Omotayo Modupeola Olakojo

Intertextuality is commonplace in creative works of the postmodern era. However, in the electronic world of secondary orality, the limits of intertextuality vis-a-vis plagiarism are rather difficult to determine. Electronic media are, by nature, easily submerged in one another; similarly, the nature of orality is that texts are not closed, neither is authorship exclusive. With the instruments of key informant and in-depth interviews (with bloggers and an intellectual property expert respectively), close textual reading (of blog posts), and questionnaire (for blog readers), this research will find out the points of convergence and divergence between intertextuality and plagiarism in three selected Nigerian blogs via the three components of the theory of intertextuality: author, text and reader. Plagiarism is expected to take on a new interpretation as particular attention is paid to individual versus communal ownership of creative works in an online environment in a residually oral society like Nigeria.