Genre and the Performance of Publics - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607324423 ISBN 13: 9781607324423

Verlag: Utah State University Press, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

In recent decades, genre studies has focused attention on how genres mediate social activities within workplace and academic settings. Genre and the Performance of Publics moves beyond institutional settings to explore public contexts that are less hierarchical, broadening the theory of how genres contribute to the interconnected and dynamic performances of public life. 

Chapters examine how genres develop within publics and how genres tend to mediate performances in public domains, setting up a discussion between public sphere scholarship and rhetorical genre studies. The volume extends the understanding of genres as not only social ways of organizing texts or mediating relationships within institutions but as dynamic performances themselves.

By exploring how genres shape the formation of publics, Genre and the Performance of Publicsbrings rhetoric/composition and public sphere studies into dialogue and enhances the understanding of public genre performances in ways that contribute to research on and teaching of public discourse.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Anis Bawarshi is professor and associate chair of the English Department at the University of Washington. He is the author or coauthor of several books and articles on rhetoric and composition studies, rhetorical genre studies and uptake, and writing knowledge transfer.

Mary Jo Reiff is professor of English at the University of Kansas. She has authored or coauthored various books and articles on writing knowledge transfer, audience theory, public rhetoric, critical ethnography, and rhetorical genre studies.

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Genre and the Performance of Publics

By Mary Jo Reiff, Anis Bawarshi

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2016 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-442-3

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: From Genre Turn to Public Turn: Navigating the Intersections of Public Sphere Theory, Genre Theory, and the Performance of Publics Mary Jo Reiff and Anis Bawarshi, 
PART I: THE INTERDISCURSIVITY OF PUBLIC GENRES: DYNAMICS OF UPTAKES, AGENCY, AND THE PERFORMANCES OF PUBLIC LIFE, 
1 Genre as Interdiscursive Performance in Public Space Vijay K. Bhatia, 
2 Between Genres: Uptake, Memory, and US Public Discourse on Israel-Palestine Anis Bawarshi, 
3 Disambiguating Uptake: Toward a Tactical Research Agenda on Citizens' Writing Dylan B. Dryer, 
PART II: HISTORICIZING PUBLIC GENRES: INVENTION, EVOLUTION, AND EMBODIMENT OF PUBLIC PERFORMANCES, 
4 Defining Moments: Genre Beginnings, Genre Invention, and the Case of the English-Language Dictionar Lindsay Rose Russell, 
5 Geographies of Public Genres: Navigating Rhetorical and Material Relations of the Public Petition Mary Jo Reiff, 
6 Bodily Scripts, Unruly Workers, and Public Anxiety: Scripting Professional Embodiment in Interwar Vocational Guides Risa Applegarth, 
PART III: INTERMEDIARY PUBLIC GENRES: MOBILIZING KNOWLEDGE ACROSS GENRE BOUNDARIES, 
7 Uncovering Occluded Publics: Untangling Public, Personal, and Technical Spheres in Jury Deliberations Amy J. Devitt, 
8 Discourse Coalitions, Science Blogs, and the Public Debate over Global Climate Change Graham Smart, 
9 Multiple Intertextual Threads and (Un)likely Uptakes: An Analysis of a Canadian Public Inquiry Tosh Tachino, 
PART IV: DIGITAL PUBLIC GENRES: MEDIATING PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT AND EXPANDING PUBLIC PARTICIPATION, 
10 Appropriating Genre, "Taking Action" against Obesity: The Rhetorical Work of Digital Genre Systems in Public Discourse Monica M. Brown, 
11 Exigencies, Ecologies, and Internet Street Science: Genre Emergence in the Context of Fukushima Radiation-Risk Discourse Jaclyn Rea and Michelle Riedlinger, 
12 Spreadable Genres, Multiple Publics: The Pixel Project's Digital Campaigns to Stop Violence against Women Jennifer Nish, 
About the Authors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Genre as Interdiscursive Performance in Public Space

VIJAY K. BHATIA

Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's (1986) suggestion that texts are invariably dialogic and hence must be looked at and accounted for in the context of other relevant and related texts, it is possible to claim that writers or speakers often interdiscursively appropriate, directly or indirectly, discursive resources, including genre conventions, and often manage as well as manipulate discursive space and participant systems in an attempt to create novel and hybrid genres through rhetorical processes of recontextualization, reformulation, reframing, and resemiotization. Although I have discussed the function of interdiscursive appropriation of discoursal and generic resources in professional contexts elsewhere (see Bhatia 2010), I believe it has an even more significant role to play in public discourses of different kinds in realizing a variety of communicative intentions in various media. Drawing on the analysis of a typical instance of media discourse, this chapter aims to give more substance to this claim by elaborating on the notion of interdiscursivity as appropriation and management of discoursal resources in genre theory and by arguing for a multiperspective framework to analyze interdiscursive performance in public space. In providing a framework that accounts for text-external resources for understanding genre performance, interdiscursivity can contribute to rhetorical genre studies scholars' burgeoning interest in genre uptakes as dynamically localized and interconnected in ways especially useful for the study of public genres this volume undertakes.

Let me first briefly refer to a multiperspective framework I introduced earlier (Bhatia 2004) for the analysis of discourse within which I would like to consider such appropriations of interdiscursivity in public discourse.

Three-Space Model for Genre Analysis

In proposing a three-space multiperspective model for the analysis of written discourse in my earlier work (Bhatia 2004), I underpinned the importance of context in genre theory. The three overlapping concepts of space — which include textual, sociopragmatic (incorporating both genre-based discursive and professional practices), and, more generally, sociocultural — help a discourse analyst to focus more appropriately on one or more of these three dimensions of space to analyze and interpret discourse. In fact, if we look at the three-space model in more detail, we realize that most forms of discourse operate simultaneously within and across four somewhat distinct yet overlapping levels in order to construct and interpret meanings in specific contexts. Drawing on this framework (Bhatia 2004), these levels of realization can be identified as discourse as text, discourse as genre, discourse as social practice, and discourse as identity and culture, which can be represented as in Figure 1.1.

The interesting thing about discourse analysis is that although the ultimate product we can see is in the form of a text, it is made possible by a combination of complex and careful selection of resources, which may include lexico-grammatical, rhetorical, and discourse organization, all of which are text internal. In addition to these text-internal resources, other contributors to the construction of discourse are conventions of the genre in question, relevant aspects of the social practice in which the genre is situated, and the culture of the community, discipline, or institution, which constrains the use of textual resources for a particular discursive practice. Thus, any instance of discourse as communication is simultaneously realized, and hence can be analyzed, at four levels: as text, as representation of genre, as realization of social practice, and as indication of social and individual identity as well as culture. Identity includes disciplinary, institutional, and professional identities in addition to individual, ethnic, and, more generally, sociocultural identities.

These distinct levels of discourse realization highlight two kinds of relationship, one between discursive practice and social practice and the other between text-internal and text-external semiotic resources and constraints. Text-internal resources have been researched for quite some time within discourse and genre analytical literature highlighting the notion of intertextuality; however, text-external resources so far have not been treated in as much detail in discourse and genre analytical literature. Text-external resources, as mentioned earlier, include the discourse and genre conventions that constrain not only the construction but also the interpretation, exploitation, and use (including genre uptake) of texts as some of the key aspects of social practices. They also include social identities and various manifestations of culture that motivate these discourses and social practices.

Interdiscursive Performance

The multispace model for genre analysis described above enables us to understand and account for the appropriation of textual as well as other semiotic resources and conventions at various levels of discursive engagement invariably exploited for the construction and interpretation of discursive...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Utah State University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1607324423
• ISBN 13: 9781607324423
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 270
• Herausgeber: Reiff Mary Jo, Bawarshi Anis
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar