Word Salad
Mon, Nov 13
When speaking, listening, and reading, we tend to experience language as a continuous, synesthetic stream of sound, text, and image. When we are at least reflective and most immersed, it is almost like hallucinating a waking dream. But to think critically about text — especially when we’re editing our own work — or when we hit a creative impasse — we need to slow down, focus, and break ourselves out of our hypnotic stupor. We need to make our language strange again.
One way to do this is through “cut-up” technique, also known as word salad. In this exercise in class, we’re going to reconstruct part of an essay by Elizabeth Kolbert by reassembling her sliced-and-diced language. But you can also use cut-ups to generate new possibilities in your own work.
The cut-up was developed as a literary method of collage by Dadaist poets and artists like Tristan Tzara, and has been used by writers, poets, and musicians from John Dos Passos to David Bowie to Kathy Acker to Radiohead.
Read This:
- William S. Burroughs was a major proponent of the technique, and discussed it in this essay on cut-ups.
- You can find out more at the wikipedia page.
- Listen to some examples of William S. Burroughs readings cut-ups here.
- You can practice with this cut-up generator.
Do This:
- Draft of Final Paper due 11/15: 3000–5000 word nonfiction research paper/creative nonfiction oriented toward the general reader, on some specific aspect of climate change. Must incorporate research. Addressing in some respect the ideas of “nature,” the “human,” faith or norms, and “integral ecology.” Creative responses utilizing literary techniques are encouraged.