Chapter 11 mainly focuses on the Beat Generation, a group of young, white, male writers gathering in Greenwich Village and San Francisco. These individuals all share feelings of disillusionment and alienation, and called themselves “The Beats” due to a sense of self-despair and holiness. These men gave birth to an entirely new movement in American literature. They felt as if the contemporary literary techniques in use at the time were not the best ways of expression, and they introduced new approaches to the construction of literature. Rice mainly focuses on two of these authors, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. Both tried to echo the changes in technology in their writings. Kerouac’s works examined in the text were On The Road and The Subterraneans. He uses unconventional prose in which sentences run together and jump abruptly from idea to idea. Kerouac called this technique spontaneous writing. This was a very effective style to depict the speed of technology during this time period. Kerouac brought new dimensions into his writing, in which he assumes audience awareness, even when it may not be there. Another style the author uses is a distinct rhetorical racial perspective in his writing. Kerouac invokes nostalgia in his readers to achieve a certain emotion of longing, and alters the way one perceives the past. William S. Burroughs enlists the help of the “cut-up method” to rearrange and appropriate text in his novels. This method is a great example of a remix in that the author creates a new work by using old text from other literature pieces. This is also known as juxtaposition, and this serves to change our preconceptions on familiar ideas.
Chapter 12 focuses on technology, and the influential role it plays in literature. Rice examines electronic writing in this chapter, in all different forms, including those prevalent in hip-hop and scratching. Hip-hop became what man DJs consider a modern form of literacy. DJs have used old records and turntables to perfect this craft, and it is a perfect example of how technology guides and shapes expression. Through the art of “skratching”, DJs can claim a new language, in turn creating a new literacy. Skratching involves the manipulation of a record’s rhythms and beats by controlling the record’s spin. These DJs were not necessarily financially endowed, so many were forced to build their own turntables out of old turntables or basically anything they could find. This is an example of remix because of the integration of old technology to create a piece of new technology. Rice concludes that this is a revolutionary new practice, and due to the fact that scratching is a rhetorical act, the act is actually its own literate practice.
