Cinnabar and Alabaster

aims: to outline an approach to teaching that does the above & 6. "to try and demonstrate the general value of a genre-based approach to the teaching of academic communicative competence" wherein "genres" are "rather more than texts" although it still "remains necessary to use texts in order to understand how texts organize themselves" [a peculiar phrasing of agency, i must say]
genre analysis: needs the "extra-textual" influence of psychology & ethnography--english alone won't do (7).
key concepts: overlap as follows: "discourse communities are sociorhetorical networks that form in order to work towards sets of common goals. one of the characteristics that established members of discourse communities possess is familiarity with the particular genres ...used in the communicative furtherance of those sets of goals....genres are the properties of discourse communities...not...individuals....genres themselves are classes of comunicative events which typically possess features of stability, name recognition, and so on...genre-type communicative events...consist of texts themselves...plus encoding and decoding procedures as moderated by genre-related aspects of text-role and text-environment. these processing procedures can be viewed as tasks" (9)
furthermore: "the acquisition of genre skills depends on previous knowledge of the world, giving rise to content schemata, knowledge of prior texts, giving rise to formal schemata, and experience with appropriate tasks. thus, the teaching of genre skills essentially involves the development of acquisition-promoting text-task activities" (10)
a discourse community: 1) "has a broadly agreed set of comon public goals," 2) "has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members," 3) "uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information and feedback," 4) "utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the communicative furtherance of its aims," 5) "has acquired some specific lexis," 6) "has a threshold level of members with a suitable degree of relevant content and discoural expertise" (25-7)
genre is: "highly attractive," loaded with "Parisian timbre," and "extremely slippery"; also "fuzzy" and "disreputable" (i didn't need that, i just liked it); "formulaic" descriptions are "inimical to the enlightened and enlightening concept that language is ultimately a matter of choice": "the issue then is whether genre as a structuring device for language teaching is doomed to encourage the unthinking application of formulas, or whether such an outcome is rather an oversimplification brought about by pedagogical convenience" (33)
in folklore studies: genre can be forms but are more usefully classified by "sociocultural value": "how a community views and itself classifies genres" such that "major narrative genres such as myth, legend, and tale are...labeled...according to how the narrative is received by the community" (& some sub-studies reject the idea of formal permanance outright & focus instead on "the evolution of the genres themselves as a necessary response to a changing world")(35)
in lit: genre is mostly interesting (to critics) because/when writers "disobey" it (36), but also has value for writers as a "positive support" (fowler); genre analysis "is valuable because it is clarificatory, not because it is classificatory" (37). (on 40 s. cites martin doing the thing amy hates: "genres are how things get done, when language is used to accomplish them")
in rhetoric: "generic analysis...aims to illuminate rather than classify. it offers...a way of studying discoursal development over time that is detachable from an analysis of an individual event or an individual author"; "analysis of actual genres can clarify certain social and historical aspects of rhetoric that might otherwise be missed"
commonalities among fields: genre study involves "a distrust of classification and of facile or premature prescriptivism," "a sense that genres are important for integrating past and present," "a recognition that genres are situated within discourse communities, wherein the beliefs and naming practices of members have relevance," "an emphasis on communicative purpose and social action," "an interest in generic structure (and its rationale)," "an understanding of the double generative capacity of genres--to establish rhetorical goals and to further their accomplishment" (44-5)
"a working definition of genre": 1) "a genre is a class of communicative events" 2) "the principal critical feature that turns a collection of communicative events into a genre is some shared set of communicative purposes" (and "it is not uncommon to find genres that have sets of communicative purposes"(47)) 3) "exemplars or instances of genres vary in their prototypicality" ("family resemblances" & some birds are "birdier" than others") 4) "the rationale behind a genre establishes constraints on allowable contributions in terms of their content, positioning and form" 5) "a discourse community's nomenclature for genres is an important source of insight" (45-54)
pre-genre: chat & other "communicative behavior...best considered to lie outside genres" (58)
genre & readers: in general, writers have an obligation to readers to meet established expectation; in "certain genres" the genre trumps the reader: "the writer has a right to withdraw from the contract to consider the reader because of an overriding imperative to be 'true' to the complexity of the subject matter or to the subtlety of thought and imagination" (this comes from elbow) (63).
genres w/relation to various schemata (& stuff):

& then he does it, inspecting artifacts & their interactions using genric concepts & their relation to communities, schemata, etc. as lenses. it's cool to watch.