Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
xv. the materiality of language is in vogue as a popular study thanks to poststructural interests, but still hadn't overtaken "the more accepted perspective" he terms "the spirituality of language: the view that there is a meaning that is separate from the word-in-use...that readers and interpreters articulate in contexts separate from the reading and viewing contexts" (links to ong's separation btw. oral & literate).
23. def. 1 (& implication): "texts are located in cultures through their genres--the groups of other texts with which they could be compared or associated. changes in culture are noticed through changes in genre."
24. "the psychoanalytic potential of genre is that it marks what is usually unconscious in verbal and symbolic interaction....the genre action, like the unconscious action...follows certain orderly procedures and paths that are not on our minds as we say what we have to say"; teachers' job should be to find out what genres & language-use patterns students possess, to "inform themselves about the students' educational status"; "the genre idea is a means of identifying students' knowledge of, and abilities with, language and writing"
35. "a signal of the change in approach to genre is given by the interest in mixed genres--their 'impurity' as well as their inherent changeability"
36-7. "writing appears in a form that is made up of several other forms that, like the form identifying the writing now, should be understood as being in the midst of social and historical change"--although a particular book's "present historical form is the novel...this way of identifying that book could change into a dream tract or a joke or something else by succeeding generations of readers. this is a materialist use of the genre idea"; "rather than the abstraction 'writing' (which applies a certain equivalence of all kinds), historical, social, and cultural practices and experiences of living people are the point of reference for understanding genres of language, literature, and other writing. the material differences in practice and experience lead to the necessity, though not to the rigidity, of boundaries"
38. "if individual people, texts, genres are recognized through being named, it is also true that the name could be understood differently when different elements in a category are more germane. depending on the observers, there is a range of possible categorical identities in society. to allow that there are genres is to allow that they are always made up of subkinds or cokinds and that the particular mix of each category varies with culture as well as with the perspectives of local observers."
41. in specific, the thing he does that drives me batty: conflates "genre" with "any way of using language"--in this case, "black english is a mixed genre of language." multi-level problematic.
80. "the genres of men's language" = all contexts in which men use language? it's more than a little unclear, & as far as i'm concerned way the hell imprecise--not that precision is mandatory, but it does make things easier to talk about.