So, I’m a huge fan of writing that alters our traditional ways of constructing texts (perhaps that’s why I blog a lot, it’s remediation and often multivocal). When I taught middle school and when I student taught high school, I taught the Multi-genre paper, outlined by Tom Romano, which I love. And I’ve seen other sort of assignments that alter the normal critical paper or the normal report — that alter expectations and show criticism, analysis, and synthesis in less traditional manners — Sirc proposes this in his book, in a way that sounds pretty cool to me.
I just read Rob Pope’s chapter in Teaching Literature: A Companion, edited by Tanya Agathocleous and Ann C. Dean, for my Literature and Pedogogy class, and I really like the proposed analysis re-writing assignment that he proposes. The assignment that he describes — that he offers a guide to, really — is one of “re-writing,” which “is here chiefly understood such strategies as parody, imitation, adaptation, and especially, intervention” (105). Pope says his project corresponds to ideas proposed by Umberto Eco, Alan Sinfield, Robert Scholes, Adirenne Rich, Alice Walker, and Gayatri Spivak. Students re-write texts that are accompanied by commentaries: “if the re-write is at the implicitly ‘creative,’ performance-based end of the interpretative spectrum, the commentary is at the explicitly ‘critical’ end” (106).
This assignment is exciting, I think, and draws on theories of reading (“In reading texts we re-write them”), intrepetation (which means “interaction with texts” and “intervention in texts”), intertextuality, interpersonality, critique as re-creation and reconstruction, and performance (isn’t criticism always performance and creation?) (108). I suggest people check out this chapter, if you’re reading here, and I think if I ever teach literature, I’ll try to incorporate something like this.
Pope, Rob. “Re-writing Texts, Re-constructing the Subject: Work as Play on the Critical-Creative Interface.” Teaching Literature: A Companion. Ed. Tanya Agathocleous and Ann C. Dean. London: Palgrave, 2003. 105+.
Do see Pope’s book Textual Intervention: Critical and Creative Strategies for Literary Studies, which is his most detailed discussion of this idea. And while Pope presents textual intervention as something to do with literary texts, it can be used in composition and rhetoric courses as well. In fact, I’d argue that it’s an extention of the classical pedagogical practice of copying, imitation, translation, and paraphrase.
Thanks for the suggestion, John! Your analysis sounds pretty accurate, I’d say.
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