“Archive”, “Revolver”, “Transformation”

Archive: The Play of Text

This week our readings deal with the transformation of texts. Our first reading was “Making it Stick” by Lawson Fusao Inada. What Inada does is transform various bumper stickers that describe the various stages Asian Americans have gone through. This form is based on the style of the famous Japanese Haiku poet Basho. Overall, the poem’s style is very appealing to the reading. The words flow to the left and right, swaying from side to side as you read down the page. The bumper sticker quotations are all negative and either express an Asian stereotype or the racism that Asian American are exposed to. The last line of the poem is the authors dedication to the Japanese poet Basho, as he writes Basho’s most famous poem. I think that this expresses the authors feelings toward his own race. Although the whole poem is negative the author expresses his true feelings at the end, his pride for being Asian American.

The Revolver: A Textual Transformation

This piece, written by Derek Pell, takes an excerpt from The Warrren Commission Report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. What Pell does is transform the paragraph that he takes from the report into various versions, each one different and at the same time the same. He writes sentences that are more descriptive and of a broader category. He starts with the word gun and changes it into any instrument used for fighting, then he changes it into a thing by means of which something is done. This last description could be used for numerous objects and not necessarily a gun. By doing this with many objects he is able to transform the text into something that is unrecognizable and open to interpretation. In this way, he uses some words that may not be well known but are synonymous with the previous words. By doing this he is able to confuse the reader by using unnecessary useage of words and advanced descriptions of objects.