‘Rewriting’(Réécriture) indicates various forms of writing in the history of iterature. In representative terms, we can enumerate ‘Intertextuality’(Intertextualité), Parody’(Parodie), ‘Plagiarism’(Plagiat), ‘Pastiche’, ‘Repetition’(Reprise), and so on. ‘Rewriting’ has been also used widely in aesthetics of reception, reader-response criticism, post-structuralism, and post-modernism, raising the issue of the ‘Reading’, Now it is natural to consider that one text is not the sole and independent work but what could be done in bilateral relations with other texts.
Michel Tournier is one of the writers who reverberated in the context of ‘Rewriting’ issue in the late 20th century. In his article, he hopes that ‘the first single reading would be a second reading’. Because he believes that a good text is to lead readers back into their faraway past, and lets them create a novelty feeling assured with the illusion of reread. To this end, the novels of Michel Tournier have chosen sustainedly, as writing material, the figures widely known in western modern myth.
This study, therefore, examines the way how to ‘rewrite’ the Classics and the traditional fairy tale through the work of Michel Tournier: Vendredi ou les limbes du Pacifique which rewrites Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Le Roi des Aulnes, Gilles & Jeanne which rewrites Charles Perrault's La Barbe Bleue.
From the perspective of the teacher who leads the students' “creative rewriting”, it would be a work followed by a tremendous responsibility. The competence of the teacher is a considerable sector in terms of directing if students' writing could be ‘creative’ or not. Because rewriting is easy to fall into the trap of such as ‘plagiarism’ or ‘parody(caricature)’, like ‘kitsch patchwork’. This study, thus, tries to examine four useful teaching points to guide students to rewrite rightly with the different versions of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe: First, how to read perversely. Second, how to understanding in different areas. Third, how to see through the text. Finally, how to twist the text and rewrite in their point of view.
The creativity means in one hand the capacity to find a ‘new’ ideas or concepts, and in the other to combinate the existing idea or concept in a different and un familiar way. It is virtually impossible to create something entirely new that did not exist. Our approach is closer to the second definition. A classic is worth reading as ever for its timeless quality. Rewrite the classics requires to define our view of value, view of life. It also demands to face and understand this world and society that hold our body and esprit by rewriting the classics in our proper time. These days college students are characterized by their ‘political and social indifference’. The experience of reading and rewriting a classic can allow students to develop their creativity encouraging at the same time the will of participation. As we mentioned in this study, that’s because the choice of ‘what’ and ‘how’ in rewriting requires a personal existential choice.