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October 30, 2005

just plain groups (collaborative writing 14.1/30)

Copeland, Jeffrey S., and Earl D. Lomax. "Building Effective Student Writing Groups." Focus on Collaborative Learning: Classroom Practices in Teaching English. Ed. Jeff Golub, et al. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1988. 99-104.

1 sentence summary: teaching students to work in successful writing groups means leading them through four stages of development; this will lead to "highly motivated teamwork."

the stages:

• i. apprehension: they're nervous & don't know each other, so be kind &
• tell them why they're in the groups, what they are to do, and a little bit aboutsuccessful & unsuccessful writing groups from years past.
• model somehow the steps in the composing process & how good group members can help at each step
• give them time or structure ways for them to discuss their experience as writers
• do some team-building activities
• ii. initial success: if you baby them through one experience, they'll be confident/optimistic about continuing to work in groups. lead with positively-worded questions for them to answer about one another's work ("response keys").
• iii. constructive criticism: when they start getting restless (don't sneak up on them) introduce more difficult questions to provoke constructive cricitism. here are elbow's guidelines for keeping these conversations constructive & valuable:
• "never quarrel with someone else's reaction"
• "be quiet and listen (directed at the writer)"
• "give specific reactions to specific parts"
• "don't reject what readers tell you"
• iv. independence: they'll be so busy working some of them will frown at you for interrupting. occasionally, add new activities so their work doesn't become routine.

response: talk about your uncomplicated presentation of a uniform student body with no differentiation, power relations, etc. of any kind anywhere!

Posted by ttobryan at 09:48 AM | Comments (0)

circles & silences (collaborative writing 13.3/30)

Ashton-Jones, Evelyn. "Collaboration, conversation, and the politics of gender." In Feminine principles and women's experience in American composition and rhetoric. Eds. Louise Wetherbee Phelps and Janet Emig. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P., 1995.
5-26.

1 sentence summary: the inherent danger in connecting feminist pedagogy and collaborative learning is that the real power dynamics feminist pedagogy seeks to work against aren't really occluded by collaborative learning strategies: they move the center of authority away from the front of the room and into groups, maybe, but still exist between group members in ways that reinforce existing status and not only continue to silence women but teach them that even in situations of "equity" they have less right to speak.

strategy:
a lot of energy goes into presenting in trimbur & myers' critiques of bruffee that "collaboration" often involves "consensus" & "consensus" is a loaded term, dangerous pedagogically not only because it limits the generative nature of if not the work at least its products (arguably prodictively, but limitingly nonetheless) and because of who it silences; the data is compelling/convincing but i haven't read trimbur & myers so it's hard to follow her critiques of them/them-as-critics-of-bruffee. i do get that she's not pleased.
passages:
7-8. "consensus and collaboration" in a critical feminist reading that doesn't assume collaborative pedagogy to be appropriately positioned as "merged in a unified effort to subvert patriarchy in the academy" reveals that such practices can be negatively enabling & damaging.
9-10. in all-female groups it does what it's touted as doing; in mixed-gender groups results are much less positive: "the problem with deducing an absence of patriarchal authority in groups is obvious: even if one construes the teacher-student hierarchy as essential patriarchal, there is nothing here to suggest that other classroom structures are not."
10-16. counts & comparisons of questions, tag-questions, hedges & topic-introduction (mostly the topics men introduce are kept & often the topics women introduce are dismissed—b/c women make the nurturing move of perpetuating the topics the men introduce & the men don't make similar moves w/women's topics.
17. "to portray collaborative pedagogies as pedagogies of equity, then, is to perpetuate and collude in the silence that helps to conceal the reproduction of gender ideology"
18. ominous reading of bruffee's observation that we learn how to speak from listening to/participating in conversations asks "what, in fact, do women hear"; the assumption is that they hear men silencing them, rather than hearing women speaking.
19. trimbur talks about "non-hierarchical" group organization & groupwork as "democratic" but for women neither of these things may be true.
21-2. by failing to differentiate btw men and women when we write about "student" & grouping them as if they're interchangeable without taking on these issues "we may be directly instrumental in teaching women a limited subject position from which to write, not only in encouraging them to assume 'appropriately feminine' voices and stances as they compose—rhetorical personae that mirror and reproduce the social and political status of women in society at large—but in unwittingly teaching them to accept their subordinate place in the social hierarchy of gender"

Posted by ttobryan at 09:45 AM | Comments (0)

bruffee part deux (collaborative writing 13.2/30)

Bruffee, Ken "Collaboration, Conversation, and Reacculturation." In Dialogue on Writing: Rethinking ESL, Basic Writing, and First-Year Composition. Eds Geraldine DeLuca, Len Fox, Mark-Ameen Johnson and Myra Kogen. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002. 63-81.

1 sentence summary: especially for students from distinctly removed-from-the-academic-context backgrounds (i.e. basic writers in the 70s) "boundary conversation and collaborative reacculturation"(69) is how to move into communities with both support and agency.

what's bruffee on about?
63. culture-shock: teaching/directing freshman comp before Shaughnessy
68. "transition groups": smaller groups who serve to "provide an arena for conversation and sustain us while we learn the language, mores, and values of the community we are trying to join"—when they learn to trust & share authority w/small peer groups they can move to doing the same w/the classroom group (& hopefully later larger academic communities)
69. reading: "reading is one way to join new communities….by reading, we acquire fluency in the language of the text and make it our own. library stacks from this perspective are not a repository; they are a crowd. conversely, we make the authors we have read members of our own community."
70. shopkeepers example about skA & skB arranging shelves together
71. "change and its educational consequences": collaboration works both "directly" when collaborators are in conversation w/one another and "indirectly" when those conversations carry over into participants' internalized ways of thinking about & negotiating ideas etc.; that internalizing is a key step in writers moving from smaller to larger communities, and is often characterized by "ambivalence" because "we are drawn to one another and distrust one another at the same time"
72. translation often what we learn in conversation is ways of talking about things that then enable us to think about them differently—to translate our experiences into other words and other schema; this kind of "reacculturative conversation…combines the power of mutual-aid self-help groups with the power of successfully collaborative intellectual work": "it integrates the will and the way."
74. cultural proclivities toward conversation: cites Treisman's experience w/following asian students around to find out what they did differently than the black & hispanic kids—they ate, walked, & talked all the time together, talking about their work; the others didn't. when he required collaborative projects & working circumstances of his other students (& taught them how to do it) their scores improved significantly.
77. negotiation: "conversation toward consensus requires them to confront and come to terms with the difference between their own fixed beliefs and the contradicting fixed beliefs of their peers. collaborative learning places students in a position…in which they must reconcile their preconceptions in conversation with one another"; "conversation alone" (he draws again on Abercrombie's research) "has the power to move students both toward consensus and toward a better undersatnding of the issue at hand"; they have to "learn to trust the power of conversation…[and] the authority they have granted to one another as well as understanding its limits"
79. student resistance: the "teddy bears or sharks" tendency to either be too polite & offer no substantive critique or to shred each others' work. both "are typical of group solidarity, which tends to enforce loyalty and mutual defense and to scapegoat some members of the group, ejecting them and closing ranks against them"; students are usually "confirmed in the habit of identifying the authority of knowledge in a classroom exclusively with the teacher's authority…[and so] often do not believe that a request to collaborate is genuine" as well as not knowing/trusting "what might be in it for them."
81. classroom hierarchy: "with the professor for the moment out of the way and the chain of hierarchical institutional authority for the moment broken, most students enjoy the freedom to reinvent in class the collaborative peership that most of them are quite familiar with in their everyday lives."

Posted by ttobryan at 09:41 AM | Comments (0)

October 29, 2005

cops & robbers (collaborative writing 13.1/30*)

Wilson, Henry L. "When Collaboration Becomes Plagiarism: The Administrative Perspective." Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World. Ed. Alice Roy and Lise Buranen. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 1999. 211-220.

1 sentence summary: the administration is in a confusing position, as is reflected by the wide array of uninformatively vague politices produced and implemented at different schools.

passages:
211. "efforts to redefine the terms 'plagiarism' and 'collaboration' are currently underway in the field of composition studies. both terms describe writing processes involving more than one author, yet the former is regarded as disreputable or unethical while the latter is increasingly advocated as an effective pedagogical technique"--and the confusion reigns in both classrooms and academic policy statements/administrations. usual distinctions center on intent--"plagiarism" intends to deceive & represents stealing or other unethical displays of power, whereas "collaboration" involves a more above-board & "equitable relationship between authors," but that negativity is still in there; the OED's 1st definition is about co-labor and its second "traitorous cooperation with the enemy."
212. official defs. of plagiarism are often stated as if their charges are unambiguous--"theft" of others' work whether wholesale or by unacknowledged citation--but modern classroom practices encourage students to work together with one another, with tutors, & with texts in ways that problematize those seemingly-clear expectations.
213. some use blanket-statements encouraging students to cite "'everything' derived from 'other sources'"--an impossible task in the light of modern theory.
214-5. plagiarism statements almost never talk about collaborative writing--which gives the impression that they have nothing to do with one another, but which then allowed collaboration to look suspiciously like plagiarism when it's introduced; standard definitions of plagiarism: "the wrongful act of taking the product of another person's mind and presenting it as one's own" (Alexander Lindey, 1952); "to plagiarise is to give the impression that you have written or thought something that you have in fact borrowed from another" (MLA).
216-7. UNC-Chapel Hill does a rare job of addressing the issue at length; staff manual acknowledges the "fine line between plagiarism and the kind of collaboration that defines writing"; "unauthorized collaboration" appears on the list of practices for students to avoid, alongside an aknowledgement that they often will collaborate, and that when they do they should "guard against" "appropriating" the words and thoughts of others. [how should they discriminate between appropriation & having (& participating in the process of) their interiors text influenced?]
217. 5 (author-identified) goals of plagiarism (only the last of which seems "future-driven" & theoretical rather than solely practical/punative) policies:

• promote/uphold academic honesty
• help students discriminate btw. collaboration and plagiarism & know which is allowed & which isn't
• facilitate punishment of transgressors
• demonstrate reputability of the college to the general public
• improve writing teaching by foregrounding issues of editing & collaboration

218. there's a conflict btw. the assumption that single-authorship = "the way," which allows plagiarism to be presented as already-iffy collaboration "gone awry" and the idea that writing is collaborative, in which case collaborative writing strategies would be taught deliberately and not discussed in conjunction with academic dishonesty/plagiarism; the grey areas will persist so long as there's so much unexamined theory on/under the table in these conversations.

*p.s.: do you see what i did up there? that little assertion? it's probably not bold enough. it's probably going to be overturned. probably not going to fly. but i had to start pinning something to something or i was going to turn into a great fluttery grey winged question-mark.

Posted by ttobryan at 01:22 PM | Comments (0)

re-media-tion (collaborative writing 11.3/?)

Schrage, Michael. "Writing to Collaborate: Collaborating to Write." Author-ity and Textuality: Current Views of Collaborative Writing. Ed. James S. Leonard, Christine E. Wharton, Robert Murray Davis, and Jeanette Harris. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill P, 1994. 17-22.

key cool idea: collaboration doesn't just make use of media, it is a medium (specifically "as much a creative medium as it is a human relationship" and so the evolution of collaboration-enabling "tools and techniques" is actually a "co-evolution of medium and media [that] will fundamentally change the way readers, writers, and critics view the creation of texts" (17).

implications: "just as paper, film, and video provide both opportunities and constraints for expression...viewing collaboration...as a medium gives us important new ways to examine the processes both of creating and interpreting texts" b/c "the collaborative medium incorporates both the technical and the personal" and "the properties of the collaboration will strongly influence the quality of the text. the various tools and technques that go into the collaborative process may ultimately prove as revealing and important as the authors' intent" (17).

19. "collaborative writings have two audiences--the ultimate reader and the collaboration itself...[which] is interposed between the writers and the readers"

21. "what does genius mean if it takes two?"; "the collaboration" as an entity that should be recognized, in many instances, as a more appropriate substitute than recognizing "the author"

22. "today collaborative writing possibilities are increasingly facilitated by the new collaboration-friendly technologies that create shared space within which co-workers of the world can unite freely. two bodies still can't occupy the same space at the same time; but collaborative technologies have redefined textual space to make it multiply accessible, and in the process created" potential.

Posted by ttobryan at 01:02 PM | Comments (0)

definitions (collaborative writing 11.2/?)

Harris, Jeanette. "Toward a Working Definition of Collaborative Writing." Author-ity and Textuality: Current Views of Collaborative Writing. Ed. James S. Leonard, Christine E. Wharton, Robert Murray Davis, and Jeanette Harris. West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill P, 1994. 77-84

1 sentence summary: if we're going to keep talking about collaborative writing, we need some sort of working definition grounded in positive rather than negative assertions (i.e. other than "the opposite of solitary writing");

77. "awareness and acceptance of writing as a collaborative act are clearly growing"; yet [look at word choice here] "it is increasingly common for even [authors of single-authored works] to confess that they relied extensively on assistance from friends or coleagues." (emph. added)

77. necessary steps to defining the term:

• "the possibility that all writing is collaborative... eliminat[es] the need to distinguish between individual and collaborative writing"
• written lang. like oral lang is inherently social
• "every text builds on pretext" (ong)
• lang like knowledge is a social construct so so are all texts
• "all texts are created in the act of reading, [so] a writer never functions alone to create a text"
• the dismissal move isn't enough, though; we still need to discriminate. "even if all writing is ultimately collaborative, some writing is immediately more collaborative than other writing" (78).
• historic association with plagiarism (78)
• romantic "illusion that truly respectable writing was something that a single, solitary author created" leading to an "aesthetic/pragmatic" split wherein practical purpose-driven writing could be collaborative but "a writer working alone" was needed "to create art" (79)
• sustaining power of this myth was added-to by narrow definitions of collaboration: "only if two or more people actually joined forces to construct a physical text"; "the equally real collaborations that frequently occur before a written text exists or after it is supposedly 'finished' were ignored or discounted as significant" (79).
• "pretext" (witte) or "interior text" or "mental text" "first appears in the mind of the writer" & last appears "in the mind of the reader"--"what the writer anticipates and the reader remembers"; "interior texts" are constantly being modified or re-created, and when we discuss them with others and modifications result, then we have, "in effect, collaborated"--which usually happens "all the time in a very casual, informal way" (80-1).
• "this essay, for example, evolved out of discussions with a friend who is much more knowledgeable about literature than i am, was modified by my experience of reading it as part of a CCCCs panel on collaborative writing, and was further shaped by suggestions by the editors of this collection. that only my name appears on it merely reflects the fact that i was the one who physically wrote the essay" (81).
• not all texts influenced at all necessary need to be called "collaborative," but the presence of only one physical writer isn't a reason not to, either (81).
• collaboration happens "more explicitly and directly" once a text exists at an early stage on paper; "any substantive modification that occurs as a relut of one writer's conscious and deliberate interaction with another can be defined as collaborative writing"--and aesthetic writers/artists do this all the time (82).
• depth of the entrenchment of the "scrupulous and proud" solitary-writer ideal leads some writers to "believe that even discussing their ideas with someone else is detrimental to their process. others fear that their ideas will be 'stolen'" (82).
• also we lack terms. we can talk about interactive speech as "conversation, dialogue, dialectic, or even chat or rap. but when two people write together, we can only qualify the term writing itself" (83).
• the term "collaborative writing" is also all we have to talk about the "process of text interaction" computers enable.
• eventually we'll need terms that actually discriminate, since "the type of collaboration that occurs between an editor and a writer is not the same as that between coauthors or among students working at networked computers"; 'til then it's a too-broad term & we have to deal (83).

84. collaboration is both cognitive and physical; once we realize it's part of all writing we'll be able to move on to looking at results.

resources: might-should i read some ong for this? do i need him?

Posted by ttobryan at 11:17 AM | Comments (0)

October 28, 2005

meaning-making (collaborative writing 12/?)

Flower, Linda and Lorraine Higgins. Collaboration and the Construction of Meaning. Berkeley, CA: U California, Center for the Study of Writing, 1991. ED 1.310/2:341069

1 sentence summary: planning--however informally conducted--is an integral part of all writers' meaning-making processes; "collaborative planning" allows researchers (and planners/writers) a way of observing the otherwise largely unobservable "repertoire of strategies this collaborative process calls out and the sorts of meaning these collaborators construct" (4).

"student writing is an act of border crossing--or of standing at a threshold trying to figure out how to cross. as writers move from home to school, through kindergarten to college, and from discipline to discipline, they encounter a variety of discourse communities...from [each of] which has emerged a body of commonplaces, topoi, and "key" issues insiders share (Bazerman, 1985; Heath 1983; Myers, 1985; Miller, 1984)[....] Within this setting, writing is both a social practice and a constructive cognitive process (Freedman, 1987). Consider what construction of this sort can involve: The institution of school and its literate practices frame the act, suggesting goals, constraints and available language...The individual writer, however, must 'read' this context, interpret its 'suggestions,' and translate them into action. Writers not only envision what they have 'to say' on a topic, they construct a web of intentions, a network of complexly linked goals, plans, and constraints, for a given piece of writing" (1).

"the meaning writers construct is shaped by many forces including their available language and knowledge of the topic and the discourse, and by the task as they represent it to themselves. In fact, task representation, rather than 'ability,' may be the limiting factor in student writing more often than teachers realize, while students may be unaware that their image of 'what's expected' in a given course or discourse differs markedly from what their classmates or instructo assumes (Flower et al., 1990b)."

--------

3 "executive-level planning strategies" writers employ: "schema-driven, knowledge-driven, and constructive planning" (5)

"schema-driven planning" is based on discourse conventions & appropriateness to a given rhetorical situation--deciding which existing scheme or schema will most appropriately suit the new task (5).

"knowledge-driven planning" (good) is based on content-knowledge, audience-knowledge, etc.; what do i know that i'll want to tell them? what do i know about their interests that might intersect with this? (6-7); (bad) turns into "knowledge-telling" & "default strategy for school"--reporting existing knowledge without really considering situation or constructing--without building any new knowledge/meaning at all (6, 8-9).

"constructive planning" is based on encountering and bridging gaps--constructing new approaches or new schema for rhetorical situations that existing schema don't account for: in practice, it is "a high-effort strategy that is worth the effort when a situation demands adaptive planning and when a knowledge- or schema-based strategy can not do the job" (8).

"collaborative planning" is the researchers' term for the interactive process they designed & studied (an effort to see meaning making, which is inherently otherwise "hard to see" (3): student writers talking through their writing-ideas with "supporters," fellow students listening & asking directed questions to elicit descriptive articulation of their existing, mid-process, and developing-as-an-aspect-of-the-unfolding conversation strategies. engaging in collaborative planning helps researchers (and sometimes students) observe when student writers are only knowledge-telling, are making schema-based or knowledge-based rhetorical choices/predictions, and are moving from those into instances of constructive planning.

-----------

"patterns of power":

interactive power-relation modes students working "collaboratively" employ that can be variously productive/distructive: "cooperation" ("play the game"; "good faith effort"; "productive"; "enlarged image of the task and of what readers, including teachers and peers, look for in a paper"); "appropriating authority" (taking on teacherly or other controlling roles, etc.--can be effective "if you are trying to learn something" but can be detrimental when "only occasional moments of critical reflection occur"); "resistance," "avoidance" (we know those well) & "compliance" (often accompanied by) "without engagement" (which we tend to overlook as a resistant strategy)

Posted by ttobryan at 10:40 PM | Comments (0)

October 16, 2005

dias_et_al_from_712 (genre 11/25)

Dias, Patrick, Aviva Freedman, Peter Medway, and Anthony Paré. Worlds Apart: Acting and Writing in Academic and Workplace Contexts. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 1999.

1 sentence summary: workplace and academic writing are different, & generic expectations/ways of understanding & working within the demands of situations are key to the discrepancies. <--what's valuable about this isn't the common-sense observation in this claim but the language they use to talk about it.

chapter 1: introduction
9. the project: (recognition that (workplace)) writing is "a collaborative and social activity"
11. collaboration is an accepted element of workplace writing but not so much w/university writing settings

chapter 2: situating writing
17-18. writing as situated activity—writing is an activity, not a neutral medium for action, and is always itself situation, not just representing situations.
19. genre studies—the stealth name for modern rhetorical studies. genre = not just text but often-textual social action. 2 aspects of genre = "social action and textual regularity"
21. exigencies if ours are understood, our readers will believe/listen to us. genre not only gives us a way of "achieving our own ends" but defines "what ends we may have"
22. "Participating in a genre means not just producing a text that looks like the ones that are usually produced in that milieu but having purposes, for action and, therefore, communication, that are recognized and allowed for within that context and for which the genre has emerged adaptively as the appropriate vehicle"
23. "genres are always in flux" (23).
26. activity theory—(from vygotsky's ideas via leont'ev)—a counter to western psych's tendency to see individual learning/action/etc as isolated & isolate-able. 3 levels of action for potential analysis: (1) a unit of activity verbs (playing, learning, working, eating) motivated by object(ive)s. (2) action "goal-directed processes that must be undertaken to fulfill the object [for the activity]." (3) operations  "the conditions under which the action is carried out and the means by which it is carried out"—can become so habitual that an intricate sequence of separable actions becomes mentally a single action. (tries to clarify—i get the idea, fuzzily, but don't really know how to divide things into one level or another).
27. the words we use to catalogue actions might represent different actions to another, or we might mean different actions w/the same verbs (whether teaching a genre is teaching an action or an activity helps dias, et. al, dispute the idea of direct genre instruction).
29. situated learning in communities of practice—COPs (Lave & Wegner) are "contexts for learning that operate successfully outside the classroom and provide the contrasting backdrop against which we can examine classroom activities"-—such situations involve "a relationship of experts and novices, oldtimers and newcomers; so that members, participating at multiple levels, are engaged in a process of learning"; there are also overlaps between communities so that people can be members of multiple COPs.
31. distributed cognition—"the knowledge and knowledge-making on which a group or organization depends in order to accomplish its activities; it includes both consciousness and storage of information." according to Lave it's "distributed—stretched over, not divided among—mind, body, activity and culturally organized settings (which include other actors)"; "The sense in which the production of a piece of writing is distributed is not just that of a mechanical division of labor.
32. It is also that other people's contributions, not only via direct inputs and suggestions, but through their experience as stored in genres, existing texts, and cultural forms, are integral to the apparently individual production" -—can only be studied in contexts, not isolation—
34. takes on the "why do we still study/talk like (Wertsch again) "this individual existed in a cultural, historical, and institutional vacuum"
35. semiotic theory: the mediating role of signs signs have no inherent meaning; "Communication is possible because to some extent we agree, by convention, to accord the same meanings to the same signs"; dictionaries collect "core meaning"s but "semioticians" "are aware of the cloud of other associated meanings, some of them highly personal, that are always also read into signs"
-->linguistic & other signs words aren't all (maps, diagrams, etc.)
-->language (and writing) as a mediating tool Wertch (not in our reading): "we ought to think of 'the person(s)-acting-with-mediational-means as an irreducible agent'" 36. "language as a mediational means or tool is not a mere neutral conduit; it also puts its own mark on mediated action." –allows & constrains simultaneously (connects to distributed cognition b/c "cognition can only be distributed via the mediation of signs"
37. how signs get their meaning "cultural associations" & "dialogic context"; intertextuality. "To be a successful user of a genre within a setting involves not just formal knowledge but an awareness of the dialogic chains, both immediate and local and those that have continued over a longer period and stretch into remote quarters of the professional community and wider culture"
writing in relation to other media/ types of relationship between media

chapter 9: students and workers learning

• situated learning as a field (psychology) is not unified (185)
• commonalities: "learning and knowing are context-specific," "learning is accomplished through processes of coparticipation, and cognition is socially shared"
• differences btw. 3 views see 185 the 3rd they identify as integrally interactive as w/Bakhtin's dialogic—"No-one breaks the eternal silence of the universe" (186).
• guided participation (Rogoff) = "the learning process or cognitive apprenticeship that primarily middle-class children experience in their homes" (its purpose is learning) (homes/primary schools)
• [between these externally-devised poles, the authors add:
• facilitated performance = "the circumstances and activities that facilitate learning in university" (188) &
• attenuated authentic participation = "the closely supervised learning opportunities that students and newcomers experience when they first enter the workplace" (188) ]
• legitimate peripheral participation (Lave & Wenger) = apprenticeship (purpose is legitimate/authentic activity
• differences between contexts for learning:
  
  • object of the activity and place of learning—in "real life" the purpose is to do something; in school the purpose is to learn something.
  • role of authenticity—learners who perceive activities as authentic are more likely to learn from/be successful at them.
  • attenuation—there are ways (sometimes hard to find) to provide means for novices to participate in meaningful activities while still new to their contexts
  • improvisatory quality of learning opportunities—learning opportunities can't be scripted or arranged in the work place—or sequenced developmentally. they just arise.
  • messiness of work context—even in case studies & simulations "the noise is removed and the task is simplified and focused"—school recreations can't approximate the real complexity of the workplace setting.
  • guide-learner roles—aren't clear-cut & unmoving in the workplace like they are in school settings; people play multiple roles, even in the same day or at the same time.
  • evaluation—school writing has evaluation/ranking as part of its purpose; workplace evaluation is "far less frequent and less pervasive"; "performance is evaluated by the overall success of the endeavor" & the novice & supervisor are working toward the same goal rather than being adversarial (194).
  • sites of learning-- students are used to types of learning situation& types of activities in which to engage as learners, & often have trouble recognizing learning opportunities in new contexts (195).
• learning to learn again— "Julie was still mentally situated in the school context" also: "all university students are graded individually, even when they collaborate….Transfer of this individualist ethos sometimes interferes with the kind of collaboration necessary for performing and learning in the workplace" (198).

Posted by ttobryan at 05:11 PM | Comments (0)

f&m_from_601 (genre 9 & 10/25)

Freedman, Aviva and Peter Medway, eds. Genre and the New Rhetoric. London: Taylor, 1994.

-----, -----, eds. Learning and Teaching Genre. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook. 1994.

click here to dowload 10 pages of intricately detailed notekeeping.

roll call:
Genre and the New Rhetoric (1994)
Freedman and Medway "Locating Genre Studies" (1994)
Miller, Carolyn. "Genre as Social Action" (1984)
Freadman, Anne. "Anyone for Tennis?" (1987)
Miller, Carolyn. "Rhetorical Community" (1994)
Bazerman, Charles. "Systems of Genres and the Enactment of Social Intentions" (1994)
Paré, Anthony and Graham Smart. "Observing Genres in Action: Towards a Research Methodology" (1994)
Coe, Richard. "'An Arousing and Fulfilment of Desires'" (1994)
Freedman, Aviva. "'Do as I Say'" (ear. version "Show and Tell" in 1993)
Hunt, Russell. "Traffic in Genres, In Classrooms and Out" (1994)

Learning and Teaching Genre. (1994)
Freedman and Medway "Introduction"
Bazerman, Charles. "Where Is The Classroom?" (1994)
Giltrow and Valiquette. "Genres and Knowledge" (1994)
Currie, Pat. "What Counts as Good Writing?" (1994)
Coe, Richard M. "Teaching Genre as a Process" (1994)
(& a few others whose stuff doesn't add/change much detail)

Posted by ttobryan at 04:58 PM | Comments (0)

c&k_from_601 (genre 8/25)

Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantzis, Eds. The Powers of Literacy: A Genre Approach to Teaching Writing. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P. 1993.

keywords of concrete joyfulness: pragmatism, pedagogy, classrooms, students, learning, purpose, language, culture, literacy, action

[there's a lot behind this cut, btw... it just doesn't condense handily into a little blocky blurb.]

Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantis. "Introduction"
2. "genre is a category that describes the relation of the social purpose of a text to language structure. It follows that in learning literacy, students need to analyze critically the different social purposes that inform patterns of regularity in language—the whys and the hows of textual contentionality"
6. genre literacy teaching is a reaction—and profound change—to/from both traditional and progressive modes of language instruction. What's wrong w/progressivism: "First, it should be exposed as culture bound, not open….Second, its pedagogy of immersion 'naturally' favors students whose voice is closest to the literate culture of power….Third, it is no more motivating than traditional curriculum….Fourth, it simply reproduces educational inequities, given the inequities in the social value placed on 'different' voices in the world outside school….Fifth…it reduces [teachers] to the role of manager. Sixth, [it] often ends up fragmented, eclectic photocopier curriculum….Seventh, and finally, the analogy of orality and literacy in the process writing and whole language approaches to literacy simply does not work. Orality and literacy could hardly be more different"
7. 'Texts are different because they do different things. So, any literacy pedagogy has to be concerned, not just with the formalities of how texts work, but also with the living social reality of texts-in-use. How a text works is a function of what it's for." "[G]enres are not simply created by individuals in the moment of their utterance; to have meaning, they must be social"
8. "[G]enre literacy in principle" means reviving some explicit teaching of forms/grammar as well as/as a way of working towards "creating equality of opportunity": teaching "the ways in which the 'hows' of text structure produce the 'whys' of social effect"
15. "Just because certain genres can be identified as those that have been required for success in school in the past does not mean that schools should redefine these as genres for success in the future….In reality, fixed classifications of genre may even mean that teachers lose sight of where the real power lies. Those who are really innovative and really powerful are those who break conventions, not those who reproduce them"
16. "[We] need to move beyond categorizations of the generic, towards using genre as an analytical tool for engaging with the multigeneric, intergeneric and heterogeneric texts of societies where differences of ethnicity and subculture and style are increasingly significant elements in daily interaction"
18. Genre literacy teaching 1) "establishes a dialogue between the culture and the discourse of institutionalized schooling, and the cultures and discourses of students," 2) "uses cultural and linguistic difference as a resource for access," 3) "sets out to reinstate the teacher as professional, as expert on language whose status in the learning process is authoritative but not authoritarian," 4) "uses explicit curriculum scaffolds to support both the systematic unfolding of the fundamental structure of a discipline and the recursive patterns that characterize classroom experience," and 5) "students move backwards and forwards, through alternate processes of induction and deduction, between language and metalanguage, activity and received knowledge, experience and theory." "It should give students new ways of meaning for unfamiliar social settings, but never because these new ways of meaning and social settings are considered superior or because acquiring these skills requires the denial of domestic or communal ways of meaning"

Kress, Gunter. "Genre as Social Process" 28. hopes for this understanding of genre in the classroom are for both teachers and students to realize:

• "that texts are produced in order to do some specific and cultural thing"
• "that all our speaking or writing is guided…by conventions of generic form, even where that takes the form of an attempt to break generic convention"
• "that generic form is always the product of particular social relations between the people involved in the production of a text"
• "that while generic conventions provide certain dimensions of constraint, generic form is never totally fixed, but is always in the process of change"
• "the ways in which degrees and kinds of power and power difference enter into the production and maintenance of generic form"
• "the possibilities for change, innovation, and creativity—that is, the possibilities and means of altering generic forms"
• (specifically teachers)"the role in which the function, forms, and structures (the grammar) of language play in the production of texts and their meanings"
• (specifically students) "the social role in which the functions, forms, and structures of language play in their own production of texts—an understanding sufficient for the task at hand"

29-30. genre work is specifically of both pedagogical and political importance in that its main task/goal is providing students access to opportunities/understandings of/and literacy in a truly multicultural society/world—he doesn't use the word, but is hinting towards "sustainability"—and the curriculum needs to account for not only the interactions btw. language and social systems, but deal w/the languages, genres, and social structures of "all the languages in the society," not just the "powerful genres of the dominant cultural group(s)"
31. his ideal curriculum "is based on a simultaneous presentation of social factors, and of possible forms of their linguistic realization; and a developing understanding that textual forms—genres—are always the result of the realization in linguistic form of a complex of social factors"
37. "[A] social theory of genre will need to be closely attentive to the constantly shifting relations between language in the spoken and in the written mode, and its relations to shifts in power….particularly if one wishes to add to the project of access the more ambitious project of social and linguistic reform: not merely giving all citizens an equal share in cultural capital, but entertaining at least the possibility of reforming the structures and the processes which exist wherever they are seen as limitations on human potential"

Cope, Bill and Mary Kalantis. "The Power of Literacy and the Literacy of Power"
63. (from abstract): "It is the role of schooling to make the nature of literacy explicit, particularly in order to provide historically marginalized groups of students access to literate culture and literate ways of thinking. Yet…there are all sorts of hidden cultural assumptions in socially powerful discourses. Certain genres of factual writing, for example, deliberately downplay the author's voice and thus pretend greater objectivity than they actually have"
65. literacy and orality are not the same, and do not share a skills-transfer or a conceptual similarity: "In…orality, the speaker and listener have the benefits of face-to-face communication, including the resources of intonation, gesture, immediate feedback, and so on. In…literacy…it is knowledge of genre which provides a key clue to communicative intentions and audience expectations" (from (Collins and Michaels, 1986))
67. "patterns of discourse and their genre variations give access to different degrees and kinds of social power. Insofar as social structures are relatively stable, genres persist over time and are the products of culture, context and history (Kress, 1989b, 9-21; Martin 1991b). Furthermore, genres have specifiable linguistic characteristics which are not fully controlled or determined by individual writers or speakers. Societies driven by inequality are tension ridden, so genres are also the linguistic sites of non-communication, miscommunication, deliberate counter-culture subversion, and ironical play. Genres…are not simply the basis for social stability. They are also political media, both reflecting and creating social dynamism"; "Genres are learnt by some form of copying" (b/c they "are conventional structures which have evolved as pragmatic schemes for making certain types of meaning and to achieve distinctive social goals, in specific settings, by particular linguistic means")
80. genres develop writers just as writers develop their use of genres—"When it comes to learning the genres of literacy, far from being a new and transparent technology for the expression of a culturally stable 'voice', the child's culture is remade through the authoritative relation of the social conventions of language to the student"
89. grammar needs to be taught as part of genre (or vice versa)—not as a set of arbitrary rules but as an array of features that characterize a particular type/genre of writing—but should be taught just as genres should: "Genres should not be presented just as rules for writing and getting ahead in the world. Equally, knowing genres is a basis for ironical play,…for poking fun at the world…for creative energy that transgresses generic conventionality, and a way to stand out in the crowd by stretching the discursive rules. Genre literacy teaching has just as much potential to be a tool for the unruly as…to promote textual uniformity and cultural conformity"; "Especially…[in] the realm of the multigeneric and the intergeneric, genre literacy becomes a critical literacy, a tool to evaluate how well a text manages to communicate, and a tool which does not bind speakers and writers to formulaic adherence to canonical genres. Indeed, many of the most powerful of texts do not lend themselves to be simply unpacked as a realization of a predictable formula. Herein lies real creativity….genre literacy teaching should not mean redoing model texts from the dominant culture 'in your own words', but using a knowledge of genre and grammar to find one's own voice, not within genres, but across, between, and around genres"

Callahan, Knapp, and Noble. "Genre in Practice"
181. "It is not linguistics or teachers, however, but the social context which 'imposes' certain requirements. Therefore, it is necessary for students to understand the context of a given interaction in order to understand the purpose of a genre"
192. "teaching genres as processes rather than products enables the genres to be applicable to all text types written by students from infants to senior secondary school"
193. adapted chart shows genres as social processes that (A) by the means of (B) in forms such as (C):

Describe:	Explain:	Instruct:	Argue:	Narrate:
classify and describe things into cultural or scientific taxonomies of meaning	sequence phenomena in temporal and/or causal relationships	logically order a sequence of actions or behavior	persuade readers to accept a logical ordering of propositions	sequence people and events in time and space
personal descriptions, commonsense descriptions, technical descriptions, information reports, scientific reports, definitions	explanations of how, explanations of why, elaborations, illustrations, accounts, explanation essays	procedures, instructions, manuals, science experiments, recipes, directions	essays, expositions, discussions, debates, reviews, interpretations, evaluations	recounts (personal, historical), stories, fairytales, myths, fables, narratives

194. "as the types of genres in contemporary society are expanding and constantly changing due, in part, to the proliferation of information technologies, schools need to prepare students to deal with this by teaching [them] the basic written genres that have developed to exchange such information and knowledge. Competence at this level will establish a foundation for later flexibility and creativity"
202. teaching grammar—in the middle of/as a crucial aspect of studying/learning to use particular genres—is an essential part of a genre approach to literacy: "it gives both teachers and students a way of talking about and dealing with language as an object that can be manipulated and changed to do particular things both in communication and expressing and organizing language"

Posted by ttobryan at 04:30 PM | Comments (0)

bishop&ostram_from_601 (genre 7/25)

Bishop, Wendy and Hans Ostrom. Genre and Writing: Issues, Arguments, Alternatives. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton, 1997.

i took 5 pages of notes on this text, in 8-point font, and then rainbow-colored them to follow conversational threads. it was complicated. it's very pretty. i'd be insane to re-transcribe them all & either lose or reproduce the formatting. if you want to see:
download brightly-colored file

contributors (see notes for details):

Bishop, Wendy. "Preaching What We Practice as Professionals in Writing" (1997)
Bazerman, Charles. "The Life of Genre, the Life in the Classroom" (1997)
Helscher, Thomas P. "The Subject of Genre" (1997)
Devitt, Amy J. "Genre as Language Standard" (1997)
Journet, Debra. "Boundary Rhetoric and Disciplinary Genres" (1997)
Clark, Gregory. "Genre as Relation" (1997)
Freedman, Aviva. "Situating 'Genre' and Situated Genres" (1997)
Mirtz, Ruth M. "The Territorial Demands of Form and Process" (1997)
Peters, Brad. "Genre, Antigenre, and Reinventing the Forms of Conceptualization" (1997)
Spooner, Michael, and Kathleen Yancey. "Postings on a Genre of Email" (1996)

Posted by ttobryan at 04:18 PM | Comments (0)

bakhtin_from_601 (genre 6.2/25)

Bakhtin, Mikhail. "The Problem of Speech Genres." Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Bern W. McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1986. 60-102.

1 sentence summary speech genres are a "problem" b/c we don't adequately understand them, and we try to do a lot of work without that understanding that can't be done effectively without taking them into account in a more focused way. it's impossible to separate style from genre, or style from grammar (and so grammar from genre), and genre from the historical and social developments of languages, and from the linguistic impact on the development of society; utterances are socially defined, "have definite and relatively stable typical forms of construction"—-"we speak only in definite speech genres" (78).

79. genres are sites of the centrifugal and centripetal forces at work in discourse—are "much more flexible, plastic, and free"
80. than other forms, and can be a site of creativity, but "genres must be fully mastered to be used creatively."
87. and such primary genres "correspond to typical situations of speech communication."
108. the utterance—any instance of language-in-use, bounded by a change in speaker—rather than word, sentence, phoneme, letter, etc. is the basic unit of language, and no 2 utterances are ever the same—can be the same words, but the context and therefore at least part of the meaning is always different. ("As an utterance (or part of an utterance) no one sentence, even if it has only one word, can ever be repeated: it is always a new utterance (even if it is a quotation)."

Posted by ttobryan at 04:09 PM | Comments (0)

schryer_from_601 (genre 6.1/25)

Schryer, Catherine. "Records as Genre." Written Communication 10 (1993): 200-34.

brief synopsis: in studying record-keeping practices, she framed her study partially w/the questions "is the concept of 'genre' an accurate or useful way to theorize about these texts? Is genre a useful way to talk about the ways of speaking and writing characteristic of discourse communities (i.e. their contextual literacy)?"—-"from [her above-outlined] perspectives, genres can be described as stabilized-for-now or stabilized-enough sites of social and ideological action." (204)

passages
201. the question isn't "who's appropriately literate & who isn't" but "what does literacy mean here?"
206. Thomas McLaughlin—"Terms commit us to particular values, and if we are aware of these commitments, we can take the position we inhabit"
207. building on Miller, she says "this notion of genre [also] involves the social actors who construct the genre. Only those involved can interpret a situation and any possible responses as recurrent and significant. Social actors involved in a particular context recognize a text as either aberrant or important and as sharing features with related texts"—genre is an internally-determined/located phenomenon.
208-9. sees a contradiction in Miller that's left unaddressed: she calls it stable in one place and then talks about its necessary responsive changes in another; Schryer's summative definition: genre is "simultaneously diachronic and synchronic….All genres have a complex set of relations with past texts and other present texts: Genres come from somewhere and are transforming into something else. They are heavily conventionalized and yet contain inherent contradictions so that their users have internal options and thus some freedom of expression, depending on the genre. Genres, because they exist before their users, shape their operators; yet their users and their discourse communities constantly remake and reshape them. Genres are inherently ideological; they embody the unexamined or tacit way of performing some social action. Hence they can represent the ways dominant elite do things"
210. "Genres are, in fact, characterized by transformativity"
211. what is "the actual unit of analysis described by the term genre"? no absolute answer; Bakhtin provides the best (evasion)
213. in studying genre "we can look for stabilizing elements especially in the most monologic and thus most inherently ideological genres. But we can also look for sites of contradiction and thus transformativity. We can ask questions about the work a genre does and does not do. We can ask who has access to a certain genre and who does not"
224. "If records are a genre, then they facilitate social action"—[how/when did perform—or serve as the site for performance—become "facilitate"? is this term valid here??]; coherence/cohesiveness, a la Halliday and Hasan: coherent = "entirely comprehensible for readers at the college" and cohesive = "[having] the ties found in writing and speaking intended for diverse audiences"

Implications:
226. "The person creating the record was not as important as the organizational existence of the record itself. In fact, the central purpose of records is coordinated social action"—thus several people could cooperate on one, or hand the project over—didn't need to speak or know each other to construct the same "text" w/their information
227. "a genre may have a complex and even contradictory relation to its social context"
228. specific genre-learning can bleed over into the (then less effective) performance of other generic actions—esp if "these students were being exposed to too narrow a range of genres" (following Bakhtin's suggestions)—students need to learn a from genres requiring a "range of addressivity or fully transactional writing," not just the few genres prized at the college (which then caused problems when others were more rarely asked for):
229. "Genres appear to facilitate the development of some communication skills and minimize the development of other skills. Genres affect each other"
230. "Genres are evolving and function as ideological vehicles that represent the values of certain groups within the speech community and not others. We need to teach our students to refuse simply to acquiesce to genres. As communicators, they need to be able to take them apart and see how they work and what they are actually doing or not doing within various communicative contexts" (230).

Posted by ttobryan at 03:45 PM | Comments (0)

devitt4_from_601 (genre 5.3/25)

Devitt, Amy J. "Genre, Genres, and the Teaching of Genre." College Composition and Communication 47 (1996): 605-15.

--> devitt's review, synthesis, & commentary on Freedman & Medway (both Genre and the New Rhetoric and Learning and Teaching Genre) and Berkenkotter & Huckin's Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition, Culture, Power.

passages:
605. genre study still a "developing new field" in 96; F & M (x2) and B & H argue (as supporting her own argument) that "writing is embedded within genre, writing is never genre-free"; genre (now) "as action rather than form, as a text-type that does something rather than is something"; "Rethinking Genre" convention in 1992
606. translation of Freadman: "genre as a game, like tennis, embedded in ceremony and place, each generic action as a serve that needs to be returned" theorists & their places: "Lloyd Bitzer in traditional rhetoric, M. A. K. Halliday in linguistics, and Mikhail Bakhtin in literary theory" + "sociologist Anthony Giddens"; calls the now-accepted the "Millerian definition of genre"
607. B & H call genre "explicitly cognitive" in that it's "instrumental in the production of knowledge"
608. Richardson (in Teaching) summarizes the explicit teaching debate as being btw. the "believers in a 'personal growth' model of education versus social constructionists"
609. looking at the progress the 3 books demonstrate and the work left to do, Devitt says we now "need to begin defining genre against related concepts rather than against past genre definitions"—"We need to expand our 'not-statements'" & explore how genre is not "situation and context, discourse community, and register"
610. she traces others' arguments to the point where she says "individuals' use of genre thus becomes the creator of context, and the patterning so critical to genre becomes a consequence of genre rather than of situation"—"Context may indeed be what individuals reproduce," she continues (further down), "but individuals may not reproduce whatever they choose"
611. looks at some of the studies of specific genres in specific situation done by B & H, Giltrow & Valiequette, & asks "what makes these studies of genre?" and "how do they differ from analyzing these contexts for…audience…or… discourse community?"; Distinguishing what is particularly generic from what is not is another challenge ahead for genre theory….scholars need to explain what distinguishes a genre perspective from all others and a genre from other kinds of patternings" s.a. "mode"—she finds that in Learning & Teaching "argument is treated as a genre in Chapter 4 and as a mode in Chapter 5" which makes the authors' genre-claims very different. Also "studies of formal conventions and language styles are at times treated as genre analysis"—B & H in one chapter examine "what I and others…would consider register more than genre"
612. need to ask also "What are the essential questions of any study of genre? What does genre theory reveal that other theories do not reveal?"—needs to "gain critical self-reflection" esp in "the dependence of genre theory on the concept of discourse community" which is apparently under attack—by whom?/how? (Van Nostrand?)--& genre theorists need to consider those attacks as relevant to their work as well
613. Freadman says that "it is place" rather than discourse community "that constitutes genre"; genre theory needs to "acknowledge conflict and diversity as an important part of genre"—discourse communities and their genres aren't homogenous or static, and genre theorists have "been largely uncritical in [their] treatment of genre as a reflector or constructor of norms, values, and epistemologies. To the extent that genres have been treated as serving the needs of communities, scholars have largely ignored whether those needs should be served or whether the community's use of genres suppresses other needs"--& g-study "has not adequately dealt with genre's power to inhibit as well as enable writers and readers" "Like early views of discourse communities, genres have too often been seen as neutral concepts, devoid of political and ideological significance"
615. "Perhaps now critical and cultural theory has developed enough to recognize that all texts and all contexts constrain as well as liberate….All utterances, all acts of discourse, entail power relationships, valorize some over others, enable some and constrain others"…"for no text is genre-free" just as "no concept is ideology-free"
N3 on Greenwood's article: its "denial of some of the basic arguments of genre theorists [concerning the importance of context over text in learning?] goes unremarked, by either the editors or the author"

Posted by ttobryan at 03:37 PM | Comments (0)

devitt3_from_601 (genre 5.2/25)

Devitt, Amy J. "Generalizing about Genre: New Conceptions of an Old Concept." College Composition and Communication. 44 (1993): 573-86.

1 sentence summary genre--in more ways than most isolated language-elements charged with the task--makes meaning.

passages:
573. diff from trad'l understanding, genre is now seen as "a dynamic and semiotic construct"; this "new conception of genre shifts the focus from effects (formal features, text classifications) to sources of those effects"
574. taking a formal view is problematic b/c a) genre seems like a trivial concern, b) form & content are divided, c) genre is tied to a "product perspective," d) relates more to reading than writing, and e) "exaggerates one of the most troubling current dichotomies….It makes genre a normalizing and static concept, a set of forms that constrain the individual; genuine writers can distinguish themselves only by breaking out of those generic constraints, by substituting an individual genius for society's bonds"
575. although usually tied to lit, formal genre appears in comp: "its five-paragraph theme, the inverted-triangle introductory paragraph, the division into purpose, methods, results, and discussion of the lab report, and the you-attitude in the business letter. Certainly, such formal features are the physical markings of a genre…and hence may be quite revealing. In merging form and content, we do not wish to discard the significance of form in genre….But those formal traces do not define or constitute the genre"
576. connection to rhetorical situation traced to Bitzer but developed for the field by Miller
577. from Halliday (AD's words): "situation consists of a field (roughly, what is happening), a tenor (who is involved), and a mode (what role language is playing)"—together they create "what Halliday calls 'register,' essentially the linguistic equivalent to what I and many of his followers…have called 'genre'
578. context as the slipperiest part yet—how do you define/qualify it? "where does it come from?"—"Today's answer would be that writers and readers construct it." Classroom contexts are still (and always) classrooms—"The assignment may ask for a letter to the editor, but the writer who begins with an inverted-triangle introduction is still writing for the teacher"; Genres and situations can be mixed/crossed-over, but writers doing so confuse readers (sometimes deliberately), and a reader "who 'misreads' a text's genre…most significantly misreads the situation as well. Genre and situation as so linked as to be inseparable, but it is genre that determines situation as well as situation that determines genre"
579. attributes the now common idea that "genres change with society" primarily to Kress; genre got unpopular via "the glorification of the individual, a romantic strain in literary criticism that considers genre and previous texts as constraints….Yet an opposing trend (WHO?) has seen the inherent intertexuality of all writing, has discerned that T. S. Eliot's 'historical sense' enriches rather than constrains the individual writer. Writers work creatively within the frames of past texts and given genres just as they work within the frames of a given language": working w/in "even the most rigid genre" still means making choices (see Christie in Reid).
580. "Genre is an abstraction or generality once removed from the concrete or particular. Not as abstract as Saussurian notions of langue or language system, genre mediates between langue and parole, between the language and the utterance. Not as removed as situation, genre mediates between text and context. Not as general as meaning, genre mediates between form and content"—acts, overall, as "a maker of meaning"
581. returns to Flower & Hayes to pull genre from their text & says "rather than being uninteresting because unconscious and rather than being trivial…these 'basic' and 'well-learned' generic goals may be the stuff of which all writing goals…are made." "Understanding writing process…must include understanding generic goals: what they are—the historical, community, and rhetorical forces that shape them—how writers learn them, and how writers use them".
582. "A large part of that [comp studies] 'knowing' must be knowing genres"—"Genre might…provide at least part of the writer's notion of the ideal text"; in writing and esp. revising (she elaborates more) "without genre a complete solution to the problem is impossible"; calls on Swales for "the fullest and most complex treatment of genre's relationship to discourse communities": "Just as genres construct situations and situations construct genres, discourse may construct communities and communities construct discourse. Thus, rather than looking at human membership to define community, perhaps discourse membership—that is, genre sets—can better define the nature…of a discourse community…"
583. interconnectivity of genre & situation need to be taken into account w/regard to our students: those who perform a genre poorly might not understand the situation; those who respond to a situation poorly might not know the appropriate genres.
584. "Depending on our individual theories of writing and teaching, we may still value originality above all, or self-expression, or clarity, or correctness; but we may no longer ignore the fact that genre operates as a force on our students as they try to meet our expectations"; and the hail-mary pass: "This new theory of genre…suggests how we might develop an integrated, unified theory of writing. With a unified theory of genre, we can reintegrate text and context, form and content, process and product, reading and writing, individual and social. In the end, genre's ability to capture both form and situation, both constraint and choice, may capture the essence of writing as well"

Posted by ttobryan at 03:30 PM | Comments (0)

devitt2_from_601 (genre 5.1/25)

Devitt, Amy J., Anis Bawarshi, and Mary Jo Reiff. "Materiality and Genre in the Study of Discourse Communities." College English 65:5 (May 2003): 541-58.

brief synopsis: criticism of discourse theory has said that it's "too utopian, hegemonic, stable, and abstract": "Abstracted from real social situations, discourse communities may appear stable to advocates and critics assuming an imaginary consensus and a shared purpose that do not reflect real experiences within communities" (541). "Genre study allows students and researchers to recognize how 'lived textuality' plays a role in the lived experience of a group. Teaching students how to analyze genres can provide discipline and focus to the study of discourse communities," because "genres, considered as material entities, enable us to enrich the idea of a discourse community by giving discipline and focus to the study of the unities of language and society" (542).

Devitt's section of the article looks at "genres…that are created within one professional community to be used by non-members of that community." Although their use by non-members is the only purpose for these genres, the "different beliefs, interests, and purposes as well as levels of knowledge" btw the two groups can "draw[] the boundaries around professional communities even more tightly," barring the user through implementation of special vocabulary, structures, etc; "students," she says, "should also see the messiness and especially the exclusiveness of genres"(543).—specifically she analyses instructions to juries by lawyers, which create impossible binds b/c the specificity of the legal terms is different from common understanding of the term to such a degree that no amount of explaining could clarify it sufficiently—"What seemed a reasonably straightforward genre…proved to be a genre mired in its specialized community's expectations and potentially misleading to its nonspecialized users" (545-6)
--"The communal agendas of those who create genres may conflict with the interests of those who use them….To say that the genre of jury instructions—and other similar genres—simply cross community borders is to simplify the complex interaction of individuals and groups, motives and agendas, and to ignore the conflicting consequences of one genre serving different groups" (549).

Bawarshi suggests using "ethnomethodological techniques" to view discourse communities by means of studying genres rather than looking at genres as the concrete productions of/possessions of particular (elsewise established) communities: "focusing on a specific textual genre helps us to identify a discourse community by relating it to a specific site of interpersonal activity"—"Genres organize and generate the exchanges of language that characterize…discourse communities" (550).
in looking at Patient Medical History Forms, he notes that "the fact that the genre is mainly concerned with a patient's physical symptoms…reflects Western notions of medicine, notions that are rhetorically naturalized and reproduced by the genre and that are in turn embodied in the way the doctor recognizes, interacts with, and treats the patient as a synechdoche of his or her physical symptoms"—"The ear infection is in room 3" (551)
--looking at the "genre sets" that constitute generic communities ("the physician's office"), he says "Members of this community 'play' various language games: they have multiple ways of identifying themselves and relating to others within the community. In this way genres help counter the idealized view of discourse communities as discursive utopias constituted by homogeneity and consensus"—"We can think of genres as the operational sites of discourse communities" and can learn about those communities by way of genre analysis, which can show "how and why individuals use language in specific settings to make specific practices possible" (552).

Reiff: considers "ethnomethodology as an academic research method and ethnography as a genre of writing" as ways to "give students better access to contexts of language use beyond the classroom"—wants students to do "mini-ethnographies" as ways to learn the writing genres of the reporting, how genre functions in whatever group they study, and how to do ethnographic work at all once. says "Ethnography is both a genre (a research narrative) and a mode of genre analysis—a research methodology used to grasp cultural beliefs and behaviors" (554); quotes Marilyn Chapman on "the role of genre in writing instruction": 3 mean teaching interests are in "learning genres, or widening students' genre repertoires; learning about genre, or fostering awareness […] and learning through genres, or using genres as tools for thinking and learning in particular situations" (555). summatively, Reiff says "By learning a community's language through its genres, students then have a more realistic sense of what it is to be a member of the community" (556)

Posted by ttobryan at 03:24 PM | Comments (0)

devitt1_from_601 (genre 4.3/25)

Devitt, Amy J. "Integrating Rhetorical and Literary Theories of Genre." College English 62:6 (July 2000): 696-719.

brief abstract: Devitt looks closely at the ways in which rhetorical and literary theories of genre are similar and dissimilar, in an attempt to find common departmental ground—throughout English, she says, what we share is "the study of discourse, especially of text, although the definition of 'text' varies"

passages
697. lit. genre is more (but not exclusively) classification-based, and comp's "draw[s] heavily from linguistics"; "Russian activity systems"?
698. in lit: David Fishelov's 1993 Metaphors of Genre: The Role of Analogies in Genre Theory—surveys past and present theories of literary genre
699. the 2 schools agree on: textual meaning as interactive (l: more reader/text c: more writer/text), genre is present in all textual (and prob. speech) forms—E. D. Hirsch: "All understanding of verbal meaning is necessarily genre-bound": genres exist as defined by their relation to other genres
700. "The writer may stretch generic rules, he may produce some unpredictable 'match' between different existing conventions of existing literary genres…but in order to understand the overall significance of his text, we should be aware of the generic system against which he is working. A writer does not create in a textual vacuum"
702. disagreement implied in rhet's pragmatic action-based model—what can literary genres be said to "do"? A common lit. answer is to say that genre exists—is made & made relevant—only in the minds of the critic—the writing just is, the critic decides what it is (Rosmarin, although most others aren't as extreme)—whereas in comp. it's the writer and reader who "define[] and use[] genre"
706. lit has done a better job than comp so far at noting that the degree w/which a particular piece can adhere to or deviate from generic convention is different for different genres—but both need to pay more attention to the ways that pieces can both conform and resist, as well as to the values inherent to/ascribed to genres, their mastery and/or their resistance—(Beebee)"if genre is a form of ideology, then the struggle against or the deviations from genre are ideological struggles."
707. Value is a rising-to-centrality issue, & the study of "genre sets" can be a productive avenue.
708-9. function/context/community is a problem for unifying theories—what's the community of a piece of literature? there's no telling who will read it, in what country, language, time period—are we part of a community w/everyone who visited the Globe when we read Shakespeare?—and no way to connect those people, predict their existence, or know their differences—as readers today, we're in a wildly different context from those who first heard Shakespeare's plays; we can't possibly understand the plays the same way, and we can't really "reconstruct" their context in order to understand them as he "meant" them to be understood… "literary genres can be described in terms of their communities of users only if the community is described always in multiple terms," she concludes, and "Rhetorical genres, too, would benefit from being attached to multiple, interlapping communities"… lit's objects of "transcendence and universality" throw cogs in the works of rhet. genre-theorists trying to contextualize and localize genres as specific social actions.
711. the new job, then: "focusing on the variation within individual rhetorical texts; examining rhetorical texts as if they participated in multiple rather than single genres; considering whether rhetorical genres might have more complex, multiple functions and situations; and addressing questions of value within and among genres"
712-4. "If genres are recognized in terms of what they are not as well as what they are, then all texts participate in multiple genres and can best be understood in terms of more than one genre" (712)—which leads to "what Beebee calls 'generic instability'" "If each text always participates in multiple genres, then even in that text a genre is moving, shifting, and becoming destabilized. Even temporary stability is an illusion of genre theory rather than a reality of genre-in-action" (713), and "generic identity, function, and situation are necessarily unstabilized—forever" (714).
A Common Purpose:
715. "To teach students the rhetorical and social significance of one genre will require teaching the significance of its genre set and the place of that genre within the set"—"if in turn we taught literary works as participating in multiple genres, with functions and situations, we would be closer to teaching students a shared perspective on reading and writing"
717. She says if we can keep both areas' leanings in mind, and work collaboratively toward this generic-view of language/text/literature, we can hold English together. Then, in her footnote (8), she says that's the optimistic version; in the pessimistic version, we're too interested in focusing on our way of seeing things to the exclusion of the other.

Posted by ttobryan at 03:17 PM | Comments (0)

derrida_from_601 (genre 4.2/25)

Derrida, Jacques. "The Law of Genre." Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 55-81.

1 sentence summary: dream on. we're talking about frickin' derrida. who the heck knows what he's ever on about? (i know, i know, allen.)

56. "As soon as the word 'genre' is sounded…a limit is drawn. And…norms and interdictions are not far behind: 'Do,' 'Do not,' says 'genre'"
58. there would be no need to concern ourselves so much w/the differences between genres if "one were rigorously assured of being able to distinguish with rigor between" them
59. "the law of the law of genre" is "a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy"
62-3. "the law of abounding, of excess, the law of participation without membership"; genre is "essentially classificatory and genealogico-taxonomic" but yet "the principle of genre is unclassifiable"—there are no absolute marks by which one can be sure that a thing is that kind of thing and no other; problem of "mode and genre"—their relation is complex. things w/in a genre can be of different modes. can things of similar modes be in different genres? Genette describes the relationship as "not, as Aristotle suggests, one of simple inclusion" but doesn't clarify what it is instead
64. "if a genre exists…then a code should provide an identifiable trait and one which is identical to itself, authorizing us to determine, to adjudicate whether a given text belongs to this genre or…that genre"… but, in reality, "it is possible to have several genres, an intermixing of genres or a total genre, the genre 'genre or the poetic or literary genre as genre of genres," and "this [code] can take on a great number of forms and can itself pertain to highly diverse types":
65. "a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without or less a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging….because of the trait of participation itself, before of the effect of the code and of the generic mark. Making genre its mark, a text demarcates itself. If remarks of belonging belong without belonging, participate without belonging, then genre-designations cannot be simply part of the corpus"
69. D. says "let us weigh the possibility of the inclusion of a modal structure within a vaster, more general corpus…whether or not related to the genre. Such an inclusion raises questions concerning edge, borderline, boundary, and abounding"
81. "The genre has always in all genres been able to play the role of order's principle: resemblance, analogy, identity and difference, taxonomic classification, organization and genealogical tree, order of reason, order of reasons, sense of sense, truth of truth, natural light and sense of history"

Posted by ttobryan at 03:07 PM | Comments (0)

encyclopediac (genre 4.1/25)

Coe, Richard M., and Aviva Freedman. "Genre Theory: Australian and North American Approaches." In Mary Lynch Kennedy. Ed. Theorizing Composition: A Critical Sourcebook of Theory and Scholarship in Contemporary Composition Studies. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1998. 136-47.

brief abstract: "Until the late 1980s" genre wasn't really a term used in comp; although "it was alive and well in speech communications," (Campbell and Jamieson) in English it was considered a literary concept rather than a rhetorical one. During the 80s, "theorists on several continents" (here, specifically, Aus. and North Am.) "seized on the notion of genre as central to understanding the social, functional, and practical dimensions of language use," beginning with Michael Halliday*, Carolyn Miller*, and the English translation of Bahktin's "Speech Genres."*

Posted by ttobryan at 03:06 PM | Comments (0)

davida_from_601 (genre 1.3/25)

Charney, Davida H. and Richard A. Carlson. "Learning to Write in a Genre: What Student Writers Take from Model Texts." Research in the Teaching of English 29:1 (1995): 88-125.

abstract: Statistical study of the effects of provided models on the final products of the psychology lab-report writing of a group of student-writers, beginning with the following claim as rationale: "To write successfully in a genre, a writer must be familiar with its conventions of content, structure, and style, as well as understand the assumptions underlying these conventions. A writer must also know how to adapt these constraints to fit the peculiarities of the task at hand."

Because students "have difficulty not only learning the structure of the genre itself but also adopting the 'voice' of a researcher," they can benefit from studying model texts that expose them to both of these elements. Contrary to researchers' hypotheses, students exposed to several good models scored no better than those exposed to a variety of different skill-level models; apparently students with some previous exposure to a genre can differentiate between good and poor examples; labeling the varying examples with grades made no difference in students' ability to discriminate in this manner.

(it might be useful if i still had page #s for this material)

Posted by ttobryan at 03:03 PM | Comments (0)

b&h_from_601 (genre 1.2/25)

Berkenkotter, Carol, and Thomas N. Huckin. "Rethinking Genre from a Sociocultural Perspective." Written Communication 10 (1993): 475-509.

brief synopsis of argument: "In the sciences and humanities, maintaining the production of knowledge is crucial for institutional recognition, the development of subspecialties, and the advancement of scientists' and scholars' research programs….Knowledge production is carried out and codified largely through generic forms of writing….Genres are the media through which scholars and scientists communicate with their peers. Because genres are intimately linked to a discipline's methodology, they package information in ways that conform to a discipline's norms, values, and ideology. Understanding the genres of written communication in one's field is therefore essential to professional success" (475-6)

passages
475-6. trad'l understanding of genre as "form, substance, and context" doesn't address 'the ways in which genre is embedded in the communicative activities of a discipline" or the "functions of genre from the perspective of the actor" performing (or learning to perform) it; words for Bakhtin's "centripetal"—unifying—and "centrifugal"—stratifying—forces
477. instead of the trad'l, B & H propose that "genre knowledge is…best conceptualized as a form of situated cognition embedded in disciplinary activities. For writers to…publish, to exert an influence on the field, to be cited, and so forth, they must know how to strategically use their understanding of genre." Their work must appear to both uphold the generic traditions and move along the "cutting edge" of change in the direction the field perceives itself to be changing in.
479. "principles that constitute a theoretical framework" for genres—they possess: "Dynamism" from Bitzer: [genre-inspiring rhetorical] "situations recur and, because we experience situations and the rhetorical responses to them, a form of discourse is not only established but comes to have a power of its own—the tradition itself tends to function as a constraint upon any new response in the form" (from p. 13)
480. Miller's view of genre is "social constructionist"
484. "Situatedness": a problem in establishing situation/genre connections is "the thorny issue of what kinds of communicative acts should be accorded 'genre status,' as Swales (1990) puts it"—Bakhtin's definition/use of "utterance" as a definitive unit is one answer
487-8. "Genre knowledge…is very much a part of the conceptual tool kit of professional academic writers, linked to their knowledge of how to use the other tools of their trade"—this = its being called "situated cognition, inextricable from professional writers' procedural and social knowledge" where "social knowledge" = "writers' familiarity with the research networks in their field"; situatedness of graduate/undergraduate genre-learning
491. "background knowledge" or "knowledge that readers of that genre are assumed to have" is an element of situatedness (489), as is "kairos, or rhetorical timing"—publishing the perfect thing at the moment and in the format ppl want to see (491).
488. "Form and content": "more localized genres…can be more fully described," but "is there some point at which a piece of communication becomes so localized that it ceases to be generic? In other words, is there a 'threshold' of genericness?"—their answer is no: "genericness is not an all-or-nothing proposition….Instead, communicators engage in…various degrees of generic activity"
492. "Duality of structure": genres "constitute social structures…and simultaneously reproduce those structures"
493. Giddens: "Structure is both medium and outcome of the reproduction of practices" in the creation of social life
497. "Community ownership": genres "signal a discourse community's norms, epistemology, ideology, and social ontology" (list—478; repeated in intro 497); connection btw. genre and discourse community is "slippery"—B & H feel "that studying the genres of professional and disciplinary communication provides important information about the textual dynamics of discourse communities"—draw also on Swales' argument for "understanding the functions of genre in terms of the discourse communities that 'own' them
498. "genres of academic writing function to instantiate the norms, values, epistemologies, and ideological assumptions of academic cultures"—and are assimilated by new members (or, rather, new members are assimilated into them) w/o explicit instruction; ex. of a newsletter begun as a forum for non-standard academic generic work, intended to break out of the bounds of institutional writing; as it became well-known as a journal, it caved: "The contributors' increasing use of the standard conventions of formal scholarly discourse with its over intertextual mechanisms suggests that, despite a short period of rebellion, the textual instantiation of the values of the academy was an inevitable outcome of the institutionalization of the journal. What counted as knowledge had to be couched in the formal discourse of the literary scholar"
501. Conclusion: authors' views are "both structurational…and sociocognitive": "Full participation in disciplinary and professional genres demands a similarly informed knowledge of written genres. Genres are the intellectual scaffolds on which community-based knowledge is constructed"; genres must therefore be both "capable of modification according to the rhetorical exigencies of the situation" and "stable enough to capture those aspects of situations that tend to recur"; "As the intellectual content of a field changes over time, so must the forms used to discuss it; this is why genre knowledge involves both form and content. In using genres customarily employed by other members of their discourse community, members of a discipline help to constitute the community and simultaneously reproduce it"

Posted by ttobryan at 02:55 PM | Comments (0)

c&j2_from_601 (genre 3/25)

Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, eds. Deeds Done in Words: Presidential Rhetoric and the Genres of Governance. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.

1 sentence summary the unique intersection between office and occupant makes "president" and "presentential rhetoric" a rich site for examining the development of generic change, as new forms of speech-act arise out of new situational demands and old forms of speech-act evolve to perform newly appropriate actions.

(i keep insisting on keeping this source b/c it's so damn practical. they look at *texts* and *language* rather than just theorizing about how that might be done)

7-8. wide definition of "genre" that involves any categorization or grouping of elements—"genre is a classifying term"—that acknowledges the circular trap of definition: (as attributed to Paul Hernandi) "How can I define tragedy (or any other genre) before I know on which works to base the definition, yet how can I know on which works to base the definition until I have defined tragedy?"—generic criticism, then, has to define its genres and know that the truth it finds in studying them as it defines them "is never the only truth, and it is always a tentative truth in that the critical argument holds only until a better argument is made." Generic criticism, then, has a specifically pragmatic function: in choosing its selective criteria, it "operates…to consider ends, that is, the functions and purposes of discourse, and means, the strategies of language and argument through which such rhetorical ends can be achieved. In short, generic analysis studies the links between function and form"
104. history of war rhetoric demonstrates truths about all rhetoric: "Rhetorical types are linked to purposes; that is, they arise to perform certain functions, to accomplish certain ends in certain kinds of situations. A given type persists only so long as it remains a functional response to exigencies. In effect, any rhetorical type is constantly under pressure, and as conditions or purposes change, and as rhetorical action establishes new precedents, advocates alter and expand existing genres or develop substitute forms better suited to achieve their ends"
126. genre is "constitutive of" 1) presidential institution, 2) individual presidencies, 3) overall system of American government; also illustrates "the evolving powers of the presidency" and shows the cic role as "a continuing threat to the nation's democratic principles"

conclusion:
213. constitutive power of these genres creates identity for each president as President (representing the presidency) while establishing rhetorical boundaries on the role, while form-function structures ensure that each president is seen as occupying that role—no matter how incompetent a particular writer may be, if s/he follows the rhetorical precedent, s/he will be seen as fitting into the tradition. Rhetorical forms also serve to legitimize presidency while affirming checks-and-balances, keeping the system working
214. The continuance of forms gives the impression of a continuity & stability of office/officer; the words themselves are deeds in that they are purposeful rhetorical actions (to pledge a covenant, legitimize cic claim, etc.)—"A mediocre inaugural still invites investiture. Even as the citizens hear such an address, they can take comfort from the assurance it provides that the presidency is rhetorically stronger than the discourse of any given president"
216. generic criticism "features those symbolic similarities that contribute to the institution's continuity and identity" while also providing a frame through which to view individual presidencies, each of which "gains some of its character from the ways in which a given president chooses to exercise or not to exercise the generic options" (If s/he sticks to them, s/he is safe within the established modes, although runs the risk of being clichéd or boring; if s/he risks deviating, s/he might fail to execute a crucial function, succeed, and establish a new precedent, or simply be artful and transcendent in over-reaching the requirements without deviating in substantive ways.)
217. adaptation within the established patterns occurs b/c a president can, in many instances, choose when to speak and when to withhold discourse, or by prioritizing one generic element in a form over the others
219. genres are particularly comforting in "times of national trauma," as when a president dies, and a vp must take over, or when a president is impeached and must be pardoned, b/c "familiar discursive forms" reassure the public that the system is still working

Posted by ttobryan at 02:41 PM | Comments (0)

c&j1_from_601 (genre 2/25)

Campbell, Karlyn Kohrs, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, eds. Form and Genre: Shaping Rhetorical Action. Falls Church, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1978.

1 sentence summary: this 1978 collection traces the emerging connection between genre and action that complicates traditional visions of genre as a matter only of form or category.

Campbell and Jamieson--"Form and Genre in Rhetorical Criticism: An Introduction":
historical development:

• Edwin Black's (1965) Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method proposed a generic approach to rhetorical criticism that presumed "that 1) 'there is a limited number of situations in which a rhetor can find himself'; 2) 'there is a limited number of ways in which a rhetor can and will respond rhetorically to any given situational type'; 3) 'the recurrence of a given situational type through history will provide the critic with information on the rhetorical responses available in that situation'; and 4) 'although we can expect congregations of rhetorical discourses to form at distinct points along the scale, these points will be more or less arbitrary'": his work "argued for an organic critical method…[that] emphasized form but was not formulary; it located clusters of discourses based on recurrent strategies, situations, and effects; and it revealed a weakness of the neo-Aristotelian perspective as a basis for writing a developmental history of rhetoric" (14).
• Lloyd Bitzer (1968) argued that "it was the situation which called the discourse into existence and provided a vocabulary through which to describe the variables in 'rhetorical situations'" and suggested "the important influence of prior rhetorical actions on subsequent discourse": "comparable situations prompt comparable responses, 'hence rhetorical forms are born and a special vocabulary, grammar, and style are established….the tradition itself tends to function as a constraint upon any new response in the form" (15).
• the late 60s saw a proliferation of "genre" and "rhetoric" articles—"in most cases, the use of 'genre' or 'rhetoric of' was a matter of convenience rather than an assertion of the existence of a discrete type of symbolic act" (15).

passages:
17. "an address [or other work] may have some elements of one genre (epideictic) and still be an exemplar of another (deliberative)"
18. elements the historical conceptions have in common: "1) Classification is justified only by the critical illumination it produces not by the neatness of a classificatory schema; 2) Generic criticism is taken as a means toward systematic, close textual analysis; 3) A genre is a complex, an amalgam, a constellation of substantive, situational, and stylistic elements; 4) Generic analysis reveals both the conventions and affinities that a work shares with others; it uncovers the unique elements in the rhetorical act, the particular means by which a genre is individuated in a given case"; to paraphrase Northrop Frye, "formal similarities establish genres, and the forms relevant to genres are complex forms present in all discourse"
19. "the rhetorical forms that establish genres are stylistic and substantive responses to perceived situational demands. In addition, forms are central to all types of criticism because they define the unique qualities of any rhetorical act, and because they are the means through which we come to understand how an act works to achieve its ends"
20. "A genre is a group of acts unified by a constellation of forms that recurs in each of its members. These forms, in isolation, appear in other discourses. What is distinctive about the acts in a genre is the recurrence of the forms together in constellation"
24. genres can be conceptually formed either deductively or inductively (or through some confusion of the two—which causes the circular reasoning of "here is x. let's say x is a poem. a poem must be all the things x is. first, let's make a list of 'poem' things from x. then, let's study x to see if it's really a poem"); both formative procedures have "pitfalls" in that they allow vague or contradictory designations to be made. Genres seen as constellations of forms avoid some of these pitfalls in that one constellation "need only exist in a single instance to establish a genre or a generic potential"; allows new genres to be named when new situations arise, rather than calling things members of a genre that they aren't quite, which can bring about the "undermining of the genre itself"; instances in which "a dynamic is sustaining a genre in the absence of, or counter to, situational demands" are "degenerative"
25. generic criticism goes beyond classification into critical analysis—"A 'genre' is a classification based on the fusion and interrelation of elements in such a way that a unique kind of rhetorical act is created. Approaching such acts generically gives the critic an unusual opportunity to penetrate their internal workings and to appreciate the interacting forces that create them"
26. "the traditional emphasis on individual speeches and speakers as rooted historically in a particular time and place is…anti-historical, because it fails to recognize the impact of rhetorical acts on other rhetorical acts, and it fails to recognize the powerful human forces which fuse recurrent forms into genres which…transcend a specific time and place"
27-8. formal analysis is a crucial "process of generic placement": "One's capacity to clarify and reveal a rhetorical act is based on one's ability to see it clearly, to understand its nature, to select the most apt characterization of it"

Simons, Herbert W.--"'Genre-Alizing' About Rhetoric: A Scientific Approach":
44. scientific approach propositions (out of an original 20):

• "The term 'rhetorical genre' refers to any distinctive and recurring pattern of rhetorical practice"
• "To demonstrate that a given set of rhetorical practices is unique, it must be shown that other rhetors do—or at least may—use dissimilar practices"
• "If one genre is to be distinguished meaningfully from another, it follows that there must be a larger class of rhetorical practices into which both genres can be put, and that this class itself might constitute a genre distinguishable from another at its own higher level of abstraction"
• "The distinguishing features of a genre must not only be namable but operationalizeable: i.e. there must be clear rules by which two or more independent observers can concur in identifying pre-designated characteristics of rhetorical practice when confronted with samples"
• "Independent observers must…also be able consistently to assign items of rhetorical practice (e.g. whole speeches) to generic categories according to those rules"
• "If items of rhetorical practice are to be consistently identified as fitting within one genre or another, it follows that these items should be internally homogenous across salient characteristics and clearly distinguishable from items comprising an alternative genre"

following a scientific approach would make a student (as in Hart) "a sort of sociologist of persuasion"—"The great promise of generic study lies not simply in classification but in the identification of common purposive and situational constraints that lead to generic similarities"

Posted by ttobryan at 02:27 PM | Comments (0)

October 14, 2005

history lesson, history lesson! (authorship 11/25)

Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993.

1 sentence summary efforts to solidify copyright law in such a way that it successfully and justly negotiates the complex (and still-evolving) terrain "between idea and expression" and between the individual and his/her place in the social fabric are "both futile and necessary" because "literary property is itself...an oxymoron" yet copyright as an institution "is deeply rooted both in our economic system and in our conception of ourselves" (8).

> yawns <

2. "copyright is founded on the concept of the unique individual who creates something original and is entitled to reap a profit from those labors." dominant "romantic and individualistic assumptions...obscure important truths about the processes of cultural production": "as northrop frye remarked many years ago, all literature is conventional, but in our day the conventionality of literature is 'elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented"

8. "authors do not really create in any literal sense, but rather produce texts through complex processes of adaptation and transformation. literary property is not fixed and certain lika a piece of land" (itself a problematic marker of the permanent); "all forms of property are socially constructed and, like copyright, bear in their lineaments the traces of the struggles in which they were fabricated."

25-6. shakespeare's claim to authorship is much more ben jonson's claim; shakespeare (at least as a playwright) was a "reteller of tales": jonson capitalized "Author" and stuck it to his name.

32-3. locke resisted monopoly in the then-growing industry of licensing; 1683 saw him proposing what looks like a relatively modern intersection of concerns: "that any person or company should have patents for the sole printing of ancient authors is very unreasonable and injurious to learning" (as well as "ridiculous" to "pretend to have a propriety in, or a power to dispose of the propriety of any copy or writings of authors who lived before printing was known or used in Europe") but "for those who purchase copies from authors that now live and write, it may be reasonable to limit their proterpy to a certain number of years after the death of the author"

39. defoe & the language of the patriarch: "A Book is the Author's Prpoerty, 'tis the Child of his Inventions, the Brat of his Brain" as much as his wife and child are, and it's wrong for "these Children of our Heads" to be "carry'd into Captivity" by pirates printing illegitimate copies; instead, all copies and profits should be and remain the "legacies, dowries, and estates" of the author & the author's family

91. the "proprietary author" and the "literary work" emerged from legal battles "like the twin suns of a binary star locked in orbit"; there's no way to extricate the one from the other

121. young's influence: to "introduce the notion of original genius into the traditional discourse of authorship... [so that] the originality of the work, and consequently its value, becomes dependent on the inviduality of the author"; especially as the novel comes into its own, authorship is more and more tied to personality, to the characters and attributes represented by the physical pages trading hands. (you did too write in this book!)

124-5. hargrave: "the subject of the property is a written composition; and that one written composition may be distinguished from another, is a truth too evident to be much argued upon. every man has a mode of combining and expressing his ideas peculiar to himself." <--but rose asks "how may one composition be distinguished from one another?" (it's not as evident as he'd like to believe), "does a composition have an essence that remains the same even if some of the language is changed? are successive drafts of a composition still the same composition?"

139-41. legal conflation of privacy with property--common-law protections of "an author's unpublished writings"--the writer should have the right to decide for him/herself whether a work be made public; "copyright is sometimes treated as a form of private property and sometimes as an instrument of public policy created for the encouragement of learning" because "copyright stands squarely on the boundary between private and public." nested divisions: protected (private) vs. unprotected (public) works; protected work is divided into "expression" (protect-able) and "idea" (somewhat protectable?) and "protected expression" further dividable into what is & isn't available under "fair use" regulations: "the meaning of private and public changes according to where one stands," which "suggests that this dichotomy is not a part of the world, but a way of organizing the world"

142. "copyright is deeply rooted in our conception of ourselves as individuals with at least a modest grade of singularity, some degree of personality. and it is associated with our sense of privacy and our conviction, at least in theory, that it is essential to limit the power of the state."

Posted by ttobryan at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)

hypertext HURTS (authorship 10.2/25)

Lunsford, Andrea, et al. "What Matters Who Writes? What Matters Who Responds?" Kairos 1.1 (Spring 1996) http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/1.1/binder.html?features/lunsford/title.html

1 sentence complaint...can't...read...hypertext...or reconstruct notions of centrality in the absence of linear structure...

passages & claims:
"a growing number of literary scholars are challenging the dominance of what Woodmansee calls the "author construct," demonstrating the web of political, social, linguistic, and ideological forces in which any seemingly unique 'author' moves."

elucidating foucault: "though I may write a textbook, the 'author function' is held by the publisher, the entity that holds copyright and hence controls the work's distribution. The larger discursive forces of publishing and copyright law, in this case, shape and create the meanings I as a 'writer' am allowed to inhabit. At the conclusion of his essay, 'What is an Author?' Foucault pauses, in fact, to ponder some questions very much like those with which I have begun, suggesting that 'who really spoke?' is more or less beside the point--that it doesn't matter who really spoke. Instead, Foucault suggests, we should be asking very different questions: 'What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it. . . ' (160)."

"much composition work on collaboration has merely reified traditional notions of authorship, viewing the group as simply an aggregate of radically individual autonomous selves"

"Our nearly compulsive scholarly and teacherly attention to what I call hypercitation and to endless listing of sources, in fact, are manifestations of the need to own intellectual property or knowledge that can be commodified, traded, and so on."

where do we situate classroom authority? "we can make a good beginning by trying to shift our emphasis, in regard to authority, from rights to responsibilities. In other words, I think we as teachers can locate classroom authority in the way we take responsibility for our actions, our position in the class, our embeddedness in institutional power structures. Most of all, we can locate classroom authority in our response-ability, in our literal and metaphoric ability to respond to student readers and writers. As Esther Dyson suggests, our value then lies not in the knowledge products we amass and dispense but rather in our relationship to that knowledge and to our students, in the responses we make to them, and in the processes we use in guiding students to explore their own responsibilities"

"For complex political, economic, and ideological reasons, we have for the last 300 years or so focused the camera of ownership and authority in on the single figure--usually European, usually white, usually male--on Wordsworth, let's say. It doesn't take much of a leap of imagination, however, to imagine relinquishing the close-up and pulling the camera back into a wide-angle shot that would reveal Wordsworth in a rich network of others, like his sister Dorothy and the circle of friends with whom he constantly talked and wrote. Nor would it take much more to embed that wide-angle shot in a fully-realized historical/contextual setting."

conclusions
"for a long time now, I have not felt a strong sense of individual ownership of any text I work on producing... but I would be disingenuous indeed if I did not recognize the degree to which my position as a white tenured full professor gives me the luxury of this stand: were I a beginning assistant professor, much less a grauate student, I would have to acknowledge a major truth of our profession: individual ownership of intellectual property is the key to advancement"

hypertext "makes manifest what scholarly articles, with their deeply embedded references and allusions and their footnotes/endnotes and lists of citations have always aimed at" and, more specifically, it "makes the always implicit intertextuality of any scholarly discourse explicit. To me, this explicitness seems also valuable because, to put it bluntly, it 'outs' academic discourse, demonstrating it to be deeply collaborative, deeply multivoiced."

"My greatest hope is that hypertextual scholarship will show forth the intricate patterns of indebtedness, intertextuality, shared authority, and collaboration embedded in all scholarly discourse and hence change the culture of the academy and of the way the academy values and rewards such discourse."

Posted by ttobryan at 02:59 PM | Comments (0)

watch closely now (authorship 10.1/25)

Lunsford, Andrea Abernethy. "Rhetoric, Feminism, and the Politics of Textual Ownership." College English. 61.5 (May 1999) 529-544.

1 sentence summary: the politics and implications of "dispersed authorship" are both promising and worth being wary of: there's the risk of disenfranchising groups just beginning to come into ways of claiming authorship/ownership in the first place, and there are a lot of corporate minds already at work looking for ways to own, buy, and sell webs and connectivity the say they own, buy, and sell monolithic texts/author-bodies/rights, etc.

passages:
529. watch out for the possibility that new notions of authorship "signal not a challenge to the old ideology of authorship but rather its appropriation for different and largely commercial ends"
530. collaboration has caught on (according to elizabeth lapovsky kennedy) due to "'feminist scholarship, anti-colonialist scholarship, and interpretive anthropology,' all of which, she says, 'present challenges to the traditional "objective" report authorized by the heroic anthropologist, the scientist of culture who works alone'"; in the 80s we thought everything was about to have a sea change, but we overpredicted its plausibility & goodness
531. linda hutcheon's argument about disenfranchising those still working "to assert and affirm a denied or alienated subjectivity" accidentally while being well-meaning theorists: "those radical post-modern challenges are in many ways the luxury of the dominant order which can afford to challenge that which it securely possesses"; copyright was never intended to protect common people or common ideas (folklore, balladry, etc.) but the unique productions of the el