Interpreting Dave Hickey’s Air Guitar

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Interpreting Dave Hickey’s Air Guitar

The essay must be an interpretation of Dave Hickey’s style and creative process in his essay collection Air Guitar. Choose 6 or 7 essays out of the collection to reference and quote.

This is the original prompt for the assignment

You began this series of exercises as all academic work begins: with a thorough, rigorous examination of sources. You looked for signs in the essays that could serve as clues about the way the writer thinks. These clues turn out to be recorded manifestations of the writer’s mind at work, his or her idiosyncratic way of making meaning. These textual facts, however, can only point to what is suggested by them. They require interpretation: looking between the lines as you try to discern what you can about their significance. Your task now is to write an essay in which you reveal the importance of your investigative and interpretive work.

Part of the challenge of writing this essay will be to organize your discoveries so that they are compelling. Do not take up the essays one at a time, one paragraph at a time for each source. Find a more interesting organizing principle. Group evidence from the essays by what the evidence itself reveals about the writer; see how the essays talk to one another, how they fall into place in pairs, triplets, patterns, discrepancies. Organize to reveal and substantiate your idea.