Cinnabar and Alabaster

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