Experimental Writing - Creative Repurposing

CREATIVE REPURPOSING

Like the readymades of Marcel Duchamp or the Brillo Box pop art of Andy Warhol, much experimental writing repurposes older source texts to produce new works, too. The methods employed to transform old sources, though, are surprisingly various. These include parody, pastiche, détournement, experimental translation, co-opted forms (such as the “hermit crab essay”), counterfeits (such as The Poems of Ossian), retellings (like fractured fairytales and Empire Writes Back), found texts, centos, cut-ups, Flarf, collage, erasures, palimpsests, remixes, sampling, mashups, and more. Sometimes merely the structural properties of an official document are extracted as the template of a story, as with co-opted forms. At other times, the narrative content of a well-known classic is rewritten from a point of view left out from the original, as with retellings. In still other cases, the exact words of the source might simply be reframed in a radically different context, profoundly changing their significance, as with found texts. Yet again, the sound properties alone might be transliterated from a poem in a foreign language, as with certain pieces of experimental translation. These techniques frequently challenge simpleminded notions of “originality” that proliferate in creative writing discourse.

Such acts of Creative Repurposing can have many different goals, as well, whether that’s to pay homage to predecessors, critique the canon, invent an archetypal story anew, lampoon the absurdity of bureaucratic paperwork, ironize a vapid political statement, play with historical styles, or reclaim a narrative distorted by Orientalism. Whenever writers make use of previous texts, incorporating elements into their own work, they are both implicitly commenting on the past and changing the meaning of their source. The past is either inert and forgotten or it is unstable and, therefore, restless and alive, as demonstrated by Borges’s parable Pierre Menard. Nevertheless, the injudicious (ab)use of source texts can raise the specters of plagiarism and cultural appropriation. We urge authors to consider not only what they choose to appropriate and how they cite or attribute their sources, but also the circumstances of why, how, where, from whom, and for whom they do so. A sensitivity to the political and cultural relationships that mediate between the source and the new work is paramount to anticipating the impact of a piece of Creative Repurposing, most especially when historically disempowered cultures or authorial identities have prior claims upon a source.

Links

● Dodie Bellamy, from Cunt Norton

● Fred Benenson (ed.), emoji dick

● Tyrone Williams, “Code Calls”

● Victoria Buitron, “Quiz: Moments of Definition”

● Jorge Luis Borges’s Pierre Menard, The Author of Quixote

● NeoFuturists, Trailer for Collected Stage Directions of Eugene O’Neill, Vol. 2

● James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian

● Annie Dillard, “A Natural History of Getting Through the Year”

● William Shatner performs Sarah Palin speeches on “The Tonight Show”

● “The Wizard People, Dear Reader: Harry Boils (Chapter 26)”

● Frany Choi, “Turing Test”