Cut It, Fold It, Mash It, Hack It

Lemonlewis points out her issues with Robe Pope's "Re-writing Texts, Re-constructing the Subject: Work as Play on the Critical-Creative Interface," and I can understand her confusion. However, I think part of Pope's theory relies on a reader-response attitude, to an extent, because his idea assumes that each individual reader interacts with the text different, and through that interaction, creates something meaningful. In reader-response, we call this "the poem," but I think Pope's idea re-imagines an old idea. 

He proposes that what we re-write in our head is not only an interaction between reader and text, but a tool used to better understand the original text in a critical way. 

Awolewel raises a few questions about the validity of this juxtaposition between the original and the cut-up/mash/fold-in. He asks, "Is interpretation invasive?" (awolewel). In my opinion? Yes, it is invasive. 

But, I think that critical reading, thinking, and understanding is meant to be invasive, to both the writer and the reader. If the reader is not meant to interact with the text and produce their own original interpretations, then the text fails, in my opinion. Pope's ideas only take the interactive concept and push it a step further by suggesting re-imagined texts can be integrated in literary criticism. 

I was thinking about how exactly hacking texts allows the reader to better understand the original, and I came to the conclusion that it's similar to when you learn forms of poetry. For example, the Shakespearean sonnet has a very specific form that is easier to understand (in my opinion) when the writer/reader has engaged in writing an original sonnet. It allows the reader/writer to gain perspective about the effort that goes into creating sonnets; therefore, their understanding of other sonnets grows deeper. 

I would argue that this kind of writing method (cut-up, mash, fold-in, etc.) could be implemented in the tinkering pedagogy we talked about earlier, and help students simultaneously understand their own voice and the voice of the author's they're studying.