Chapter 11
Chapter 11 begins by discussing “The Beats”. They were a group of writers that started their own movement in literature. The chapter discusses Jack Kercuac’s, one of the members of the “The Beat”, spontaneous writing. Spontaneous writing is when sentences change from one idea to another without having a transition. It contains a random shift of ideas and narrations. It has no particular order, but just constant rambling. A writer can use certain words to inspire more ideas and make a random shift in topic. It can be imagined as a writer who has many thoughts running through his head and trying to get it all written down. Kerouac’s “The Subterraneans” is written in this format but purposefully and with editing.
Rice states that Kerouac’s rhetoric of race is that instead of applying Kerouac’s personal views on racism we should approach it from a rhetorical view of his thoughts and words that he uses to describe race. To better understand how attitudes are formed though rhetoric we should pay more attention not to the personal beliefs of the writer but the rhetoric ideas.
Rice defines nostalgia as a longing of the past. It is the longing of past feelings and situations and our desires for them to return. Kerouac uses nostalgia as a form of critique. He uses nostalgic feelings to tell a story, for example telling the story of a deceased brother the memory uses nostalgic experiences to retrive the past.
Rice moves on to discuss another member of “The Beat”, William Burrough. Burrough discusses the idea of the cut-up. A cut-up takes place when a part of a writing is cut into different sections then arranged in a different order. Therefore creating a new meaning from what was organially written. For example we can take a political speech that has a particular meaning to it and have it cut-up. After doing this the entire meaning of the speech is changed. When we use word processor we use cut-up through the process of cut and paste. Juxtaposition is basically the same thing as cut-ups.
Burrough’s novel “Nova Express” showed a character named The Subliminal Kid. This character experimented with tape recording. The character would place recorders in various public areas. He would use these recordings and mix them together and create a juxtaposition with new ideas and arguments.
Chapter 12
In chapter 12 Rice discusses how skratching shapes it’s own literate practice. To most people when they hear the word skratching they understand it as skratching records or also known as skratchadelia. How does this techology of skratching apply to writing? Rice answers this through Peter Elbow. Elbow uses the example of freewriting. We write all our ideas down and come back to sort out the writings into a meaningful idea. In music freewriting is called freestyle.
