Reported speech and intertextuality

This week I'm reading up on reported speech and direct quotations in the context of intertextuality. This will inform my writing on how Christian missionaries in 19th century Yorubaland (today Southwest Nigeria) used intertextual bonds, e.g. biblical quotations and imagery but also self-quotations, in their letters and journals to write themselves into the Christian narrative of 'spreading the word'. I'm particularly focussing on how the missionaries report on conversations they allegedly had with members of the native population and from which they inevitably emerge as 'winners'. This phenomenon of self-reported speech is discussed by Rebecca Clift in her 2006 paper "Indexing stance: Reported speech as an interactional evidential." Clift argues that conventional means of marking stance towards a statement or event (adverbs like 'presumably' or constructions like 'It may be that..') are not used in the context of self-reported speech. Clift remarks that if someone reports on their own words, this self-quotation is seemingly "epistemically robust: no markers of uncertainty or mitigation could here undermine the authority of the reporting" (Clift 2006: 572). I'm wondering how this can be transferred to the missionaries' writing and their acts of self-quotation. By quoting themselves, thus showing themselves in a positive light because they reportedly 'won' the religious arguments with the non-Christian population, the missionaries establish epistemic authority and accountability and construct a feeling of authenticity. At the same time, I cannot ignore John Peel's remark that a "hermeneutic of deep suspicion" (Peel 2003: 12) seems to be in order regarding the veracity of the missionaries' accounts.

I'm going to update this post after reading Greg Matoesian's 2000 paper on "Intertextual authority in reported speech: Production media in the Kennedy Smith rape trial."

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Sources: 

Clift, R. (2006): Indexing stance: Reported speech as an interactional evidential. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10/5, 569-595.

 Peel, J. (2003): Religious encounter and the making of the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.