Cinnabar and Alabaster

framing questions (3-4):
"how are individual acts of producing and reading texts related to one another? how do genres, discursive institutions, make these relations possible? what values, beliefs, and ways of interpreting the world inhere in the discursive forms students practice and in the process of learning them? and what kind of critical awareness of these values and interpretive strategies do students need in order to produce and not just parody these forms?"

passages:
5. "a genre is an inherited social form, a 'discursive institution,' within which a writer fuses meaning, structure, linguistic features, and pragmatic purposes and effects. genres establish rhetorical situations, including relations of power between writer and audience. understanding them and their institutional contexts is thus indepsnesable to the teaching of writing"
11. writing across the curriculum = "general practices, common procedures for teaching writing that will work in all sorts of courses...generalizations about the writing process and cognitive growth"; writing within disciplines = "what would happen if we followed and alternative view of academic genres, one that is centered on the writer's active, contributing participation in an educational community?....what a political scientist, or historian, or philosopher discusses the writing she studies and teaches...and the scholarly and student writing which intends to say something convinceinly about those texts, what does she mean by writing and how are these various texts related to one another?"
14. "neither...understanding [nor] transcending constraints...can ever be attained only from interpreting texts, no matter how attentive that interpretation might be to larger concerns. such constraints must be experienced and reflected upon from within one's own writing, which requires that student writing be an integral and equal part of any course....without this attention to writing, post-structuralist educational goals will do little more than reproduce (in different ideological form, at best; at worst merely with different ideological terms) the formulaic interpretive ingenuity that marks the educational agenda it critiques"
15. geertz on "the refiguration of social thought": "this genre blurring...[philosophical inquiries looking like literacy criticism...scientific discussions looking like belles lettres morceaux...histories that consist of equations and tables or law court testimony....has grown to the point where it is becoming difficult either to label authors...or to classify works....it is a phenomenon general enough and distinctive enough to suggest that what we are seeing is not just another redrawing of the cultural map--the moving of a few disputed borders, the marking of some more picturesque mountain lakes--but an alteration of the principles of mapping. something is happening to the way we think about the way we think. (19-20)"
16. "so the critical study of academic genres, a study that questions them as well as masters them, indeed masters them by both writing within them and contextualizing them, is pedagogically necessary for two reasons: (1) this active, productive, writing-centered experience is consistent with how we really learn, as opposed to just absorbing what others give us, no matter how complex and sophisticated the gift; (2) students, to be prepared for the variety of expectations, and even the 'blurring' of expectations, they will encounter, need not so much to be told about and practice our understanding of academic genres (which might be wrong and will probably soon be ou tof date) as to participate in their making, examining critically, on their own, the nature of those genres and the generic basis for thinking, reading, and writing in the disciplines they engage."