Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
137-8. from devitt's student amanda mcginnis: when writers work within the imposed frame of a genre, "the individual does not cease to exist; he only ceases to be visible"; but the pre-existance of genres does not force the writer's hand: whether to use the form as it exists as an expected communication tool or to violate its precepts in order to achieve other effects is the writer's choice every time. main claim:"genre necessarily and simultaneously both constrains and enables writers and...such a combination of constraint and choice is essential to creativity"
139. overlapping context (just squeeze "collaboratively" in there somewhere!):

recent debates over whether to emphasize individual 'voice' in writing classes (peter elbow and others) or to emphasize expectations and conventions of academic writing (david bartholomae and others) echo debates about whether an individual has an authentic self that transcends cultural (including generic) conventions or whether writers' personae are constructed through writing within those conventions.

devitt contends that rather than debate between them we should recognize the "dialectical" influence of both.
140. genres "are inherently creative...in the same way that language is inherently creative: to use language is to say something never before said using words and structures that have often before been said....but that linguistic novelty can exist only because linguistic similarity also exists. each element of a novel utterance has been uttered before....without existing linguistic elements, nothing can be said, either novel or formulaic." she calls this necessity the "duality of patterning"
142. just as language standards are both critiqued as "a constraint on individual freedom...as restrictor of the home dialect and all it represents culturally, and as senseless formula contrived by members of the upper class to oppress members of the lower classes" and "rever[ed]...as the keeper of the gate against anarchy and intelligibility or as the tool of empowerment for the disadvantaged, who can gain access to the circles of power if only they have access to the standard language," so do genres fill both pairs of shoes.
144. also like language standards, some features of genres are noticed only when they are violated; others are noticed only when they appear. most of them are never noticed at all.
147. the increasing relevance of the role of "appropriateness"; linguists commonly recognize this as instrumental in discussing langauge standards (situation, context), but "composition and rhetoric scholars more commonly view genre primarily in terms of function"--really, though "they are not just...'fitting' responses to rhetorical situations and therefore functionally and rhetorically effective but also appropriate behavior in conventional social contexts and therefore socially effective."
149. within linguistic rules and within genres there is a great deal of room for individual variation--variation that's not just possible but "necessary for genres and language standards to exist. without variation, it would not be possible to percieve standardization; without generic choice, it would not be possible to enact generic constraint"
150. meaning cannot exist without both variation and standardization
151. creativity theory: "the creativity from which new things develop [is] dual, two-sided"; Rothenberg describes it an "Janusian thinking" (d's term) or (his:) "the capacity to conceive and utilize two or more opposite or contradictory ideas, concepts, or images simultaneously"; Koestler's term is "bisociation"; Hampden-Turner's explanation is "creativity...requires...convergence as much as...divergence"
152. De Bono's "distinction between lateral and vertical thinking" in terms of genre: "using lateral thinking, the writer or reader must perceive a genre by converging many unique texts into a single pattern....using vertical thinking, the writer or reader creates a unique text within a genre by seeing how this text can diverge within the common pattern": "to write and read requires both vertical and lateral thinking, both convergence and divergence, requires the unity from among variation and the variation within the unity--that is, to write and read, with all the creativity both acts entail, requires genre"
154. "to produce an interpretable text, every writer must rely on the community's genres; to produce a unique text, every writer must exploit some of the possibilities for divergence within those genres. since every text is unique, every writer must write creatively within a genre"; authors (ex: Joyce) "can foreground innovation because of the background of the expected"
158. Balkin & "cultural software" as a term for "socially constructed cultural information, what gets created and transmitted historically and through people"--which "both enables understanding and potentially delimits what people can perceive"; "genres, as part of cultural information or 'software,' help humans understand their experience, are created and transmitted by other humans, and preserve stability while allowing change and creativity"
162. fundamentally: "genre both empowers and subjects to power" & it's the tensions there & that duality that makes it "as language, infinitely and essentially creative"