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November 29, 2005

yes, this belongs here. (authorship)

susan's post

Posted by ttobryan at 06:00 PM | Comments (0)

November 25, 2005

don't make it any worse! (authorship 14.2/25)

Lunsford, Andrea A., and Susan West. "Intellectual Property and Composition Studies." College Composition and Communication 47.3 (October 1996): 383-411.

1 sentence summary: this whole copyright/authorship thing: we've got to get our disciplinary heads out of the sand about it & start taking stands to change laws & practices so that the theory matches what we apply--& change our theories to more responsibly allow for the exchange of information in today's connected world.

passages
383. premise: "the time has passed when teachers of composition and communication could ignore debates about intellectual property, if indeed we ever should have"--b/c there's a bill on the table, the "proposed National Information Infrastructure Copyright Protection Act of 1995" (i suppose i'll have to find out what ever happened to that)
384. for teachers the "stakes are...high" & the field needs to "finally move beyond [its] limited and limiting models, in both theory and practice"
386. the document itself "would make browsing among electronic databses (simply viewing documents on a computer screen) tantamount to copying and thus subject to a fee; and allow information providers...to install devices that would track the retrieval of all information, protected or not"--a "radical invasion of privacy" for users.
387. "the field's silent complicity in shrinking the intellectual commons" has been & remains a problem; "after all, the teaching of writing has traditionally been invested in a model of composing that makes solitary reflection central to the production of 'original' texts absolutely 'owned' by their creators"
388. history: "the passage in the constitution which sanctions u.s. copyright law articulates this balance, empowering congress 'to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries' (article 1, sec. 8, cl. 8). this passage envisions an ideal reciprocity between inducements for creators in the form of limited rights and, on the other hand, the public interest in an expanded body of knowledge"
389. today's important questions: "what exactly is the contemporary american copyright law protecting? whose interests are being served by the current intellectual property regime?"
390. & the unfortunate answer: copyright lately is more & more "a tool for the protection of large commercial third parties"
391. taking the problem head-on means hearing from theory, science, & technology: (1) derrida, foucalt...
392. ...barthes, lefevre, brodkey, ede & lunsford more unintended theorizing: lunsford-and-west write about "ede-and-lunsford" as if there's no overlap. so another collaborative configuration makes a 3rd-person remove an appropriate way to refer to the first collaborative configuration, even when there's an "i" in common (although who would "we" be?)? (s) science & patent law--> "what one researcher calls the 'nightmare scenario of conflicting claims to various parts of the genome'"
393. & companies' fights to "level the playing field for marketers of drugs based on genetic sequencing information so that their own company might then achieve a larger share"
394. (3) the proliferation of material available "free" on the web--"we are...being led to understand communicating in an electronic environment as a social activity, as the necessarily collaborative process of creating and consuming information"; "until recently the information exchanged on the burgeoning electronic frontier has been relatively free from regulation, a situation that has caused users to feel uniquely empowered and also has contributed, in the opinion of some commentators, to the explosive growth in new information forms and delivery systems characteristic of the digital highway"
396. it's comp's problem b/c (1) "members of our profession must take strong stands on proposed copyright legislation, law that will profoundly affect us and our students as creators and consumers" & (2) "we must examine the assumptions about language that inform our rhetorical practice and our pedagogy and decide what kind of culture we want to promote in the classroom and beyond, particularly in cyberspace"
397. (even if we're "uneasy" about the issues)--we have a "deep and abiding investment in knowledge as a product to be traded in the academic marketplace"--"the academy's nearly compulsive scholarly and teacherly attention to hypercitation and endless listing of sources are driven, for the most part, by the need to own intellectual property and to turn it into commodities that can be traded like tangible property, a process of alienation that is at the heart of copyright doctrine based on the abstract concept of 'work'"
398. complications: "teachers often in effect appropriate the writing of students--in the kinds of assignments we make...in how we read and respond to student compositions...and in how we use their work with or without citation"; & "students are themselves often engaged in staking out territory to call their own"; "even such apparently alternative evaluation techniques as portfolios depend for their efficacy on the traditional notion of authorship, a notion dependent in turn on seeing knowledge as a marketable commodity"--so "it is not insignificant that the academy has been obsessively concerned with plagiarism, with 'false' ownership."
399. the big picture: "traditional notions of authorship, intellectual property, and commodified knowledge inform work in the academy, and much about public and private middle- and high-schools as well. indeed, from this viewpoint, the business of education is that of accessing and trading knowledge packages, accumulating and using them for advancement toward grades, graduation, admission to graduate or professional school, jobs, promotion, tenure, and so on. what what happens if this business...is no longer prfitable....if the knowledge products...are now readily accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime?....if the producers of such knowledge...are so widely dispersed as to be invisible...if the forces surveyed above...effectively destroy old systems of the 'right' to copy?"
400. first "we must begin to reimagine the space of the classroom"--"such metaphoric space is no longer commensurate with theories of learning, however, much less with the realities of late twentieth-century existence in a quite literally electrified world"; new classrooms need to be envisioned as "open and public," "as often virtual spaces where people meet to make meanings together"; hypothetically "our classrooms would not be separated from what anne gere describes as the rich 'extracurriculum'" (in which case it wouldn't exactly be "extra" anymore); also, of course, "teachers of writing must reimagine 'authorship'"--"there are many other ways [than the traditional] of locating 'authorship' and of invoking and enacting collaborative practices"--> "why not alternatively understand the creation of intellectual property as a temporary appropriation of linguistic territory from the cultural commons, an appropriation meant to enrich not only the 'creator/s' but the public domain as well?" better metaphor: "stewardship"
401. in such an imagining, copyrights would then "carry with them the steward's traditional responsibilities"; "there are alternate ways of imagining not only copyright but rhetorical invention as well, of where knowledge comes from and who has access to it"--i.e. esther dyson (& googlezon!)

Posted by ttobryan at 03:10 PM | Comments (0)

ready, set, CARE (authorship 14.1/25)

Mortensen, Peter, and Gesa E. Kirsch. "On Authority in the Study of Writing." College Composition and Communication. 44.4 (1993): 556-572.

guiding/motivating question: "how are we to account for the theoretical erasure of the authority that constitutes the writers--the authors--we face everyday [sic] in our composition classrooms?"

facile answer--with real consequences: "authority may not be dead after all, and even if it is, it hardly matters," because "the concept"--or "concepts"--"of authority is very much with us" (556).

the problem:
556. "composition studies now struggles with two fairly distinct views of 'authority,' yet the term is treated as stable and uniform by a range of authors who otherwise appear to hold differing assumptions about the nature of language and the world. while both views assume that authority attends the negotiation of power within the context of communities, they diverge in assumptions about how communities function and, consequently, how authority is to be defined and engaged": (1) ("assimilation model") "community evolves from consensus and authority compels assimilation. that is, individuals gain discursive authority by submitting to the [community's] explicit and tacit conventions of discourse"
557. (2) ("resistance model") "assimilation is seen as uncritical accomodation of authority," & so "a properly critical stance toward authority warrants resistance to the hegemony of conventional ways of knowing." both share this limitation: "a tendency to objectify authority, to cast it as something fixed and autonomous that writers or writing can possess"; an alternate approach would be "a dialogic model of authority" emphasizing ethics & problematizing "the asymmetrical power relations that situate participants in institutional cultures such as the academy"--"feminist critiques" are already at work questioning the entrenched "notion of authority based on autonomy, individual rights, and abstract rules"; they propose to continue this by "recast[ing]" authority as "informed by an 'ethic of care'"
situating authority
558. "relations in communities are in part defined by differences in knowledge, experience, and status," & "a dialogic model of authority addresses such asymmetrical power relations by linking them to an ethical concern for the well-being of community members"; "ethics" (acc. to giroux) "illuminates the tensions between authority as enabling individual autonomy and...engendering democratic, dialogic public life"
559. the poststructuralist warning: "'objectively' questioning the epistemological assumptions of the cultures we inhabit or...the pedagogies we practice...fails...because it feigns critical distance from subjects in which it is thoroughly interested"--but ultimate failure doesn't preclude the good t be done by "the insistant questioning that can--better than reified answers--yield insight"
questioning authority
559. OED characterizes authority as both "enforc[ing]" and "influenc[ing]"--2 very different ways of theorizing a stuff that in either case acts as a "conduit" that "channels power"--and that "often materializes into discourse," which is how "discourse legitimates the enforcement of obedience and the containment of action"
560. culturally, "personal authority" is always "male-marked" because "men have traditionally held most positions of authority, and acts of asserting authority are often marked as masculine," which linking "has led to a privileging of individual rights over community relations, and to an absence of care in those relations"
561. bahktin & how "communities always contain forces contending oppositely for stasis and change" (centripetal--conservativism & centrifugal--resistance, which "is part of the 'game' of community life, and can be valued just as accommodating participation is valued")--as such, "resistance requires authority," which "in bakhtin's universe comes from what he calls 'internally persuasive discourse'"--"the constellation of voices we appropriate as we learn how to differentiate ourselves as indiividuals in a particular social setting"; "it is also possible--and much easier--to speak with authority by repeating what bakhtin calls 'authoritative' utterances: discourse the community generates over time to preserve its status quo"; "authority & gender are so closely linked that we often have trouble recognizing authoritative gesutres that arise particularly from women's experience"
authority in rhetorical theory
562. process pedagogy embodies authority already but also sets the stage to change it.
563. expressivism: "'voice' corresponds with self, 'power' with authority"; cognitivism: "the individual mind and the autonomous text become twin seats of authority, for they both 'contain' the source of authority--knowledge"; social theories: "authority is never inherent in texts or minds, but rather is negotiated and constructed in discourse by individuals who observe conventions for the representation of knowledge"--so even in this view, "authority remains strictly a function of a body, albeit a metaphorical body, a community"
feminist critiques of authority
564. one way to look at it is "on a trajectory from personal to impersonal, from visible to invisible, from the pretense of care to no care at all"--at its extremes "paternalism," which "represents 'an authority of false love'" to "'autonomy'," "'an authority without love'"; the OED also offers "a tertiary sense in which a traditional authority might treat 'kindly' its subject"
565. "care, as we understand it, connotes an asymmetrical relationship between 'one caring' and one 'cared for.' in such a relationship, the 'one-caring' experiences deep engagement with the other; he or she 'assumes a dual perspective'"--"and because authority is male-identified and care female-identified, we see potential for a critical reassessment of both terms by exploring their nexus": it's not a safe activity; "care can easily lapse into paternalism--care imposed through authoritarian acts--and so presuppose the superiority of individual subjectivity and agency"; it also "can reinforce stereotypical female roles and continue to oppress women--or men--who act in 'caring' roles." the key is to imagine it "not as nurturing" but as "an obligation to another"--so for example "there is no requirement that writing teachers like the students they care for. the teacherly obligation centers instead on taking care that the diffusion of authority in the writing classroom promotes learning for all of the competing constituencies represented there."
566. thus, "instead of authority that delineates individual, autonomous subjects, we might envision authority that 'augments' social relationships," "as a way of vohering and sustaining connectedness" (jones), which vision "enbables the formation of communities by weaving together those experiential differences that falsely make autonomy seem a 'natural' aspect of some 'universal' human condition"--realistically, then, authority "continually constitutes (and is constituted by) particular communities" (in all their particular local asymmetries)
consequences
566. "we must teach students how and when authority can be negotiated. we must help them understand--and utilize--the many forms authority can take. of course, at the same time, we need to consider how much authority college composition students can bring with them into the classroom"
567. "we are arguing for more dialogic uses of authority, for a reinvigoration of giroux's idea of 'democratic, public life.' we must, therefore, avoid displacing autonomous authority with just another monologic model of text-mediated human relations"--even though it sounds hard to deal with, we need "messy pluralism"--to "provide composition studies with multiple senses of authority that are inclusive and heterogeneous": "we must not stop at encouraging students to seize authority...[but] must also help students choose how to be subject to authority without being coerced"--"a teacher can persuade students that their 'best interests will ultimately be served' if on appropriate occasions they subject themselves to the teacher's authority" (bizzell); "such dialogic authority allows teachers to engage students in discourse that can be difficult and even painful, yet crucial to their learning"--"exercizing authority over students...does not necessarily implicate us in acts of coersion"

Posted by ttobryan at 01:28 PM | Comments (0)

the so-what part (genre 17.1/25)

Holdstein, Deborah H. "Power, Genre, and Technology [response to Kathleen Yancey and Michael Spooner]" CCC 47:2 (1996): 279-83.

1 sentence summary: whyfore the will to "genre-ize" the internet (specifically email) & will it do us any good?

passages:
280. spooner & yancey's essay is "one of those watershed essays," one that "evoke[s] in a single essay many of the most salient issues inovlved in technology and composition studies in a scholarly and innovative merging of form and content"; "the specter of 'genre' is a particularly vexing one, raising any number of issues, questions, and contexts--western and non-wester, traditional and alternative....to create a genre is an act of empowerment and potential disempowerment. when we read a sonnet, we measure it against basic criteria of this genre within a genre and against a particular view of the best of that genre. the criteria that make a particular genre itself enable readers to recognize a work when it fits...and to measure another by its standards when it fails to measure up"
281. "while Freedman affirms that we still need to know how to categorize...types of prose...we are less sure what to call and 'how to read the mixed-genre' prose of comtemporary feminists"; dh would "extend this quandary to the mixed-genre qualities of the discourses prevalent on the internet. do we need to name these discourses as much as we need to read them?" like the "literary mosaic" Freedman identifies for "feminist post-critics," dh suggests "that the internet offers a similar multilayered, multivalenced set of textualities" & "this blending offers the possibilities and difficulties of a type of genre bordercrossing, and the inevitable readerly as well as writerly conflicts stemming from the distance between what we all seem to want the internet to be (free, utopian) and our simultaneous certainty that it already replicates the hierarchies of its users (androcentric, judgmental, rule-governed)....if it is part of any genre, it is a 'baggy-monstered' cross-genre, and in being so once again replicates and to some extent subsumes the other genres enacted within it, crossing other types of socio-cultural concerns and borders in its wake: among them, access, privacy, and ownership, a certain simultaneity of judgment (sometimes made known to the writer, sometimes not), not to mention unsettling, techno-inducted reproductions of street-life hazards"
282. possible answers: "the critic-theorist's mode of knowledge is 'categorizing'"; "perhaps this, too, describes the need to validate or categorize the internet--to justify our time and contributions on various lists, perhaps, and to academically validate cyberspace as a forum for scholarly work and publication"
283. also, "one might argue that by virtue of being on-line, computer-based writing boasts far more distinctive features--i'd say problems, again, of access, publication, ownership, and so on--than simply being 'transmitted via computer'"; another important question: "what other invisible hierarchies--in addition to the ones we know and understand that relate to gender, power, and so on--will be formed to order us as we 'slouch towards cyberspace'?"
284. "a number of critics...assert that each new technology excludes women from its spheres of influence (and it is true that the vast majority of the people using the net [in 1996] are male)"; "what are the ways in which we seem to 'know' the gender of the person writing even when the writer masks his or her gender?; overall, then, spooner & yancey's essay "helps us see the net with a renewed, harsh glare towards the interface, highlighting to the profession the social, ideological, and power relationships replicated on new technologies and the ways in which we much acknowledge, confront and--is it even possible?--redefine those spaces"

Posted by ttobryan at 12:24 PM | Comments (0)

networks, told-not-shown (collaborative writing 21/50)

Brodkey, Linda. Academic writing as social practice. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 1987

1 sentence summary: "as social practice" doesn't mean "writing is social" (the obvious) but means there are social consequences for writing and social constraints that allow and determine it--it's just just always part of a larger social whole but is connected into that whole through specific material, political, & ideological nodes that can be examined and influenced.

unwitting position statement? ix: "to the extent that writing is an individual act, i am of course responsible for the arguments made here. but to the extent that writing is also a collective act, a great many people deserve full recognition for their tangible and intangible support during the years that i worked on this project"

definitions:
when writing about "the interdependence of writers and readers in the academic community," "culture and community" are "contingent terms of analysis" whereby culture is the term for "referring to what members of a group know, or could learn, about language conventions" and community refers to "cultural practices, in this instance...what academic writers and readers do with their knowledge": "the Academy" is "a culture" and "the academic community [is] a specific group within that culture whose members organize their professional lives around" its demands (7).

from hymes: language field = "the languages an individual knows"; speech field = "the number of communities whose rules of discourse and individual knows" & speech network = "a way to describe how and where people put their knowledge to use--who in fact speaks to whom and under what circumstances" (paralleled with "what [she] earlier defined as community")(18-19).

passages
21. "interdisciplinary study is not primarily a commitment to a method, but to a topic. consequently, in interdisciplinary studies, a particular axiology rather than a method links one text to another. needless to say, then, texts are related to one another as beads in a necklace, rather than as beads on a string. this being the case, textuality is less a matter of individual beads and more a matter of the relationship between the beads and the necklace" (this is here because i don't know what it means, but the metaphor & its opacity intrigues me. wtf, lb?)
23. "learning to read and write academic prose is...a matter of learning conventions, such as whom to cite and when to do so, for those conventions are part of the cultural repertoire of all academics. in the doing--in the reading and writing of academic prose--the academic practices that ensue from this shared cultural knowledge are, however, material choices that are made. hence, when they interpret and evaluate their own and one another's prose, academics are positioning themselves in relation to both academics and nonacademics. and in so doing, they choose academic ideologies as well as thir fields and disciplines: which topics are academic; which methods are appropriate for research; what political profile to represent within the academic community, as they perceive it; and what politic, to practice outside their community. so to the extent that academics inherit a culture, but literally construct a practice out of the material resources of that culture, including the language in which to voice committments to things academic, one might say that academics are what they read and write and publish.
30. "the more one thinks about it, the more one suspects that even faint praise from someone in the community is thought to be preferable to any amount of adulation outside the community" <--she's talking about the academy again, but isn't this generally true for communities of discourse/influence/etc. anyway?
36. "network" is a better term than "community" for describing how discourse-groups (s.a. academics) interact; "community is...a word teetering on sentimentality, a notion which, because it betrays no tentions...promises much by stipulating very little," but "social network is sociology's attempt to substantiate empirically the sense of community" b/c it's "consistently described in terms of observable social practices": so "what is meant by community might be better understood as a social network or, even more likely, as a collectivity if interdependent social networks"
76. atomism = the modernist "notion that the individual is an atomic, self-referring unit" (re: alienation)
114-5. the collaborating writers she studied, in her description "each harbored hopes that learning would be unevenly distributed, that the extensive committment to a particular version of feminism and feminist literary study that each brought to the project would be affirmed. in short, each wished to be the other's teacher rather than student" even though "both...professed to believe that they entered the collaboration evenly qualified" and that "the apparent disparaty between their academic status and credentials did not obviate the more crucial fact that each felt susceptible, even vulnerable, to arguments asserted by the other"
119. there's something valuable--but i can't pin down yet what--about bill's "plan" & how him bringing the plan in set the stage for the collaboration going the way he envisioned it--or resisting his envisioning, but either way being defined, positively or negatively, by that claiming move. is that a good thing or a bad thing, a constructive act or a limiting one? (ok, both, but which way does it lean, if it consistently does, or what makes it wobble?)
141. there's also something valuable about how he thought they were collaborating about & somewhat also through feminism whereas she saw collaboration as feminism in action.

Posted by ttobryan at 11:37 AM | Comments (0)

November 21, 2005

my name is legion (collaborative writing 20.1/50)

Yancey, Kathleen Blake, and Michael Spooner. "A Single Good Mind: Collaboration, Cooperation, and the Writing Self." College Composition and Communication 49.1 (February 1998): 45-62.

1 sentence summary: we're still assuming a lot of things when we talk about collaborative writing/learning that we should look closer at, from a whole handful of different (voices) angles.

46. ("indefinite definition) "at the same time composition teachers and scholars are promoting collaboration inside the classroom and out, our academic institutional structures continue to punish it as a dishonorable 'giving or receiving help'"
47."it would be especially useful for the field to stablize what we mean by collaboration. however, to do this (naturally) implies a critique of the construct of collaboration that predominates now, showing it at odds with the claims for it"; "[collaboration] allows a constructivist, collective kind of knowledge-making process that is faithful to and takes advantage of a postmodern, multivocal, Bakhtinian understanding of how we 'create' knowledge" (cue reither & vipond, (neo) porter, etc.)
48. the above "could be called old style/paradigmatic collaboration: while the processes involve multiple authorship, the text itself is pretty much the same as it would be in a single authorship venture"; "when collaboration 'works,' what happens?...if it's ubiquitous, it's always working, no?"
49. from ede & lunsford y & s "get the sense of a false opposition"--"the first set of respondents were content with thier groups' focus on efficiency and division of labor--which actually belong to the hierarchical mode--while, conversely, the second set of respondents were feeling oppressed by the dialogic style of thier groups"; "if for Ede and Lunsford 'group' and 'collaborative' were not equivalent by definition, then 'dialogic' and 'hierarchical' could be seen as two modes of group writing, but 'dialogic' might be collaborative and 'hierarchical' might not--without the stigma of intellectual rigidity and interpersonal failure"
50. "what many accounts of collaborative writing don't see is that--though they lay claim to the master narrative--they don't in the specifics of their accounts support the narrative. they underscore it as mythology. for example, ownership--a rather anti-collaborative concept--still seems pretty important even to collaborative scholars"; "the practice described by many seems both celebratory of and resistant to collaboration at the same time: a reflection perhaps of what we all feel--the tug and pleasure of working together in tension with the need to recieve individual credit in a meritocracy"
52. "collaborators achieve a critical level of congruence in understanding, in purpose, and in other intellectual dimensions of a project. cooperators organize themselves differently: clear structure, division of roles, division of knowledge, efficiency--'hierarchy' in its neutral or positive dimension"; "plagiarist" alongside "ghostwriter" defined as "working 'alone' but co-opting another identity"
53. "many scholars in composition still seem to prefer a certain vagueness in the idea of community. it's as if the word has become magic: a talisman against the idea of conflict in the discipline....one would guess that this comfortable magic is also behind the interest in collaboration. and while it has brought some luck to the study of composition, it may also have kept the field from seeing value in reasonable non-collaborative models of writing"
54. "but maybe a committee...is not such a bad model" even "an appropriate model for group writing in the classroom": "the work is assigned, a deadline set from outside, an inescapable arbitrariness pervades. committees have an emotional detachment about them because they belong to the world of work"; emotional investment isn't everything, though; "composition teachers are inundated every year with student writing that is truly impassioned and truly bad"
55. "writing-for-the-teacher is your profession when you're a student, and working as a committee is an effective--even a natural--approach in a professional setting"; "we usually assign for students what Smith would call cooperative--not collavorative--work, in what Ede and Lunsford would call a hierarchical--not a dialogic--mode"; "the sense of collective" is "in our superstition: we 'see' collaboration everywhere, along with community. the trouble is that the effect of an all-inclusive definition of collaboration has been to trivialize collaboration"
56. "it has to be OK to say that these are not all 'collaborative' modes of writing"; "if our theory must call all writing collaborative, then 'collaboration' becomes moot and useless as a theoretical construct...and then this emperor has no clothes"; when the line becomes a continuum: "imagine the lone author at a given point on the circle. move in one direction...through increasingly cooperative projects, on into collaborative ones, until you reach the fulfillment of smith's 'expectation of a singular purpose and a seamless integration of the parts, as if the conceptual object were produced by a single good mind.' and where are you? back to the individual. well, not 'the' individual, but a collective one...an our/self"--"even in its collectivity, it's still a singular. the autonomous self seen through a kaleidoscope--fragmented, but composed"; & the "foregrounding difference" point: "if we aren't different, then we don't need to collaborate"
58. "in short, ironically, in spite of all, the We in collaborative scholarship is under erasure. identity is very much individualistic, the individuals and their concerns linked rather than 'collected'"; "a collaborated self wants to say with the villagers to the census-taker 'we are one.' yet--for example, by acting out the intersection of voice in the format of this paper--that self also says 'my name is Legion'"; "writing," says porter, "is an attempt to exercise the will, to identify the self within the constraints of some discourse community"
59. benjamin's word is "montage." but "no one is looking at how such different voices--the ones normally so important in collaboration of whatever variety--might be represented textually. the assumption seems [to be simply] the old genres will suffice to contain it....[but] this collective intelligence?--represented textually [might require us to] invent new genres that wouldn't contain it, might have to refigure old genres so that they couldn't contain it"
61. "if multivocal writing becomes the 'new force' that gesa kirsch predicts, it will be interesting to see what readers make of it. to see if they are annoyed at the reading work involved, or to see if they are pulled into the text--perhaps as voyeur...or as reader-chorus, or as participant....or if they find reading it difficult repcisely because this text doesn't quite fit their genre expectation"; "to expose the multiple gears and pulleys does in fact represent the collaborative process, and it should work in part to remind readers of their own contribution to meanings made. multiplicity, transaction, community, intertextuality mean nothing if they stop at the end of the page"

Posted by ttobryan at 09:35 PM | Comments (0)

development reconsidered (genre 16.3/25)

Prince, Michael B. "Literacy and Genre." College English 51 (1989): 730-49.

1 sentence summary: rather than leading students through a sequence of writing activities based on a model of cognitive development that assumes a uniformity that doesn't exist (& might not work anyway), we should lead them through a sequence evolving from more familiar to less familiar genres so that they become acquainted with academic writing by writing in successive approximations to it.

passages
730. developmental psych's approache to cognitive sequencing "fails to consider the extent to which cognitive development may be influenced by a child's exposure to different kinds of discourse," plus, "the ability to achieve college-level literacy will often depend upon a student's prior familiarity with the discursive behavior he or she is asked to exhibit in school," which is why we "need...a social...basis" instead. argument: "every student possesses a socially constituted generic lexicon, which functions as a complex code of verbal behavior," & "our success with students whose generic lexicon does not already predict success with the essay depends, then, upon our ability to establish mediating links between familiar and unfamiliar generic contexts"
733. effective "generic replacement serves to counteract the inherent advantage of teachers over students"--one in which academy members & academic genres are always more isolated, intellectual, & removed from social realities than the genres of students.
738. "when individuals lose connection with the currents of familiar social discourse, when they isolate themselves in a distant observatory or are isolated within a barren discursive tract, then madness--or dullness--or both--threaten"--"intellecutal and discursive solitude" leads to "a feeling of powerlessness"
739. to reverse this, bringing "the...ficure of knowledge...into contact with patterns of interaction from a more familiar sphere....brings about a recontextualization of knowledge"
745. "missing from Elbow's celebration of free-writing is an indication of how students are to move from lyrical self-expression to successful writing in school"--the demands of school writing "suggest[] the need for a differen kind of intervention, a shift in the students' conceptual relation to writing"--"a shift towards [using in classrooms] genres that inscribe a sense of writing as direct communication": "we might, in other words, imagine a sequence of assignments moving from generic contexts closer to actual patterns of verbal interaction to patterns further removed"
747. his model "refamiliarizes students with the conversational cues that inform their face-to-face interactions and then gradually shows them how to submerge these cues within the more discursive strategies of essay organization. the movement is from imagining a familiar, highly specific reader to positing an unfamiliar audience; from exploring familiar topics generated from texts; from writing within a 'climate' that encourages the first person voice, informal development of thought, vairety of tone, and so on, to establishing a more formal context, within which one ix expected to use the third person and develop a coherent, unified argument"

Posted by ttobryan at 09:15 PM | Comments (0)

consensus as dissensus (collaborative learning 19.3/50)

Trimbur, John. "Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning." College English 51.6 (October 1989): 602-16.

1 sentence summary: defining "consensus" as a situation calling for and a way of allowing for the co-presentation of dissenting voices, rather than a blanket neutrality, not only allows bruffee's ideas to stand but offers a theoretical possibility for the continued existance of difference.

passages:
602. the good side: collaborative learning "organizes students...to engage in a process of intellectual negotiation and collective decision-making" with the goal of "reach[ing] consensus through an expanding conversation"; for bruffee "the language used to reach consensus acquires greater authority as it acquires greater social weight: the knowledge students put into words counts for more as they test it out" against one another. the critique (p.1) "the use of consensus in collaborative learning is an inherently dangerous and potentially totalitarian practice that stifles individual voice and creativity, suppresses differences, and enforces conformity;
603. (p.2) "bruffee's social constructionist pedagogy runs the risk of limiting its focus to the internal workings of discourse communities and of overlooking the wider social forces that structure the production of knowledge"--"in an unequal, exclusionary social order...embedded in hierarchical relations of power," by which means "unwittingly or not," it may "accommodate its practices to the authority of knowledge it believes it is demystifying"
instead:

"consensus in some of its pedagogical uses may indeed be an accommodation to the workings of normal discourse and function thereby as a component to promote conformity and improve the performance of the system," but "consensus need not inevitably result in accommodation"; it "can be a powerful instrument for students to generate differences, to identify the systems of authority that organize these differences, and to transform the relations of power that determine who may speak and what counts as a meaningful statement

(i.e. who can change the matrix) plus, "if the fear of conformity is a legitimate one, it is not for the reasons...bruffee's critics give[]. their effort to save the individual from the group is based on an unhelpful and unnecessary polarization of the individual and society"
604. rather "consensus represents the potentiality of social agency inherent in group life--the capacity for self-organization, cooperation, shared decision-making, and common action"; "the goal of reaching consensus gives the members of a group a stake in collective projects"; also "pragmatists see no reason to rescue the individual from 'normative communities' because in effect there is nowhere else the individual can be: consciousness is the extension of social experience inward." the thing to fear is the "teacher-centered and authoritarian...fear of 'group-think'": "it prevents a class of students from transforming themselves from an aggregate of individuals into a participatory learning community" & "locks [students] into a one-to-one relation to the teacher, the repository of effective authority in the classroom, and cuts them off from the possibilities of jointly empowering activities carried out in the society of peers" --> and "the issue" of "the left-wing critique...is not the status of the individual but the status of exchange among individuals"
605. "how we teach, bruffee suggests, is what we teach"; "the term conversation has become a social constructionist code word to talk about knowledge and teaching and learning as social--not cognitive--acts": "learning" in rorty's words "is a shift in a person's relations with others, not a shift inside the person that now suits him to enter new relationships"; his "notion of conversation describes a discourse that has no beginning or end, but no crisis or contradiction, either"
607. rorty also "acknowledges...the tendancy of discourse to normalize itself and to block the flow of conversation by posing as a 'canonical vocabulary'" but he doesn't follow this far enough; what he defines as "abnormal discourse" is "the activity par excellence not of the group but of the individual--the genius, the rebel, the fool"
608. he doesn't carry out the disruption he hints at, trading in "civility, the agreement to keep on talking" & "the 'power of strangeness' in abnormal discourse...simply reaffirms our solidarity with the conversation," which is why trimbur wants to "look[] at consensus in terms of conflict rather than agreement"--and at abnormal discourse as "the result...of the set of power relations that organizes normal discourse: the acts of permission and prohibition, of incorporation and exclusion that institute the structure and practices of discourse communities" & as "dissensus...marginalized voices, the resistance and contestation both within and outside the conversation, what roland barthes calls aratic discourse--the discourses out of power"
610. civility and consensus are worth saving, but "to do this we will need to rehabilitate the notion of consensus by redefining it in relation to a rhetoric of dissensus" such that "collaborative learning" is also "a process of identifying differences and locating those differences in relation to each other" in which "the consensus that we ask students to each...will be based not so much on collective agreements as on collective explanations of how people differ, where their differences come from, and whether they can live and work together with these differences"
611. institutionally "we must acknowledge that one of the functions of the pforessions and the modern university has been to specialize and to remove knowledge from public discourse and decision-making, to reduce it to a matter of expertise and tecnique": "the prevailing configuration of knowledge and its institutions prevents the formation of consensus by shrinking the public sphere and excluding the majority of the population from the conversation"
613. this "utopian view of consensus...would abandon this expert-novice model of teaching and learning. instead consensus would provide students with a critical measure to identify the relations of power in the formation of expert judgment"; "collaborative learning...seeks to locate authority in neither the text nor the reader but in what stanley fish calls interpretive communities" that examine difference productively & create learning by virtue of their examination.
614. the paradox: "the revised notion of consensus i am proposing here depends paradoxically on its deferral, not its realization. i am less interested in students achieving consensus (although of course this happens at times) as in their using consensus as a critical instrument to open gaps in the conversation through which differences may emerge"
615. dreamy picture painted: "consensus offers a way to orchestrate dissensus and to turn the conversation in the collaborative classroom into a heterotopia of voices--a heterogeneity without hierarchy."

Posted by ttobryan at 08:03 PM | Comments (0)

teaching term papers (genre 16.2/25)

Mustafa, Zahra. "The Effect of Genre Awareness on Linguistic Transfer." English for Specific Purposes 14:3 (1995): 247-56.

1 sentence summary: because "conscious knowledge of genre structure plays an important role in effective use of English in academic settings," "raising university students' awareness of term paper conventions" by explicitly teaching how to write term papers leads to students' creation of better term papers. (247)

rationale:
248. "despite the availability of...manuals and style guides, it is still necessary to provide explicit instruction on the constraints and the opportunities of the genre specific context (swales 1987...)....it is also well established that explicit instruction on academic genres introduces students to the intellectual activities of a certain discipline such as writing research reports; it acquaints them with the issues addressed and how they are resolved by the different lines of reasoning, assumptions about the audience, the writer's ethos and the purpose of communication (bazerman 1981; bizzel 1982)" but the details haven't been thoroughly explored.
249. in this context, "formal instruction" = "the taking of a course on term paper writing which includes providing detailed explanation, giving examples and exercises, indicating references (books, articles, manuals, handouts) and evaluation"
252. one problem: "the weight given to [an array of standard] conventions in the final evaluation of the paper varies from one professor to another and is not related to the provision of instructions on such aspects. three of those who provide instruction allocate to them 20% of the grade, while the other three do not give them any weight and may or may not comment on them. similarly, one of those who do not provide any instruction gives such aspects 20%, but the other does not."
254. result: "formal instruction through a special course on writing term papers plays an important role in raising students' awareness of the conventions and macrostructure of this genre" & "it is necessary that co-ordination between...teachers should include an agenda for agreeing on the features of the genres required from students and the criteria set for their evaluation"

response: meh. the charts & "data" don't clearly demonstrate (at least to me) the validity of the "instruction is important" claim, & the "it only really works if teachers agree first" caveat kinda kills it for me--the reality is that teachers (and broader-level academic & professional standards) don't all agree, so while teaching-to-the-test works as a short-term solution to an incredibly localized problem, its larger applicability is pretty darn consistently nil.

Posted by ttobryan at 07:35 PM | Comments (0)

by any other name? (genre 16.1/25)

Bhatia, Vijay K. "Genre-mixing in Academic Introductions." English for Specific Purposes. 16:3 (1997): 181-196.

1 sentence summary: the variously named elements of academic works that serve to introduce those works both overlap far more than the array of names reserved for them would indicate (such that there's often no way to distinguish a "preface" from a "prologue" from an "introduction" from a "forward") and sometimes sneakily share generic properties with such other genres as advertisements.

definitions
181. genre analysis "is the study of situated linguistic behavior in institutionalized academic or professional settings, whichever way one may look at it, whether in terms of typifications of rhetorical action...regularities of staged, goal oriented social processes...or consistency of communicative purposes" & genres "are essentially defined in terms of the use of language in conventionalized communicative settings. they are meant to serve the goals of specific discourse communities, and in so doing, they tend to establish relatively stable structural forms and, to some extent, even constrain the use of lexico-grammatical resources in expressing those forms"
183. many introductory "genres" "share the same communicative purpose of introducing the book," while "some of them occasionally incorporate a number of other minor purposes too"--"academic," "promotional," & maybe other?
185. they usually share "set conventions to number pages in roman numerals rather than Arabic numbers" (& maybe that's illuminative, & maybe it occludes)
186. one possibility: "over a period of time, these historically somewhat distinct genres have come so close to each other that they seem to have lost whatever traditional distinctions they may have had"
187. "it is not uncommon to find a dual communicative purpose in academic introductions, to introduce the book and to promote it to the potential readers, who may be tempted to invest in the knowledge being offered"
188. advertising is marked by adjectives; "promotional letters" with "i'd love to hear your comments" appeals
190. claim: "this mixing of generic resources...to introduce variation in genre construction, whether it is a deliberate mixing of communicative purposes, or a subtle exploitation of one generic context to communicate private intentions, is always considered to be tactically superior and hence must not be viewed as transgression of generic conventions. it tends to give considerable tactical freedom to expert members of the specialist discourse community to respond to novel situations on the basis of prior experience and past interactions"
191. if "pure genres" are even possible, "mixing" is one deliberate action & "embedding" another--"in genre embedding...one often finds a particular generic form...used as a template to give expression to another conventionally distinct generic form" (ex. is a job advertisement written as a poem)
192. so what? "genre theory needs to account for the complex communicative realities of the academic and publishing world" & "be able to account for genre-mixing and embedding, on the one hand, and to maintain generic integrity, on the other" (he makes no effort to explain what "generic integrity" does or could mean)

Posted by ttobryan at 07:11 PM | Comments (0)

flame wars! (collaboarive writing 19.2/50)

Johnson, Thomas S. "A comment on 'Collaborative learning and the 'Conversation of mankind'" College English 48.1 (1986) 76.

1 sentence summary: bruffee's a pinko commie bastard & he's out to enslave us all.

accusations

"there seems to be little substantive difference between his presentation of 'collaborative learning' and Orwellean 'groupthink'"

"one characteristic of every major authoriatarian system of this century has been the imposition of a common (or 'normal') language, representing a common way of thinking, for, of course, the common good. when mr. bruffee advocates 'collaborative' learning through peer pressure, the teacher being one 'peer' (more shades from Orwell's nightmare), and advocates the inculcation of 'normal' modes of communication and thinking, he seems to be falling...into the same camp of reformist social engineers as the somewhat more agressive ideologs of Naziism, Fascism, and Communism"

despite his "liberal bows to creative thinking," brufee professes a clear "committment to teaching 'groupthink'"--it's really just "establishmentarian liberalism paving the wide road for authoriatarianism"--for an "authoriatarian leveling toward the norm through peer pressure" that leaves no room for the "inegrity of the individual creative thinker, when he is outvoted"

& there will be no one left to "undermine the political conformity of the collaborative ideology" if everyone learns via "mr bruffee's peer indoctrination classes"

or: POW, right in the KISSER.

Posted by ttobryan at 06:50 PM | Comments (0)

sex & the purple cow (authorship 13.3/25)

Howard, Rebecca Moore. "Sexuality, Textuality: The Cultural Work of Plagiarism." College English 62.4 (March 2000): 473-491.

1 sentence summary: "if you want to see what the man believes in, look at his metaphors" --rmh, on hayden white

passages:
474. "embedded in the discursive construction of plagiarism are metaphors of gender, weakness, collaboration, disease, adultery, rape, and property that communicate a fear of violating sexual as well as textual boundaries. to regulate textual relations...is to regulate the gendered, sexualized body."
475. as we use it, "the comprehensive term plagiarism...supports the worst sort of liberal-culture gatekeeping, maintaining false distinctions between high and low literacy" & its metaphors "draw the teacher into an amorphous cultural regulation of the body, a regulation that wholly exceeds the scope most of us would claim for our work"; furthermore, "this cultural regulation...is hierarchical in the very ways that many of us abhor"
gender in words
475. "women are (to adapt irigaray's phrase) 'this author which is not one,'" are "not authors but the threat to authorship"
476. "the masculine is strong and admirable, the feminine weak and contemptible"; "masculinity is intellectually subtle, femininity is not"; "the authorial function of the feminine is to inspire the originary male, but the female, far from trustworthy, is a trollop. she is an essential part of the male's creativity, but finally the male must go it alone"
477. plus, pragmatically, "women may not mate with other women, with the female muse; hence they cannot be original"; "patriarchy reduces women to the stereotypes of angel and monster"
479. "gendered metaphors of authorship and its transgressive variant, plagiarism, advance arguments...and they participate in a highly articulated, very explicity modern economy of authorship in which only the writer who can work alone, autonomously, free of others' influence, can produce an 'original' text. and that author of original text is male"; more metaphors: "paternity and the author as tiller"
480. students' plagiarism & "venereal disease"--where "disease is, of course, of the body, and a prominent tradition in the West says that the body is the feminine."
481. "in the modern economy of authorship, the spiritually inferior is, of course, the plagiarist, the binary opposite of the true and thus moral author, the masculine. the immorality of plagiarism is infectious, capable of contaminating (feminizing) those who come into contact with the offender"; add to spiritual impurity how "women writers of centuries past often depicted themselves--or were depicted by others--as mad" & "the familiar association of plagiarism with adultery"
483. and rape. but "who is being raped"? "is it the originary, proprietary, male author? or is it his property, his text?" (b) "it is the text that plays the feminine role of rape victim. the outrage of plagiarism, therefore, is that the text belongs to the proprietary--male--author" although in application "it is usually the reader or the author, not the text, who is identified as the rape victim"--and since the author can only be male...
484. ...what's left is "homosexual rape," rarely stated but still hovering there as the "enthymeme [that] does inform our culture of authorship" which "can powerfully affect our attitudes not only toward plagiarism and plagiarists but also toward authors whose texts have been plagiarised"
486. the claim, then:

the properties of autonomy, originality, proprietorship, and morality attributed to the modern author do not 'merely' describe modern authorship; they also instate and reproduce hierarchized textual values that operate from a model of heterosexual, binary gender. the metaphoric arguments of authorship invest the masculine gender with power and creativity--with subject status--and the feminine with powerlessness and an absence of creativity--with object status. this rhetoric of authorship depicts plagiarism not only as a transgression against textual ethics but also as a transgression against the masculinity that defines binary heterosexuality

"plagiarism represents authorship run amok--hence gender rendered indeterminate--and thus incites gender hysteria in the community in which it occurs"; "the metaphors are more than a coincidental add-on; they are the meaning of plagiarism. if we take the metaphors away, plagiarism is bereft of meaning; it becomes a transgressive speech act without consequent injury."
487. integral connectivity: "metaphors of gender and sexuality are part of our economy of authorship because our economy of authorship is part of our cultural regulation of gender and sexuality"
488. therefore: ixnay orfay ethay ermtay! "the term plagiarism, denoting a heterogeneous variety of textual activities, is doing cultural work that few of us would deliberately endorse"; "walter ong is right; the metaphors cannot be detached from the term they construct. hence the term--and with it the notion of unity among its hetergeneous subcategories--must be set aside." new terms instead: fraud, citation, and repetition. & the bottom line: "fraud? let's go right on getting angry about it....and then let's deal with everything else as issues of pedagogy, not as issues of morality or sexuality"

Posted by ttobryan at 06:10 PM | Comments (0)

0 cheers for gratuitous punishment (authorship 13.2/25)

Howard, Rebecca Moore. "Plagiarisms, Authorships, and the Academic Death Penalty." College English 57.7 (1995): 788-806.

1 sentence summary: treating plagiarism universally as lawlessness & punishing students harshly enforces the academy's clout without following through with its stated mission to educate (while also emphatically positioning students as lacking validity); the laws need to change to reflect accurately what we understand about authorship--students' and others' and to only punish intentional infractions of legitimate policies.

passages:
789-90. dwarves & giants: "implicit in this aphorism is an emphasis on accumulated knowledge," "reverence for the giants, the source, the Authority," and "an endorsement of the practice of imitating the source"; it also "accords to the latest writer the greatest knowledge"
791. descartes & freud are anxious about originality: "writers who want recognition must assert priority; to assert priority is to assert originality; and to assert originality engenders a fear of being robbed" plus "the larger fear that there is no such thing as originality" (meltzer)
792. copyright--we take it for granted & forget to examine how it works and what it does--"obscures the conventionality of literature, the mimetic nature of composition"; king & his "voice-merging" (miller)--"he applied the textual practices of one community to his writing in another"
793. "neither diachronically nor synchronically, then, can authorship be bounded into stable, antipodal categories of mimetic, autonomous, or collaborative authorship. the heterogeneity of theories of authorship, the contradictory definitions that exist simultaneously, render impossible any sort of unitary representation"; but, problematically, "representations of student plagiarism...simplify student authorship, depicting it as a unified, stable field"
795. in reality, authorship--students' along with everybody else's--is complex, changeable, interactive, etc, & the policies don't match the reality, so "we must redefine institutional policies to account for the dialectic"
796. we should also be teaching textual work "not in order to 'prevent' or 'cure' patchwriting but to help students make maximum intellectual use of it and then move beyond it"
797. too often, policy is phrased in (already contradicting) "moral" and "formalist terms" and "may even specifically exclude the writer's intentions, stipulating that plagiarism is plagiarism even if the writer is ignorant of its prohibition"; what is never recognized is that "students may have commendable reasons for engaging in patchwriting, a textual strategy that is commonly classified as plagiarism." instead, new policy needs to account for intention & motivation, for ignorance, experience, & students' ability to decode unfamiliar material & textual conventions
799. "plagiarism takes three different forms--cheating, non-attribution of sources, and patchwriting." cheaters can flunk. non-attributors & patchwriters, if they're doing it intentionally & deceitfully, can also flunk; if they're not, they're midway through a learning process & need teaching, not punishment.
803. what we need to do is "recognize that pedagogical applications of contemporary theory have gone as far as they can within the limitats of now-outdated law. it is time, therefore, to undertake gradual revisions of the law, so that it will reflect rather than obscure the complexities of student authorship"

Posted by ttobryan at 04:26 PM | Comments (0)

anthropology (genre 12.3/25)

Briggs, Charles L. and R. Bauman. "Genre, Intertextuality and Social Power." Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2 (1992):131-172.

1 sentence summary: understanding genre better--especially rhetorically instead of only as classification--can enable "investigating generic intertextuality" in ways that "illuminate questions of ideology, political economy, and power" in the study of linguistic anthropology.

keywords: anthroplogy, language, gender, power, ethnography

basically: he spends a long time reconstructing the evolution of the distinctions genre theory makes in order to conclude the above.
133. old field texts--Sapir, for example, who writes that "the arrangement of the texts [being studied] under the heads of [their placement categories] is self-explanatory and need not be commented on"--gloss over these distinctions miss stuff.
135. in Boas--his "repeated insistence on how 'perfectly clear in the mind of the Indian' is the distinction between myths and historical tales" shows that he "apparently...did not encounter--or chose to disregard--instances in which his consultants saw particular narratives as generic hybrids or as categorically ambiguous" (oversimplifies linguistic complexity)
138. "genre occurs...[within a] matrix of longer discourse, or of nonverbal behavior" (which is "the province of anthropology")
139. in examining a community & classifying its genres, part of the challenge is that not everything fits: "the task becomes one of discovering what portion of the speech economy is generically organized, what portion escapes generic regimentation, and why" (hence a "rigorously taxonomic classificatory perspective on genre" is "limit[ing]")
140-1. "in establishing the place of genre in the conceptual repertoire of the ethnography of speaking, one important task has been to articulate the relationship between genre and other core concepts and units of analysis, such as speech act, speech event, and speech style"; "genre styles...are constellations of co-occurrent formal elements and structures that define or characterize particular classes of utterances"
142-3. hanks in 1987 "conceives of genre as an orienting framework for the production and reception of discourse," "defines genre as 'the historically specific conventions and ideals according to which authors...compose discourse and audiences receive it....and sets of expectations that are not part of discourse structure, but of the ways actors relate to and use language'"
147. "genre cannot fruitfully characterized as a facet of the immanent properties of particular texts or performances. like reported speech, genre is quintessentailly intertextual. when discourse is linked to a particular genre, the process by which it is produced and received is mediated through its relationship with prior discourse"; "the creation of intertextual relationships through genre simultaneously renders texts ordered, unified, and bounded, on the one hand, and fragmented, heterogeneous, and open-ended, on the other"; when genre is "viewed synchronically," "the invocation of genre thus provides a textual model for creating cohesion and coherence"--tells us what to expect. when viewed diachronically "invoking a genre...creates indexical connections that extend far beyond the present setting of production of reception, thereby linking a particular act to other times, places, and persons"
151. "although genres tend to be linked to particular sets of strategies for manipulating intertextual gaps, it is clearly not the case that selection of a particular genre dictates the manner in which this process will be carried out"
156-8. there are many factors influencing the variability in genre's impact on communicative action & classification; one "with respect to the degree to which generic relations create order, unity, and boundedness lies in the fact that all genres are not created equal--or, more accurately, equally empowered--in terms of their ability to structure discourse."
158. a cautionary note: "naturalizing the connections between genre, gender, and emotional experience can in turn rationalize the subordinate status of particular social groups or categories of persons"; "on the other hand, individuals who enjoy less social power due to gender, age, race, or other characteristics may draw on particular genres in expressing the injustice of their situation or in attempting to gain a more active role in social and political processes"
159. the point: "generic intertextuality cannot be adequately understood in terms of formal and functional patterning alone--questions of ideology, political economy, and power must be addressed as well if we are to grasp the nature of intertextual relations"
161. "the association of genre with order" needs to remain spotlit.
162. "ethnographers can be easily misled as to the types of generic intertexuality that their 'informants' are using in framing their discourse. as in other types of discourse production and reception, what is negotiated is not just what types of intertexual links are being established, but who gets to control this process; race, class, gender, status, institutional position, and postcolonial social structures in general affect the production and reception of intertextual relations in fieldwork"
164. "ethnographically based studies often portray the situated use of ethnic genres as a process of applying relatively stable, internally consistent, mutually exclusive, and well-defined categories in the production and reception of texts. in representing such an orderly process, scholars run the risk of doubly mystifying the problem by failing to discern the ideologies and power arrangements that underlie local impositions of generic order as well as by covering up their own rhetorical use of genres in ordering ethnographic data"

Posted by ttobryan at 02:28 PM | Comments (0)

enter the matrix (authorship 13.1/25)

Porter, James E. "Intertextuality and the Discourse Community." Rhetoric Review 5 (1986): 34-47.

1 setence summary: intertextuality is the thing, & i was dead-on with the weaving metaphors. or, in porter's terms:

intertextuality [is] the principle that all writing and speech--indeed, all signs--arise from a single network: what Vygotsky called "the web of meaning"; what poststructuralists label Text or Writing (Barthes, écriture); and what a more distant age perhaps knew as logos. examining intertextuality means looking for "traces," the bits and pieces of Text which writers or speakers borrow and sew together to create new discourse. the most mundane manifestation of intertextuality is explicit citation, but intertextuality animates all discourse and goes beyond mere citation. for the intertextual critics, Intertext is Text--a great seamless textual fabric. (34)

(matrix references aside--although i'm doing a very bad job of leaving them there--i also can't help reading his name every time as "james potter" & expecting there to be a wand in his hand!)

passages
34. that whole intro w/Adso and his "lesser library...of fragments, quotations, unfinished sentences, amputated stumps of books" is as pretty as what disney's done to narnia.
35. the downer view: "authorial intention is less significant than social context; the writer is simply a part of a discourse tradition, a member of a team, and a participant in a community of discourse that creates its own collective meaning. thus the intertext constrains meaning"; poststructuralists as exemplified by Vincent Leitch: "the text is not an autonomous or unified object, but a set of relations with other texts. its system of language, its grammar, its lexicon, drag along numerous bits and pieces--traces--of history so that the text resembles a Cultural Salvation Army Outlet with unaccountable collections of incomplete ideas, beliefs, and sources"; "the traditional notion of the text as a single work of a given author, and even the very notions of author and reader, are regarded as simply convenient fictions for domesticating discourse"
35. 2 types of intertextuality: iterability = "the 'repeatability' of certain textual fragments, to citation...[and] also unannounced sources and influences, clichés, phrases in the air, and traditions" & presupposition = the things we can count on readers filling in that we don't have to say--that "once upon a time" means a made up story or something meant to seem like one, that there's such thing as time, that narratives are linear & this one will start at a beginning.
36. the Declaration of Independence: "Jefferson was by no means an original framer or a creative genius....[but] was a skilled writer...chiefly because he was an effective borrower of traces" taken "consciously or unconsciously from his culture's Text"; "the most memorable phrases in the Declaration seem to be the least Jefferson's," congress made "eighty-six changes" to the document & did the most changing to the parts that were the most original.
36. "the idea of Jefferson as author is but convenient shorthand. actually, the Declaration arose out of a cultural and rhetorical milieu, was composed of traces--and was, in effect, team written"; Jefferson's work was "helping to mold and articulate the milieu," "creating the all-important draft" and "his ability to borrow traces effectively and to find appropriate contexts for them." halliday: "creativity does not consist in producing new sentences...[but] in the speaker's ability to create new meanings: to realize the potentiality of language for the indefinite extension of its resources to new contexts of situation"
38. because of how important presuppositions are to the creation of meaning, "the intertext exerts its influence partly in the form of audience expectation"; the "audience...is as responsible for its production as the writer....in essence, readers, not writers, create discourse"
39. audiences & meaning-making = discourse communities: "a text is 'acceptable' within a forum only insofar as it reflects the community episteme (to use Foucault's term)"
40. "a poststructuralist rhetoric examines how audience (in the form of community expectations and standards) influences textual production and, in so doing, guides the development of the writer"; thereby "the lone inspired writer and the sacred autonomous text....take a pretty hard knock. genuine originality is difficult" & "genius is possible, but it may be constrained" (one can, F again, "speak the truth" without being "within the true")
41. "successful writing helps to redefine the matrix--and in that way becomes creative": "every new text has the potential to alter the Text in some way; in fact, every text admitted into a discourse community changes the constitution of the community"; "we are constrained insofar as we must inevidably borrow the traces, codes, and signs which we inherit and which our discourse community imposes. we are free insofar as we do what we can to encounter and learn new codes, to intertwine codes in new ways, and to expand our semiotic potential--with our goal being to effect change and establish our identities within the discourse communities we choose to enter"

pedagogy
41. "the intertext of our discipline" still believes "that writing is individual, isolated, and internal," "glorif[ies] the individual essayists," and "assumes...an automonous writer exercising a free creative will through the writing act"
42. but what about: "to what extent is the writer's product itself a part of a larger community writing process? how does the discourse community influence writers and readers within it?" esp. when "talking about writing in terms of 'social forces influencing the writer' raises the specter of determinism and so is anathema." bartholomae: "carrying out ritual activities" is part of it, & those rituals exist/are created by communities; barthes: "the 'i' which approaches the text is already itself a plurality of other texts, of codes which are infinite"; williams (paraphrased): "pre-socialized writers are not sufficiently immersed in their discourse community to produce competent discourse: they do not know what can be presupposed, are not conscious of the distinctive intertexuality of the community, may be only superficially acquainted with explicit conventions"; neo: "our long-range goal might be 'post-socialized writers,' those who have achieved such a degree of confidence, authority, power, or achievement in the discourse community so as to become part of the regulating body. they are able to vary conventions and question assumptions--i.e. effect change in communities--without fear of exclusion," they are able to change the Matrix.
43. "intertextuality suggests that they proper focus of audience analysis is not the audience as receivers per se, but the intertext of the discourse community": "what are the conventional presuppositions of this community? in what forums do they assemble? what are the methodological assumptions? what is considered 'evidence,' 'valid argument,' and 'proof'?" (& just like the genre awareness argument): "a critical reading of the discourse of a community may be the best way to understand it"; "writing assignments should be explicitly intertextual," making clear that "the individual writer's work is part of a web, part of a community search for truth and meaning"; "research assignments might be more community oriented rather than topic oriented"; & "the key criteria for evaluating writing should be 'acceptability' within some discourse community"--how well students do at "adopting the community's discourse values--and of course borrowing the appropriate traces"
44. reality again: "the writer is constrained by the community, and by its intertextual preferences and prejudices, but the effective writer works to assert the will against those community constraints to effect change" & our students "need to see...the Adsos of the world, not just the Aristotles...writers whose products are more evidently part of a larger process and whose work more clearly produces meaning in social contexts"
45 (n4). "Robert Scholes puts it this way: 'if you play chess, you can only do certain things with the pieces, otherwise you are not playing hcess. but those constraints in themselves do not tell you what moves to make"

Posted by ttobryan at 01:44 PM | Comments (0)

patching concretely (authorship 10.3/25)

Pecorari, Diane. "Good and Original: Plagiarism and Patchwriting in Academic Second-Language Writing." Journal of Second Language Writing 12 (2003) 317-345.

1 sentence summary: features in student texts commonly identified as "plagiarism" don't necessarily indicate either a lack of awareness of textual conventions or an intention to deceive; there are other factors of work, not the least of which is the learning process involved in becoming fluent in reading & writing academic texts, and treating teaching opportunities as occasions for punishment hurts everyone & helps nobody.

framework: interviews & examinations of texts to evaluate the degree of & intentionality of textual overlap in the graduate-school writing of 17 british NNSE students--with lots of samples to look at instead of only read about! she chose NNSE b/c suspicion surrounds them anyway, & their struggles w/textual appropriation are likely to be more pronounced since they're working in unfamiliar languages & that takes more steps/more work--successive approximations ("learning a skill is rarely a straight line from input to mastery. the novice academic writer must crawl before being able to walk" (320)) will be more distinct & easier to distguish, but a whole conflation of studies & evidence insist that "cultural issues...cannot be the only factor at work" influencing the high degree of textual overlap their work exhibits.

how to set this sort of thing up (when your terms are doomed to indeterminacy): "because there is some question about what degree of inappropriateness will be received as plagiarism, it is useful to invert the question and ask whether a text is fully appropriate in its source use, and therefore beyond accusations of plagiarism" (324)

324. transparency = it's clear "whose voice is speaking": "means signaling the relationship between source and citing text accurately." "readers make a number of assumptions based on the principle of transparency. those which are related to plagiarism include the following:

1. that language which is not signaled as quotation is original to the writer
2. that if no citation is present, both the content and the form are original to the writer
3. that the writer consulted the source which is cited

330. "when experienced academic writers and readers 'collaborate' on a text, placing citations and interpreting them is not difficult. however, determining whether these less experienced writers had cited a source was not always straightfoward"
336. students in the study, all of whom failed to meet at least 1 (most all 3) transparency criterion, made "no attempt to conceal the nature of their source use"--they didn't know they were doing it wrong.
337. "cultural differences were not irrelevant to these writers, but...they were overshadowed by more relevant matters."
338. that "these students...were not experienced or confident writers...support[s] Howard's model of patchwriting, a form of textual plagiarism which is caused not by the intention to decieve but by the need for further growth as a writer."
339. some other problems: "ingrid's distinction between more and less original parts of a research article"--"they probably got it from someone else...i don't know where they got it from"--"presented [her] with a problem because she was aware that 'you're supposed to use the original source.' her solution was at times to cite the source she had consulted and at times to omit a citation"; but it's important to note that "her writing was guided by a set of principles more complex than 'it's okay to plagiarize'; she had expended some thought on what she was doing"
341. erden's note-taking: "you try to avoid" having copied too directly in a note, or having lost track of a quotation mark or two, but "when you are reading and taking a note, sometimes it is unavoidable," and going back through "hundreds of citations, hundreds of articles" to double-check, in "[his] position, it is impossible": there exists "a gap between ideal and realistic performance" (of course teaching him better note-taking strategies would help--but lecturing him about ethics would not)
342. "distinguishing between prototypical plagiarism and patchwriting is an important first step in addressing the issue": "first, patchwriting should be recognized as a widespread strategy, and efforts to address it should start with the understanding that most students will use sources inappropriately before they learn how to use them appropriately"; "secondly, patchwriting should be recognized as a neutral, rather than a stigmatizing error"; "conflating" the two has negative effects: "teachers who assume plagiarism is primarily an ethical issue are not likely to diagnose it in students they see as diligent and honest" and "the stigma creates an atmosphere of suspicion and concern whenever teachers raise questions about source use, and this is not conducive to the learning process."

Posted by ttobryan at 12:50 PM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2005

forms & boundaries (genre 12.2/25)

Cain, Mary Ann. "Problematizing Formalism: A Double-cross of Genre Boundaries." CCC 51:1 (1999): 89-95.

1 sentence summary: (as part of a larger conversation about positive potential overlaps between composition & creative writing) formalism "persists" even though we'd like to talk as if it doesn't; "the formal properties of a text...define its boundaries and, in part, help determine its value as a text" (90); its "ghosts" still "exert...influences...on us as writers and teachers and...upon the students we teach" (94).

Posted by ttobryan at 04:51 PM | Comments (0)

November 19, 2005

poetricks? (collaborative writing 19.1/50)

Bernstein, Charles. "Community and the Individual Talent." Diacritics 26.3-4 (Fall 1996). 176-195.

1 sentence summary: "community" (specifically he's critiquing (while promoting?) a poetry listserv) is a trickier term/concept than we give it credit for; there's always a danger of being con[sub]sumed.

passages:
177. "Poetry is (or can be) an aversion of community in pursuit of new constellations of relationship. In other words, community is as much what I am trying to get away from--reform--as form."
182. "all this stuff about poetry groups and movements is a publicity stunt for poets without the imaginative capacity to assert their unique individuality in forms and voices utterly indistinguishable from the other prize-winning poets who vote these awards to each other on panels and juries that systematically rule out any trace of individuality expressed by particularity of tone, diction, syntax or form"; "You want to take things that appear accessible and linear, I reply, and show how they are complex and inaccessibly nonlinear; I want to take things that appear complex and nonlinear and show how this complexity is what makes them accessible in the sense of audible (auditable). And, I continue, waving my arms and upping the tempo as my colleague's eyes begin to spin in orbits, isn't the nonlinearity of much so-called disjunctive poetry indeed a point of contact with the everyday cultural experiences of most North Americans, where overlays of competing discourses is an inevitable product of the radio dial, cable television, the telephone, advertising, or indeed, at a different level of spatialization, cities?"
185. "you get a far greater range of poetic explorations in the pages of Temblor or o.blek than you'll find in the truly schoolish, dispiritingly conformist poetry pages of the New Yorker or most of the mainstream poetry journals."
188. < irony >"Subscribers to Poetics@UBVM agree to
end all "back channel" communication. All
communication among subscribers shall be
sent to the list as a whole: no individual
e-mail or conventional mail may be
exchanged, no face-to-face verbal
communications will be permitted
(nonverbal communication is in no
way restricted by this rule).
At first, this may be difficult
for those who live in the same area.
But, over time, the enormous advantages
to community-building will become
apparent." < /irony >
190. listserv sig: "POETICS@UBVM--we're taking the unity
out of community! Unsubscribe today!"
191. "I use "aesthetic" not to suggest an ideal of beauty but rather to invoke a contested arena of judgement, perception, and value where artworks and essays operate not as adjudicators of fixed principles but as probes for meaning, prods for thought."

Posted by ttobryan at 05:00 PM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2005

happy pills (collaborative writing 18.3/30)

Anson, Chris, Laura Brady, and Marion Larson. "Collaboration in Practice." Writing on the Edge 4.2 (Spring 1993) 80-96.

1 sentence summary: working collaboratively to write about collaborative work has been enlightning and cool.

passages:
80. they've seen "instances among [their] students and among [their] colleagues where collaboration has become a (risky) type of competition" or where "one person... becomes a 'leader' and exercises a disproportionate amoung of control over the other group members"
81. it's not a vacuum--their participation in taking their "turns" vary as much b/c of real life as the project
83. metaphors--contortionism but w/o "connotations of oddity or pain"; fabric (they don't develop that one but i would)
84. "the tension between individual and collective voice was one of the most essential issues [they] negotiated together"--> "each of us knows that our thinking and writing are certainly a product of all our interaction, and in that way are collaborative, but they're not ONLY or TOTALLY collaborative"
85. "dialogue WITHIN...and THROUGH" has the danger of becoming "the 'Gollum-like' 'we' stuff" (where the "i" becomes "we"); additionally problematic can be how collaborators "seem unable (unwilling?) to delete or do much substantive revision. why is that? i think i'm afraid of making a 'mistake' or taking out something that one of both of you thinks is 'essential.'" no one wants to be "coerced toward consensus"
86. Johnson compared the implications of Bruffee's idealism about collaboration to "naziism, fascism, and communism" and a danger to "the integrity of the individual creative thinker" <--endorses "a Cartesian epistemology"; Bruffee's response re-emphasizes "collaboration as an ongoing, constantly negotiated process"
88. more metaphors--cooking chili & co-labor (giving birth & coaching)
90. "[their] final product is proving to be more than just the sum of the parts [they've] each contributed"
93. "anything each [collaborator] says is colored by what the others say (hence, no contribution is truly individual)"

Posted by ttobryan at 03:48 PM | Comments (0)

November 16, 2005

sharing the mic (collaborative writing 18.2/30)

Morris, Kerri K. and Dana Gulling Mead. "Collaboration, Consensus, and Dissoi Logoi." Writing on the Edge. 7.1 (Fall 1995-Winter 1996) 83-92.

1 sentence summary: creating a unified voice denies collaborative writers opportunities to say conflicting or divergent things and to express the complexities of their ideas and interaction--consensus is too limiting; instead try representing multivocal thought on the page.

passages:
84. collaborators who are "overly careful" can become listeners who don't "allow [themselves] to speak"; "what happens when one writer doesn't get to speak her or his thoughts and is forever contaminated by the other's voice?"; "consensus in collaborative efforts seems to us the unhappy version of the story. instead of two voices speaking harmonically or discordantly only one voice is heard"
86. their alternating italicizing are a representation of "Weathers' doublevoice technique" which "enables [them] both to provide information and to commentate on that information, allows [them] to make a statement and invert it, encourages [them] to seriously explore an idea and playfully critique it...allows [them] to share one text and fully participate in its creation, complete with [their] disagreements and second thoughts": complexity & confusion have a home here.
88. dissoi logoi = "the double-sided argument": conversational models of collaborative learning forward "exchanges," "misunderstandings," "corrections," "interruptions," "revelations," "explorations," & multiplicity: "cacophony, a carnival, heteroglossia"; when conversants aren't willing to disagree there's not much point in talking, & "there doesn't seem to be much point in two or three or four writers acting like one, either, when they have multiple opinions that don't cohere to a thesis, when their explorations have revealed more than one answer"
89. Trimbur: consensus isn't an end but is a means through which "humans...live and work together with differences"; "consensus for Plato was where conversation ended. although much of our writing seeks to tell what it knows, sometimes we write in order to explore what we don't. perhaps this is why we collaborate, to foreground the conversations we have within ourselves and with each other"; on the down side, dissoi logoi "has erroneously veen viewed as a will to power...tainted with notions of conflict and hostility"
91. neither writer is the italicized ("dissenting/diabolical/evil" or "comic") voice or the "straight" voice; both write within both, and at conferences they take turns playing each role.
92. "to summarize, consensus in collaborative writing happens; forced consensus is a bad influence on imaginative scholars," and having "resorted to using double voice and dissoi logoi" has enabled them to write more and more completely/complexly than would have been otherwise possible.

Posted by ttobryan at 04:41 PM | Comments (0)

regulates & constitutes (genre 15/25)

Bawarshi, Anis. Genre and the Invention of the Writer. Logan, UH: Utah State UP. 2003.

1 sentence summary: genres aren't just characteristic of situations, they are situations, and as such contribute to the constructions not only of writers' situational options but writers' possible selves at the (percieved although already part of an ongoing exchange) onset of any communicative action.

passages:
xi. (preface) "writers both preface a text and are prefaced by other texts, namely genres...as such, the act of writing becomes a complex site for the enactment of prefaces, in which writers and texts preface each other, constantly inaugurating and deferring their own beginnings"
3. tendency in writing instruction is toward "a view of beginnings as divine or magical acts of unpreceded origination" rather than "as situated and textured"--Said calls these "secular terms"
13. invention is located "at the intersection between the acquisition and articulation of desire"
18. genre is "a dynamic site for the production and regularion of textured, ideological activities"; "by maintaining the desires they help to fulfill, genres provide a way for us to interrogate analytically how writers get positioned within these textured desires to act at the same time as they enable writers to articulate and fulfill these desires as recognizeable, meaningful, consequential actions"; insinuating agency in genre this way "will surely make some readers uneasy" esp. if used to lit. conceptions.
19. rhet. genre shouldn't replace lit. genre; they have "much...to contribute to one another" as "genres are constituative both of literary and nonliterary contexts...[and] writers"
21. "genre-function": f's "author-function" is defined as "characteristic of the mode of existence, circulation, and functioning of certain discourses within a society" (emph. AB), but what determines which ones count?
22. genre as "an overarching concept that can explain the social roles we assign to various discourses and those who enact and are enacted by them": "it is quite possible that the author-function is itself a function of literary genres, which create the ideological conditions that produce this subject we call an 'author'"--so author-function is "subsum[ed]...within...the genre function, which constitutes all discourses' and all writers' modes of existence, circulation, and functioning within a society"
23. "genre is both and at once a concept and a material practice"
24. "genres are both functional and epistemological--they help us function within particular situations at the same time as they help shape the ways we come to know and organize those situations"; "genre does not simply regulate a pre-existing social activity; instead it constitutes the activity by making it possible by way of its ideological and discursive conventions"
31. genres are not only "analogical to social institutions but [are] actual social institutions"
45. definitions: "genres function as sites of action in whcih writers acquire, articulate, and potentially resist motives to act"; "genre is a social motive and a rhetorical instantiation of that motive. genre is what it allows us to do, the potential that makes the actual possible, the concept and its practice, the 'con-' and the 'text-' at the same time"
47. main framing question: "what happens to writers when they write?"
48. proposition: "we can learn a great deal about how and why writers invent by analyzing how writers get positioned within these genred sites of action" (where is the active agency in this sentence?)
50. "genre theory helps...extend the sphere of agency in the study and teaching of writing to include not only what writers do when they write, but what happens to writers that makes them do what they do"; Burke's "the motivation to act" is "a process of simultaneously acting and being acted upon" & in this formulation "the writer [is] a 'double agent,' one who is both an agent of his or her desires and actions and an agent on behalf of already existing desires and actions."

83. anecdote w/the patient medical history form--the form "helps organize and generate the social and rhetorical environment within which the patient and doctor use language to interact and produce meaningful, situated action" while it also "reflects Western notions of medicine" wherein "the doctor, recognizes, interacts with, and treats the patient as a synecdoche of his or her physical symptoms"--the form allows no other type of interaction.
90. "whereas motive is socially defined, intention is an individualized interpretation and instantiation of social motive"; this "'motive-intention' interaction...is situated within and reproduces structure, which provides both the ideological conditions and the socio-rhetorical conventions agents need for enacting their social practices," which practices "reproduce the very structures they enact"--& "genres are structures"
91. genre, in heideggerian terms, "is both the boundary and the presencing"; "the power of genre resides...in this slight of hand...in which social obligations to act become internalized as seemingly self-generated desires to act in certain discursive ways"--writers shape those motives even as they're shaped by them, though: "genre motive alone thus does not 'do' anything; it is potential that requires individual interpretation and articulation in order...to become actualized as social action"
92. reality check is still that power is still always in play: "writers who successfully transgress certain genres often do so because they have established a certain degree of authority in the sphere in which the genres function coupled with a critical awareness of the genres' conventions"
98. genre has "the power...to shape and enable writers' identities even as they transform the genre," but "writers...do not occupy only one genre position. they assume multiple positions and relations as they enact various social practices, both within genre systems and between genres systems"
101. "genres, then, shape and enable our positions as writers, even as they serve as the potential sites of resistance, because they maintain powerful desires which writers work within and against as they move from one situation to the next"
105. (there's too much word-tweaking here to see exactly what he is saying): "rather than claiming that genre 'effaces' self, then, it is perhaps more accurate to say that a certain genre replaces or, better yet, adds to the range of possible selves that writers have available to them"

146. FYW: "teachers can and should teach students how to identify and analyze genred positions of articulation so that students can locate themselves and begin to participate within these positions more meaningfully, critically, and dexterously. genre analysis can make visible to students to desires embedded within genres; and by giving students access to these desires, we enable them to interrogate, enact, and reflect on the relations, subjectivities, and practices these desires underwrite"
155. the fact that FYW can't teach students everything they'll ever need to know to write in the academy "does not mean that the FYW course cannot prepare students for writing within these contexts"; "genres...can serve as the 'passports' for accessing, analyzing, navigating, and participating in... [the academy's] disciplinary structures"
156. "genre analysis encourages students to identify and examine the situated desires, subjectivies, relations, and practices that are rhetorically embedded in disciplinary and processional genres"
158. Swales calls it a "textography"; AB calls genre analysis "textual archeology"; it's a 4-step process of "collecting samples of the genre, identifying and describing the context of its use, describing its textual patterns, and analyzing what these patterns reveal about the context in which the genre is used"
161. taken in order, "the heuristic guides students from the situation to the genre and then back to the situation" which "enables students and teachers to open a temporary analytical space between the genre and its situation...in which students can access and inquire deeply into the interplay between rhetorical and social actions"
163. what all this means is students, rather than writing about topics, write in FYW about writing. (d'oh!)
165. of course we can't teach them to do everything, (i wrote this thesis already) but what we can do "is teach our students how to become more rhetorically astute and agile, how, in other words, to use genre analysis as a way to become more effective and critical 'readers' of the sites of action within which writing takes place. such an analytical skill is transferable and does not require immersion in disciplinary cultures"
166. (hidden) definitions: genre analysis = "the process of 'reading' a site of action as it is rhetorically embedded in its genres"; invention = "the process of positioning oneself within these genred sites"; social activities = "the choices a writer makes and their effects within these genred sites" --> all "are connected in the act of writing"

top 5: giddens, bazerman, foucault, bakhtin, miller

Posted by ttobryan at 02:33 PM | Comments (0)

November 15, 2005

ethics (collaborative writing 18.1/30)

Trzyna, Thomas and Margaret Batschelet. "The Ethical Complexity of Collaboration." Writing on the Edge. 2.1 (Fall 1990) 23-33.

1 sentence summary: collaboration is ethically complicated, primarily because it always asks students to work in both cooperative and competetive ways; this isn't automatically a problem but can be if those complexities remain unexamined.

passages:
23. "collective assignments" are those that "demand that students function together as a unit in the creation of a single product and in the group experience, an experience that includes both individual effort and collective nurturance for that effort"; both collaboration & competition are involved in our school ideals & so in the assignments we give.
24. Bruffee idealizes collaborative learning as if it could occlude competition, but it can't <--authors have chosen this dichotomy as the focus of their look at the ethical complexity inherent in collab. writ.; in science (Popper, Pareek), "friendly-hostile cooperation" and "free criticism" are norms of collaborative engagement--it's a different pic. from Bruffee's.
25. "collaboration requires certain political and moral virtues that are defined by the community. collaborators must be willing to challenge one another, to debate, to conform to the standards of their disciplines, and to demand conformity from others"; "clearly, the goal of providing a competitive evaluation may conflict with the goal of providing a supportive group experience": the group (1) "must produce the best possible product" but/and (2) "may be implicitly or explicitly expected to nurture all the members of the group and to produce...the best possible learning experience"
26. conflict arises when members choose not to participate, etc.; assessment raises addn'l "ethical dilemmas"--when they report on & help evaluate each others' contributions, roles get ambiguous: "is the student a collaborator, leader and participant; or a co-teacher; or an informer? at its worst, collaboration can become precisely what it was in world war ii: working for the enemy"
27. questions about collaboration: "who wields the power, to what end the collective works, and how people are respected or abused in pursuit of that end"
28. bottom line: "classroom orientation to a collective activity needs to introduce the ethical--and the political--dimensions of the task"
31. the struggle must be shared: "student collaborators must learn to express their concerns in public, even when it is difficult"
32. "classroom collaboration is complex, perhaps more complex than collaboration in industry....[&] despite the many benefits that collective assignments may offer, we must be aware that our methods exist in a political and ethical environment that cannot be avoided"

Posted by ttobryan at 10:33 PM | Comments (0)

basically (genre 14/25)

Swales, John M. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

1 sentence summary: genre is one of three key concepts--alongside "discourse community" and "language-learning task"--that facilitate the effective "teaching of academic and research English."

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.

Posted by ttobryan at 03:09 PM | Comments (0)

November 14, 2005

princess amy on pedagogy (or: amy deals the death-blow) (genre 13(4)/25)

Devitt, Amy J. Writing Genres. Carbondale: Southern IL UP. 2004.

Chapter 7: "A Proposal for Teaching Genre Awareness and Antecedent Genres" 191-213.

1 sentence summary: genre awareness should be explicitly taught, both because awareness is transferrable where individual genre elements are not and because awareness is not formal rigidity or limitation; awareness will enable students to properly take advantage of the antecedent genre-learning they'll be doing anyway.

framing quotation: "to understand is to be given, at one and the same time, new tools of potential understanding and new chains of potential enslavement, and the two are not easily separated" --j.m. balkin, cultural software

passages
192. main argument: "teaching genre awareness" means teaching "a critical consciousness of both rhetorical purposes and ideological effects of generic forms" which "may enable writers to learn newly encountered genres when they are immersed in a context for which they need those genres" and "to learn the needed genres with greater rhetorical understanding and with more conscious acceptance of or resistance to the genres' ideologies" while meanwhile "acquir[ing] new genres that can serve as antecedent genres for their future writing"
193. Freedman's argument against explicit instruction is (a) mostly about teaching genres rather than teaching genre awareness, (b) based on work w/second-language learners that might not apply to first-language learners; schoolchildren learn genres w/o explicit instruction, but that doesn't mean that being explicitly taught to learn genres wouldn't help in other ways
195. "explicit teaching may not be necessary for people to produce acceptable texts with appropriate generic forms...but it may be necessary for people to perceive the purposes of those forms and their potential ideological effects"
197. you can't identify all of the features of even any one genre, let alone be expert in them all; learners acquire genres "through immersion in the authentic situation," then "having learned how to percieve purpose behind form, the learner can discover the purposes behind [other forms]" and "having learned how to discern potential ideological effects, the learner can be alert to the ideologies underlying [other genres]"
198. explicit teaching doesn't = lecturing; hillocks calls it "environmental teaching" (presumably immersing students in or allowing them to create appropriate "environments" within which their tasks have genuine relevance)
199. several writers have shown how their students profitably learn about genre by collecting, examining, and making inferences from examples of writing within genres
202. amy saves the world again: "the teaching of genre awareness rather than particular skills gives a new potential justification for first-year writing courses and a way of helping students transfer general rhetorical understanding to particular rhetorical tasks. in that respect alone, a pedagogy of genre awareness can rescue first-year writing courses"; being aware of the influence of antecedent genres on later genre acquisition demonstrates too "a new angle on the issue of transference"
203. angle: we should choose carefully the genres students work with & study in school, b/c those are the genres that will be their antecedents for learning future genres.
204. toolboxes: "the more genres they know, the more potential antecedents they have for addressing new situations. if the genres they know influence how they would learn the new genres they encounter, then knowing more genres would give individuals more different genres on which to draw. the more genres they know, seemingly the more likely they would be to have access to a genre that would serve as a sound basis for learning any new one"
205. "genres that students learn in writing courses thus can be chosen to provide antecedents for tackling future writing tasks, but they should also be chosen with an eye to the limiting effects of those antecedents" [i.e. when all my students know about quotation marks is how to use them in stories to write dialogue, they want to always set them off with commas--their antecedents have overly determined their appropriation of new features]

the problem with princess amy is:
now there's nothing else to say. to do, for certain; her every line ends with "now somebody needs to go research this & tell us what really happens." but for exam writing, there's nothing left to make a thesis of w/o hands-on research to bring along!

Posted by ttobryan at 06:40 PM | Comments (0)

princess amy on (almost) everything else (genre 13(3)/25)

Devitt, Amy J. Writing Genres. Carbondale: Southern IL UP. 2004.

Chapter 1: "A Theory of Genre" 1-32.
Chapter 3: "A Study of Genres in Context, a Theoretical Intermezzo" 66-87.
Chapter 4: "A History of Genres and Genres in History" 88-136.

1: existing theory/approaches to genre tend not to complicate it quite enough & so to overlook some of the most important aspects of its fundamental complexity.

3: the ways genres operate within a specific community demonstrate both recurrance and variance, both group pressure and individual agency.

4: genres develop and change over time, and their change occurs at the intersection of individual action and situational demands.

passages
4. "at its worst, genre is a trivial and dangerous concept" because in addition to naming & describing it "artificially compares unique authors and works of art...and stifles true creativity"
6. the form issue: "classifications are the effects of genre but not the extent of genre" (she spends many pages demonstrating/reitterating this)
12. genre also = expectation (in but also beyond form); "picking up a text, readers not only classify it and expect a certain form, but also make assumptions about the text's purposes, its subject matter, its writer, and its expected reader"
21. paradox: "people recognize recurring situations because they knew genres, yet genres exist only because people have acted as though situations have recurred"; it works b/c "their relationship is reciprocal and dynamic"
23. resulting from this reciprocity is what happens when someone encounters a shift in genre which causes him/her confusion about the "writer's purpose or the reader's role...the situation" or misreads the genre entirely (i.e. our poor students & Swift)
27. existing defs of genre (already binding it to situational context) need 1) culture (or cultural context) & 2) the influence of other genres ("context of genres")
31. proposition/definition: "that genre be seen not as a response to recurring situation but as a nexus between an individual's actions and a socially defined context. genre is a reciprocal dynamic within which individuals' actions construct and are constructed by recurring context of situation, context of culture, and context of genres. genre is visible in classification and form, relationships and patterns that develop when language users identify different tasks as being similar. but genre exists through people's individual rhetorical actions at the nexus of the contexts of situation, culture, and genres"

67. "there are many ways of grouping texts...but when considering genres within their contexts, the generic classification that matters most must be the classification recognized by the users of those genres"
69-70. sometimes sub-groups within heterogenous groups identify genres differently, which can tell researchers about both the genres and the groups.
87. "the power of genre to encourage conformity is strong indeed," but "that power does not make genres evil or even necessarily politically repressive....standards themselves...are not negative; it is how society uses those standards that makes them work for or against people."

90. over time, situations change, & so do their genres.
91. "changes in any one genre necessarily constitute a change in the context of genres, which in turn changes the context within individual genres are shaped" & changes other genres.
92. because "genre is...a nexus of contexts...then any new genre must emerge from a relationship with old genres"
124. genres change at different levels; overall shape/purpose/etc. might change, but so might the appropriateness of various linguistic features at the word/sentence level.
129. language change--word endings, for example--in her study "was happening differently in different genres"
134. "most individuals who effect genre change may never even be aware that they are doing so. in all of the cases [devitt studied] individual actions must compound to create collective change. [so] the combination of contextual forces and individual forces is probably necessary for genre changes to have much currency or endurance"

a note about sources:
she does a lot of work w/campbell & jamieson's deeds done in words--i told you guys that was a good resource & an important book to work with even if it's not in the mainstream list. i didn't know princess amy knew when i insisted, but now i do!

Posted by ttobryan at 05:34 PM | Comments (0)

November 11, 2005

princess amy on social context (genre 13(2)/25)

Devitt, Amy J. Writing Genres. Carbondale: Southern IL UP. 2004.

Chapter 2: "An Analysis of Genres in Social Settings" 33-65.
Chapter 8: "Conclusion" 214-219.

2: genre is inherently social & genres help construct what we recognize as social situations, expectations, and constraints.

8: everything, everything, everything:

genres pervade lives. people use them, consciously and unconsciously, creatively and formulaically, for social functions and individual purposes, with critical awareness and blind immersion, in the past and yet today. they shape our experiences, and our experiences shape them. as we study and teach these ways of acting symbolically with others, we may be approaching an understanding not just of genres but of the messy, complex ways that huma