Key Concepts In Writing And Rhetoric

Remix

emix

is the manipulation and rearrangement of original materials, modes, genres, and stories into something new. Remix refers to both a product and a process; it is a noun and a verb. We listen, watch, and create remixes all the time.

involves sampling beats, citing familiar themes, and incorporating allusions to other texts and stories in our work. We remix when we retell a narrative in a new setting or historical period, create fan fiction, generate memes, or use well-known formats to create new multimodal platforms for delivering content to audiences. Remixing requires knowledge of existing historical and cultural materials, modes , and genres, along with their

affordances

so that we can create and circulate particular messages to our targeted audiences.

istory of remix

Artists and other creators have always remixed materials as part of their creative process , starting when the earliest tales were passed orally from poet to poet and were eventually written down in

alphabetic text;

with each telling, new elements and details were added in or taken out as the stories were customized and circulated for different audiences. Linda Hutcheon suggests that an adaptation or remix is: [a]n acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works, [al creative

and

an interpretive act of appropriation/salvaging, [and] [a]n extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work (8).

ey oncepts n Writing and Rhetoric

Scholars have long debated what the best term is to describe this process and product of adaptation ; they have used imitation, alteration, offshoot, parody, revision , mash-up , spin -off , appropriatios, hybridization, and remix. Each of these terms stresses a particular element of the remix process and the connection between the original source text and the remixed product. While all of these terms apply to using established texts and mode s to create new works, remix, which has alliances with musical recordin g and samp lin g, explicitly stresses how one or more texts can be cut up , reordered, inserted,

juxtaposed

and

arranged

in new ways.a

Terms for Various Types of Remix What It Does Can You Complete the Chart With Some Examples

citation imitation parody alteration and rev1s10n offshoot and spin-off mash-up and hybridization appropriation adaptation quotes or paraphrases other texts in the new text sticks as close to the original as possible stresses the comical and humorous aspects of the new text revises the original in a new way that stresses particular aspects or changes only some parts of the situation (such as updating the langua ge or turning a sad ending into a happy one) focuses on a selected e l ement of the original (such as creating a new story for a minor character) joins together more than one text or mode implies the forceful takeover of another s ideas or work to make it our own, and often raises ethical issues around authorship or ownership of materials revises the origina l to make it work for a new purpose or setting or time period

Chapter 1 • Remix

Remix

today

Engaging in remix requires knowing and paying attention to how other artists have remixed and adapted their own texts so that we can learn how to use remix in our own creative and critical works, whether those ar e

alphabetic texts

digital artifacts, image-creation, or any number of multimodal formats. Daniel Fischlin and Mark Fortier argue, [t]he task of a careful reader is to see exactly how an adaptation functions in any particular situation, and what effects it has or may have on the lit e rary politics of author and canon , as well as on larger social and political questions (7). Remix, as a concept, allows writers and artists to look at

genres

forms , texts , and stories and to analyze those elements, their

affordances

and figure out what is most useful to them in their goal of creating new texts and meanings in their own work. When we learn th e se processes we are prepared to seize our own

kairotic

moment to get our own messages out to our particular audience or

field.

Part of the popularity of remixing is in the pleasure of recognizing similarities, differences , connections , and variations between the old and new material. Also , when we remix canonical materials such as Shakespeare's works we participate in long-standing artistic discourses or

fields

of practice that Shakespeare, himself , was involved in. For example, Shakespeare draws from Ovid's

Metamorphosis

(8 AD), an early Roman alphabetic retelling of ov e r 250 oral myths, to create two of his most famous plays:

Romeo and Juliet

and

A Midsummer Night s Dr e am .

Both plays were remixed from Ovid's story of Pyramus and Thisbe -a story of two young lovers separated by a wall who decide to run away to be together and end up killing themselves after Pyramus mistakenly thinks that Thisbe has been eaten by a lion. Shakespeare remixed Ovid's story into the core plot of

Romeo and Juliet

by setting the tale in Verona and fleshing out the narrative to include witty dialogue, a fancy ball , sword fights using the latest w e aponry , and contemporary drug references, to update the story and address the cultural interests of his early modern English audiences. At the same time he remixed Ovid's story more directly, almost sampling it, as a comical subplot to the fairies' and lovers ' antics as a play within a play in

A Midsummer Night s Dream.

In it, Bottom and his crew oflaughable mechanicals perform the story of Pyramus and This be as part of the marriage entertainments at the end the play. By studying how Shakespeare made his own remixes we can see how he used the

affordances

of his

genre

(the public theatre-a new and cutting-edge mode of delivery in the 1590s) to address the needs of his multi-class and multi-gendered audience who went to the theatre regularly and wanted a wide variety of narratives that were pleasurable due to their familiarity and difference from the known source tale . And , by making two different remixes of the same source material, Shakespeare engaged in the exact same process as any artist that