In chapter 11, Rice discusses “the beats”; white, male, educated writers who started a new movement in American literature rethinking relationships to American culture. Although there were several writers, Rice only talks about two, Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs and how they rhetorically created alternative forms of expression on views such as the relationships to state, educational, and cultural control.
Spontaneous writing as Kerouac called it, is the writing of whatever came to mind as quickly as possible. The image of this writing style is actually more important than spontaneously writing. Influencing this style was the fact that through the 50’s and 60’s technology was developing at a very rapid speed. Nostalgic writing is effective with creative a sense of longing in its audience. Through television, nostalgia can give the audience a sense of, with a Nike commerical, that wearing their product can make you feel and look like a certain sports player. Nostalgia also arose in popular television shows like Happy Days.
“The cut-up involves taking a piece of writing, cutting it into at least four sections, then rearranging the sections in new ways.” Doing so allows for different perspectives on previous works revealing new ideas and even counteracting the original meaning and purpose of a text. While Burroughs used this technique as a means to critique, technology has now taken this for granted, using ‘cut and paste’ technology to take unrelated images and putting them into an SUV commercia,l for example making the commercial a more powerful and more persuasive one.
Juxtaposition is the use of putting items togheter, sometimes items that have nothing to do with one another. Burroughs uses juxtapositon to defamiliarize images, languages, relationships and roles we normally take for granted. The use of juxtaposition as Burrough mentioned in The Subliminal Kid where the kid remixes recordings and plays them in order to present different arguments, can also and is used for cool writing, as is nostalgia and spontaneous writing to make new and more powerful persuasive arguements.
Chapter 12 Rice discusses how literacy through the development of technology has advanced. In the 1500’s not many people could read or write, but as technology advanced so did education and literacy. As literacy advances so does techonology. Skratching records a.k.a ’skratchadelia’ is a means of skratching records producing a rhythm. Rice states that, “[l]ike sampling, skratching integrates the technology itself into the process.” Skratching puts together the tools of technology into the writing process. Skratching is an example of the cut and paste act, producing something new, therefore, is important to cool writing in how it creates its own literate practice through the development of computer technology.
