“ESPERA CON FRUTOS”

In 1977, poet Ronald Johnson systematically erased words, phrases, and even whole sentences from Milton’s Paradise Lost to produce a new poem reduced to the title Radi Os. Two hundred years earlier James Buchanan had methodically converted the first six books of Paradise Lost into prose-style syntax, keeping the diction intact and placing this “translation” alongside the original as a guide for readers. Several of Buchanan’s contemporaries had already undertaken similar projects of adaptation and translation, seeking to correct, improve, or simplify Milton’s epic (see Green, Hopkins, and Jackson, for example). Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, snippets of Paradise Lost were scattered across countless instructional texts to assist in teaching grammar, rhetoric, reading, writing, and speaking. And in recent years, new paraphrases and prose renditions have emerged, as writers continue to fiddle with Milton’s language to entertain and instruct ever more modern readers.17 _{As these examples suggest, works of reuse} easily intersect with what I am calling “the literary domain”: writing with and about literature. In

17 _{Translations of Paradise Lost advertise their services in remarkably consistent ways. In the preface to his 1994} Paradise Lost: The Novel, Joseph Lanzara claims, “To the legions who never embarked on this poem’s heroic

journey, or who, not knowing better, did, only to meet quick defeat in its convoluted syntax or endless digression, is dedicated this simplified version, which promises new access to long buried treasure” (n. pag.). A blurb on the back cover of Dennis Danielson’s more recent parallel prose edition likewise proclaims, “Dennis Danielson’s new edition of Milton’s great epic offers a vibrant, authoritative rendition in modern prose alongside the original text of Milton’s story of heroism, pathos, beauty, and grace, making accessible for the first time a work that continues to be acclaimed as ‘possibly the most profound meditation on good and evil ever written’” (n. pag.). In their emphasis on accessibility, these rationales also echo those of Buchanan and Green in the eighteenth century. Buchanan acknowledges that Paradise Lost “has been generally found to be above the capacities of ordinary readers” and thus hopes to render “this first English classic universally read with ease and delight” (1). And Green endeavors to

manipulating literary sources, one may create a new or alternative piece of literature, practice writing or reading, or find a starting point for further text generation. In short, then, this literary domain offers vast potential for invention through reuse, regardless of which official institutional context a person or work comes to occupy.

When writing with and about literature, one might look for guidance from a handbook such as They Say/I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein. As their title indicates, Graff and Birkenstein supply techniques for writing in relation to others’ words and ideas (sources that may be literary). They have examined samples of critical writing in order to extract from them common rhetorical moves that effectively position one’s contributions with regard to others. In their shift from extracting these “moves that matter” to distilling them into abstract, content-less templates, however, Graff and Birkenstein present textual structures that merely evince strategies, not moves in a more active sense.18 _What emerge are reductively mechanical approaches to positioning one’s ideas. These approaches stress an easy division between what “they say” and what “I say,” a readymade relationship between one’s own ideas and those that came before them. Yet as the examples in the previous paragraph indicate, such clean division is not always possible or desirable. Innovative reuse often blurs the boundaries between old and new, integrating both into one text (such as a translation) in ways that Graff and Birkenstein do not sanction even while proclaiming that “one of the main pieces of advice in this book is to write the voices of others into your text” (3). For Graff and Birkenstein, writing the voices of others into one’s text is a seriously limited endeavor dependent upon simplistic, conservative notions of textual ownership and positioning.

18 _{To clarify, They Say/I Say does not deal entirely with textual reuse. Sometimes following its templates will}

As Chapter 1 demonstrated, writers like David Shields have been practicing alternative critical approaches that embrace the kind of textual blending and blurring that Graff and Birkenstein discourage. Reality Hunger and Jonathan Lethem’s essay “The Ecstasy of Influence” have established that writers can combine critical with creative techniques to produce compelling hybrid texts that comment on reuse while experimenting with its moves.19 In Reality Hunger “they say” blurs with “I say”: there is no clear distinction between what Shields contributes and what has come before him, as attribution occurs only in an appendix that he encourages readers to ignore. Furthermore, citations may be misleading because Shields does not faithfully reproduce quotations but tinkers with them instead, adding, deleting, and substituting words, phrases, clauses, and punctuation in importing old text into a new context. In blending and manipulating its sources, Reality Hunger playfully deviates from Graff and Birkenstein’s instructions to “make sure that at every point your readers can clearly tell who is saying what” (67). Instead of sandwiching each source between his own commentary as Graff and Birkenstein advise (“Since quotations do not speak for themselves, you need to build a frame around them in which you do that speaking for them” [41]), Shields employs the book itself as a frame for enclosing and organizing various and discordant voices. Reality Hunger thus disturbs the disciplined standards that Graff and Birkenstein promulgate in collecting and arranging quotations yet avoiding explicit direction on how to read and understand them. Even as Shields himself appears in moments throughout the book (e.g., in recounting childhood memories [168] and repeating bits of writing from his earlier publications [24-25]), he emerges as compiler and

19 Two additional examples include Mark Amerika’s book remixthebook, which demonstrates how to create textual

remixes while arguing for their affordances, and Lance Olsen’s essay “Notes toward the Musicality of Creative Disjunction, Or: Fiction by Collage,” which much like Reality Hunger, advocates for a collage-style blending of criticism and fiction by offering its own collage of critical voices. Peter Elbow also uses collage in an essay arguing for its value as a writing practice. Both Olsen and Elbow clarify, however, that collage does not require the combination of reused materials. One can also use collage “as a structuring principle for new textual units—not only

arranger rather than as the distinct leading presence whom Graff and Birkenstein envision as the “I” in their title.

Where Graff and Birkenstein stress explicit and diplomatic positioning among sources, Shields and Lethem pursue the inventive potential in flouting such a traditional approach. They exploit the playful possibilities that open up when reused text stands on its own or interacts with surrounding text in unpredictable and even antagonistic ways. They shape and modify their quotations beyond what academic writing typically allows for via bracketing and italicizing bits of quoted text. They show that more options are available when writing with sources, options for intervening in and reconstructing prior materials. Identifying such options encourages moving beyond the confines of what Graff and Birkenstein label “academic writing,” into a flexible literary domain populated by hybrid works of creative nonfiction, translation or transposition, and adaptation.20 _{Lethem’s essay sharply demonstrates how creative reuse can push critical} writing into a domain of greater uncertainty. After being called out for reusing but not crediting a sentence written by Lawrence Lessig, Lethem defended his artistic decision to eschew attribution by implying that his essay does not fit traditional categories like journalistic, scientific, or academic writing (Lessig et al. 4-5). The discrepancy between how Lessig and Lethem treat attribution reveals how critical-creative texts like “The Ecstasy of Influence” trouble critical conventions for writing with sources.

Significantly, then, critical-creative collage texts call for broadly reconfiguring the field of writing with sources. Shields draws attention to the uncertainty that always underlies textual origins, the impossibility that a particular idea or quotation can belong to an easily discernible “they.” Revision occurs as texts move among different contexts via reuse and re-appropriation,

merging bits of what “they say” with bits of what “I say.” Furthermore, in quoting, a writer does not just import a “they”; he or she acts as an “I” contributing something via selecting, framing, arranging, and combining prior text. Thus, “I” can say something just by re-appropriating another text, making “I” and “they” one and the same. This heavy exchange and reuse of language and ideas makes it so that any text is not singular but multiple, hybridized, inflected all over by prior texts, rendering the “they say” designation particularly inapt and oversimplified. It is perhaps for this reason that following the guidelines in They Say/I Say would seem to make weak straw-man arguments so inevitable: our ideas are so multiple and fluid, our language so shared, that we invent persons or positions with which to argue, those that do not actually exist because they cannot be clearly distinguished from ourselves and positions that we can imagine inhabiting.

In this chapter, I reconceptualize the field of writing with sources, moving beyond what Graff and Birkenstein offer by focusing on works of reuse that explicitly blend “they say” with “I say,” those like Buchanan’s rewriting or Johnson’s erasure poetry that rely simultaneously upon old and new text. As such, I theorize a hybrid practice of critical-creative composition that I call tinkering, a practice that embraces reading through writing, interpreting through producing. I develop this practice and argue for its value by tracing its varied appearances across the fringes of English studies today and throughout its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century archives. In doing so, I seek to move this practice from a peripheral to a more central position in the discipline.

I theorize and advocate for critical-creative tinkering by defining the tacit procedures underlying example texts like Buchanan’s, procedures that offer promising strategies for textual reuse more generally. Significantly, however, I avoid reducing general procedures into decontextualized templates like Graff and Birkenstein’s. Templates are characterized by routine.

In contrast, I underscore that even as procedures guide experiments with reuse, some degree of deviation through customization will nonetheless occur (as both Shields and Lethem demonstrate in tweaking their sources, sometimes in substantive and other times in trivial ways). I offer some order while foregrounding the sense of openness and play that Graff and Birkenstein merely suggest is possible with templates. (They insist that their templates do not stifle creativity and can be imaginatively manipulated [10-11], yet devote so much attention to structuring and enumerating said templates that manipulating them seems a less readily available undertaking for users.) Since I do not restrict my treatment of reuse to a single domain of writing like Graff and Birkenstein’s “academic writing,” I propose that the procedures I offer can be taken up and combined in numerous unforeseen ways, depending to an extent on context and any concomitant constraints. Thus, I advocate a spreading out and blending of procedures of reuse across the realms of critical writing, resulting in playful, hybridized forms of composition that until now have been too narrowly labeled: confined to “creative writing” as it is defined against “academic writing.”

I. “GOING WRONG”: RHETORICAL-POETIC LANGUAGE PLAY IN W. D.