Rewriting: How To Do Things With Texts

4 Taking an Approach

73 4 Taking an Approach . . . nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. —William Shakespeare, The Tempest It’s the same old song But with a different meaning Since you’ve been gone. —Holland/Dozier/Holland,“It’s the Same Old Song” The various moves I’ve talked about so far in this book—coming to terms, forwarding, and countering—are ways of marking out your words and ideas from those of the texts you are working with. The very typography of academic writing speaks to this concern, with its use of quotation marks, text blocks, separate fonts, and notes to distinguish the separate voices that make up an essay. By noting what others have had to say on a subject, defining where their thinking ends and yours begins, you can make your own stance as a writer all the more clear. Indeed, a useful move in revising a critical essay is to go back through a draft and highlight where you quote or represent the work of others and where you develop your own line of argument. (See the Projects box “Tracking Influences” at the end of this chapter.) In doing so, you will often see the shape of a dialogue begin to appear in your writing, as you alternate between restating the views of others and responding to and making use of their work. In this chapter, however, I want to turn to a use of other texts that is harder to mark with 74 Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts precision but is nonetheless a key move in much intellectual writing—and that is working in the mode of another writer, or what I will call taking an approach. There is a weak version of taking an approach in which one assumes the role of a disciple, adopting (rather than adapting) the moves and interests of another thinker. This often leads to a form of school writing with which you are no doubt familiar—the essay in which you are asked to apply the ideas of a writer to a certain subject, with the aim not so much of testing those ideas but of proving their validity. Almost any of the texts I’ve quoted in this book could serve as the basis for this sort of assignment:Apply your reading of John Berger to the depiction of women in fashion magazines. Or, apply your reading of Alexander Nehamas to another disdained medium—to comic books or musical shows or romance novels or whatever.And so on.When done in a routine fashion, such writing merely provides more examples of what has already been argued by Berger or Nehamas or whomever.Little new knowledge is created. Instead the disciple simply shows that the master is correct. To make new knowledge your examples need to raise problems for your theory. It has to turn out, for instance, that the images of women in fashion magazines don’t jibe entirely with the ideas of John Berger. And then as a writer you need to come up with some ideas of your own about both how to read those images and how to rewrite Berger in order to better account for them. When you take on the approach of another writer both your thinking and theirs need to change. Otherwise you are simply applying ideas to examples. To transform is to reshape , not to replace or rebut. The original does not go away but is remade into something new. Such a reworking of materials goes on all the time in fiction, film, Intertexts Aretha Franklin, “Respect,” Natural Woman (Atlantic, 1967). Herbie Hancock, Cantaloupe Island,” Empyrean Blues (Blue Note, 1964). Jimi Hendrix, “Star-Spangled Banner,” Woodstock (Atlantic, 1967). Bruce Hornsby, “The Way It Is,” The Way It Is (RCA, 1986). Otis Redding, “Respect,” Otis Blue (Atlantic, 1965). Tupac Shakur, “Changes,” 2Pac’s Greatest Hits (Amaru/Deathrow/Interscope ,1998). US3, “Flip Fantasia,” Hand on the Torch (Blue Note, 1993). Taking an Approach 75 and music. The cover song, in which one musician reinterprets a song associated with another, is a staple of rock and roll. And what you listen for in a good cover is not an imitation of the original,as in karaoke or American Idol, but a new rendering of it. Think of Aretha Franklin turning Otis Redding’s macho demand for “Respect” into an assertion of female...