Week One

Hello, all:

Each week I will post the lecture notes. Please feel free to add your own notes or questions using the comment option.

- Organize into Groups. Each Group gets a handout. Each group chooses an article and a date.
- Email LIST. Blog.
- Read out genres. Student’s share their own genres. Genre Lecture.
- Homework: read “Ecocide” – Chapter 2 until 2.2 in Giltrow

1. LECTURE: Genre


A. GENRE
Definition: A type or class. A category of artistic composition, as in music or literature, marked by a distinctive style, form, or content.
**read examples.
Genre Theory: Genre theory’s most practical claim for the study of writing: the scholarly genres (and other genres) should be studied in their own terms. These terms are themselves full of interest, as indications of ways of life.
A writer involved in the characteristic wordings of a discipline is involved in its practices and its procedures for interpreting the world.
A discipline’s typical wordings embody its representations of the world...
Our job is to analyze these genres’ characteristic markers of position and subjectivity (real world available identities...)
Hearing Voices: Read to them some different genres. Listen to my voice.
*Hand out and read through the passages on 21 / 22 TYPES OF WRITING ONLY. Name the types of writing in passages one through six.
All the passages are in English; this is not as important as to where they DIFFER
- These passages come directly from different moments in North American life. They voice different situations.
- No one can say which passages is BEST
- But we can estimate the efficiency of each voice – each style of expression – in serving the situation from which it arises.

B.
- The passages we just read through not only serve the situations in which they arise by they embody them, representing certain recognisable occasions.
- We HEAR the setting in which they operate.
- These sounds signify typical moments which culture has been produced: mating, marketplace, social distinction, professional publication.
- The situation has imprinted, pressed into the general shape of the language features which mark its use for particular occasions.

C.
*Read through passages again *Cultural situation ONLY
Hearing and speaking, reading and writing, we enact our experience of the world as that experience which has been shaped by our culture.
LANGUAGE IS SENSITIVE TO SITUATION
- IMAGINE language as an organism, adapting to its environment.

D.
Now, genres have typically been used to differentiate styles. For example, poems, novels and plays are different. This allowed English Departments to determine their curriculums.
- HOWEVER, now it is more important to take into account the social and political contexts of knowledge and to calculate the degree to which the quality of statements about the world dependent on who – in the world – was making the statement.
- GENRE: wants us to think about the context-dependency of language.
- FORM + SITUATION = GENRE
- Genre becomes NOT A RULE but a sign of common ground between readers and writers – expressing: shared attitudes, practices, positions in the world.
- Forms of speaking are connected to social contexts where people DO things: like selling a house of finding a mate.
- Different routines of social behaviours – habits of acting in the world – create different genres of speech and writing.
- EXAMPLE: Thank you note or love note. Both types of writing are not only made up of a characteristic written expression but also of the situation in which it occurs: it is a way of acting in the world.


Style: The manner of expression of a particular writer, produced by choice of words, grammatical structures, use of literary devices, and all the possible parts of language use. Some general styles might include scientific, ornate, plain, and emotive. Most writers have their own particular styles.
In our case – something can look like an essay but fail to fulfill the conventions of the genre – fail to speak directly to / or enter the discourse of the discipline.
A discipline’s typical wordings embody its representation of the world
Instructions of how to understand the world / statements about it
We are presented with voices, I am asking you to listen to the accents of the genres – to interpret them, how do they function in the text, what purposes do they serve, adopt those same strategies in their own work
Develop an ear and learn how language constructs your own ideas of the world
Style is meaningful, we should ask what it means, and if the style is a social action, we should ask what it does. We should ask by what principles a way of speaking organizes knowledge of the world, how it organizes systems of association, solidarity and advantage.
What does this mean for us in this course?
Well, without access to scholarly ways of speaking, student writers cannot occupy scholarly positions, or use scholarly methods from producing statement, or speak to academic interests.
**It’s all about language, style, having access to vocabulary. Think of writing as a landscape: EXPLAIN. Going out on a trip – what do you need? Music? Blending of Genres!

EXERCISE:
• Page 28 – Have the student’s complete the exercise.

ASSIGNMENT FOR NEXT WEEK

Read: “Ecocide and Globalization” by Franz Browswimmer.
Define: Rhetoric and Rhetorical device.
Define: Stylistic device and produce a glossary of terms.
Define: Ethos, Pathos, Logos.




Next Week:

In GROUPS: As an example of genre analysis and close reading (a skill we will be honing all semester) I want each group to watch and analyze a film about the Global Environmental Crisis / Global Warming. In each case I want your group to present up to four clips from the movie that demonstrate HOW the filmmaker is making his or her point. How do theses filmic choices such as camera angle, sound, editing, dialogue, imagery, ECT.. further their overall arguments. Are these decisions effective? Why or why not?

An Inconvenient Truth (2006)
Manufactured Landscapes (2006)
Petropolis: Aerial Perspectives on the Alberta Tar Sands (2009)
The 11th Hour (2007)
The Great Global Warming Swindle (2007) TV
Flow (2009)