma Programme Subject Brief – Language A: Literature, first assessment 2021, (c) 2019 – the same source cited by the study guide and revision notes. Verified 2026-09-06.