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04/11/2004 Archived Entry: "Charting the Tarantino Universe"

"Charting the Tarantino Universe". A nice rhetorical breakdown of some of Tarantino's major usages of allusion in Kill Bill and the soon to be released Kill Bill 2. Constructing a network of references and allusions, the films make a solid case for the power of new media rhetorical possibilities, all of which can be performed in print, but in film (or on the Web) function differently due to image and juxtaposition techniques. This is a solid example of how the network works when we bring various works together in a mix/remix method. Asking students (or ourselves) to remix the culture, we identify tropes and figures whose power to affect changes from text to text, depending on how we place and modify the signifiers (see Barthes, too, on this point). Michael Jarrett is doing a nice piece on Elvis and Goddard that tackles this idea for our collection New Media/New Methods. I would like to write a textbook on mixing, a rhetoric that teaches students to remix and mix texts as new media writing practice. For starters, I might include material on the Kill Bill films and ask students not to write about how the remix works, but to take the models as instructions for constructing their own mixes. Hey Bedford! Interested?