In Literacy in the New Media Age, Gunther Kress settles into a gradual
progression from long-held presumptions about alphabetic literacy to an
increasingly hybridized and "multimodal" literacy based on the screen. The
screen’s proclivity for combining images and text has profound consequences,
Kress argues, for the temporal/sequential logics of letter, word and clause as
units of meaning. Kress contends that syntactic complexity is compromised
as the frenetic reading pathways of the screen condition readers and writers to
mixed-mode framings that, in turn, impact how they read and write.
Contrary to my expectations, Kress is none too sour on this trend; in fact, his
movement through dense sociolinguistic explanations of literacy, genre and
punctuation as framing are impressively nuanced. Yet, very little of the
first two-thirds of the book is explicit about the ways in which new writing
technologies are entangled in the shifts he describes, and in this sense, I find
Kress to be frustrating in how patiently he advances his back-analysis on
traditional alphabetic literacy (replicated in formal Western schooling)–while
the matter at hand–screens as a site of particular kinds of changed
writing activity–hovers as a given. This book is far more about
"Literacy" than about "the New Media Age;" it inches toward actual discussions
of interfaces, and finally, near the end of chapter eight, offers a screen-shot
of a web page with eleven (by Kress’s count) "entry-points" for reading.
Kress’s point with the screenshot: "’reading’ is now a distinctively different
activity to what it was in the era of the traditional page" (138).
Tag: genre
Genre Sirc-umvention
We have evolved a very limited notion of academic writing (or any genre,
really). Our texts are conventional in every sense of the word; they write
themselves. They are almost wholly determined by the texts that have gone
before; a radical break from the conventions of a form or genre (and I’m not
speaking here about the academic convention of the smug, sanctioned
transgression, e.g. Jane Tompkins) would perplex–how is that history writing?
what community group would need that for its newsletter? how is that going
to help you get a job? A Happenings spirit would begin at the point of Elbow’s
"life is long and college is short" queasiness with academic writing
("Reflections on Academic Discourse" 136). (10)
A-la Geoff Sirc’s English Composition as a Happening.
Genre Theory II
For yesterday’s genre theory session we looked at the first chapter from Amy
Devitt’s book,
Writing Genres, and the first and third chapters from Paul Prior’s book,
Writing/Disciplinarity (both of which have searchable copy at
Google Print).
Devitt gracefully works genre into an interactive model between individuals (at
a basic level); social structures, genre, and groups (at an intermediary level)
and context of culture, context of genre and context of situation (at an
ultimate level). It’s meant to simplify a complex set of relationships, I
think, and as a model it does well to give a graphic alternative to some fairly
heady stuff. But I’m still a bit murky on the role genre plays in scaling
between the lived, everyday activity (often communicative, often recurrent–as
in, not another grocery list) and the higher/broader orders. Genre,
given to patterns of activity, would ask of us to point to evidence of the
relationship between the broader abstract levels and the more ornate,
idiosyncratic actions of individuals. Forgive me though; I’m the one who’s
murky (shall I explain in a supplem-entry?). Better to read Devitt
first-hand than to take this as a solid handle on her project.
Bawarshi, Genre and the Invention of the Writer
Anis Bawarshi develops a case for a genre-studies-based first-year writing
curriculum. In the courses teachers would introduce students to sampled
genre sets from selected disciplines or professional fields (studying, in
effect, lab reports as a genre, or other professional document types).
Students would analyze the genres, writing both in them and about them; hence,
composition would have as its impetus a pragmatic extra-disciplinary
awareness of the writing students will do in their major areas of study and, as
well, bona fide content: writing itself (in all its forms, in and beyond the
academy). As Bawarshi’s project builds an argument for this model, he
reasons that a more comprehensive, nuanced understanding of genre is one
(though perhaps golden) ticket to composition’s status as a discipline and
might also serve us with a compelling justification for the first-year writing
sequence.
On Genre
From Anthony Giddens, "Problems of Action and Structure."
The Giddens Reader.:
"If interpretative sociologies are founded, as it were, upon an imperialism
of the subject, functionalism and structuralism propose an imperialism of the
social object. One of my principal ambitions in the formulation of structuration
theory is to put an end to each of these empire-building endeavours. The
basic domain of study of the social sciences, according to the theory of
structuration, is neither the experience of the individual actor, not the
existence of any form of societal totality, but social practices ordered across
space and time" (89).
Genre Theory I
I thought I’d drop in just a few brief notes from the summer course I’m taking:
CCR760: Genre Theory in Academic Contexts. My plan is to introduce
similar entries over the next few weeks; I’ll think of them, for now, as
provisional and winding
explorations through/around/between some of the key ideas playing out in the
course.
Retromediation and Novelty
Cross-posted to
Network(ed) Rhetorics.
Frankly, as I read "Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for
Teaching with Weblogs," by Brooks, Nichols and Priebe, all of NDSU,
I wondered about the consequences of framing
weblogs as remediations of older forms–the journal, the notebook and the
filter. What results from a setup of weblogs that calibrates their
potential in terms of paper-based corollaries? It’s difficult to know
exactly how this was framed beyond the evidence we find in
the article
(the framework, the research narrative, the questionnaire, the data-sets, the
conclusion) and in the related links (the
weblogs themselves,
a
syllabus,
a reading list,
adjacent
assignments) so I’m reluctant to respond to the essay with firmly resolved
skepticism, especially considering that it reflects some of the earliest uses of
blogs to teach writing. Yet through this limited lens, I have doubts about
why we need to liken blogs to paper
counterparts. What’s gained? Is it a way to legitimate composition
pedagogy adventurously (inventively, imaginatively!) straying from
long-recognized forms, forms often occupying the lion’s share of weight in the
event-oriented syllabus or program-wide curricular design? Is it a way to
call up, for students, a sense of the familiar? Although it is, perhaps to
a lesser degree than resonates in this article, necessary at times to present
students with a grounding in the familiar, when Brooks et. al. tell us, "we
wanted to balance the novelty of the activity with a grounding in familiar
literate practices," my initial thought is that a high stakes
flattening/deadening/adequation is inevitably brought about. And this, I
think, must bear on motivation, if only subtly, tacitly.
What do I suggest instead? Well, it
depends on the broader aims of the course. For collective course blogs, I’m less
and less inclined to model exemplary entries for the whole class, and rather
than talking about what blogs enable by connecting them to the written forms
they (more or less) resemble, I
prefer to introduce blogs to students in terms of their impact on how we
think (sure, paper variations impact
thought, too), develop and write with/about ideas and so on (more to this, but
I’ll let it rest here).