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1359 articlesApril 2015
March 2015
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Reasons for Using English or the Local Language in the Genre of Job Advertisements: Insights From Interviews With Dutch Job Ad Designers ↗
Abstract
Research problem: This study provides insight into practitioners' reasons for choosing a particular language (English versus the local language) in the genre of job ads in countries where English is a foreign language (EFL countries). Scholarly publications and public discourse have suggested reasons for language choice, but these were not based on the perspectives of practitioners. Research questions: (1) What reasons do Dutch job ad writers give for using all-English, all-Dutch, or partly English ads and what genre factors inform these reasons? (2) To what extent do the reasons given by Dutch job ad makers for using all-English,P all-Dutch, or partly English ads complement reasons mentioned in publications on job ads? Literature review: Genre theory identifies three factors as important determinants of genre: contextual factors (such as characteristics of the organization and the sector in which the genre is produced), reader-writer factors (characteristics of the genre's target audience and author), and textual factors (the genre's content, structure, and wording). The reasons mentioned for the use of all-English job ads are that English is the organization's corporate language and that the organization is looking for English-speaking candidates. The reasons given for the use of job ads in the local language are that English is less clear than the local language and that English words are strange and exaggerated compared to equivalents in the local language. Among the reasons mentioned for the use of partly English job ads are that English words attract more attention than equivalents in the local language and that English job titles sound more modern and have more status than equivalent job titles in the local language. Methodology: In this qualitative study, we conducted 25 interviews with practitioners who designed job ads in the Netherlands, selected because they had recently placed an all-English, an all-Dutch, or a partly English job ad in a Dutch newspaper. They were asked an open-ended question about their reasons behind the language used in the job ad they placed. Interview data were labelled and categorized; subsequently, patterns were identified across categories. Results and conclusions: The interviews showed that all three types of genre factors-contextual, reader-writer, and textual-underlie practitioners' language choices. Practitioners mentioned the same types of factors that were mentioned in publications on job ads, but gave a greater variety of reasons for language choice. Of the reasons mentioned by the practitioners, the large majority were not given in publications. These findings underline the importance of obtaining text producers' perspectives and can be used to sensitize both novice and experienced professional Human Resources writers to the relevance of genre factors in language choice. A limitation of the present study is that the desired effects of language choice mentioned by the respondents were not verified with the target group of the job ads. Therefore, future research on language choice in workplace writing should test whether particular language choices in job ads actually achieve the recruitment effects Human Resource Manager professionals expect.
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Abstract
Research problem: Examines how Korean entrepreneurs in an entrepreneurship program revised their English-language slide decks for their competitive presentations (“pitches”) by reusing content from professional communication genres, including their own documents and feedback from potential stakeholders in their target markets. Research question: As entrepreneurs learn to pitch ideas to unfamiliar markets, how do they revise their slide decks by reusing content from other professional communication genres? Specifically, what strategies do they follow when reusing content? Literature review: The professional communication literature demonstrates that reuse tends to take place in documentation cycles where documents are set in interaction with each other and that reuse itself involves rhetorical choices. Yet such reuse strategies have not been examined in existing studies of entrepreneurial pitches in marketing and technology commercialization. Methodology: In an exploratory qualitative study, researchers textually analyzed 14 sets of five related document genres in the archives of an entrepreneurship program. These genres represented a full cycle of activity: application to the program, initial pitches, initial feedback from program personnel, detailed feedback from representative stakeholders in the target market, and revised pitches. Interviews and surveys of program personnel further contextualize the data. Results and conclusions: Entrepreneurs reused content from professional communication genres, including those that they had generated as well as those generated by market stakeholders. However, reuse went simply beyond accepting and copying feedback; as they learned to make their pitch arguments, these entrepreneurs had to weigh this feedback and engage with it critically. This reuse can be characterized as Accepting (repeating verbatim or in close paraphrase); Continuing (extending lines of argument); and Resisting (rebutting lines of argument). These findings suggest that entrepreneurs need all three strategies as they refine their pitches for their target markets.
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Abstract
212 RHETORICA imento alia lacuna presente nel testo origínale che viene pero colmata in traduzione senza indicazioni sull'integrazione operata. Infine, YEpitaffio: un testo su cui poco é stato detto dagli antichi e dai moderni e che l'A. tenta di indagare approntando un'originale partitura del testo, servendosi del con fronto con gli altri testi gorgiani e con gli altri pochi esempi di logoi epitaphioi dell'antichitá. Interessante é l'interpretazione in chiave retorica del concetto di kairos che viene destituito di qualsiasi significato filosófico. II discorso fú nebre acquista poi un forte significato etico che rivela, secondo l'A., un forte interesse di Gorgia per la morale, interesse non certo codificatosi in una presentazione teórica ben definita, ma sicuramente tradotto in numerosi spunti sparsi anche negli altri due discorsi analizzati. Quella di Gorgia sarebbe una morale della cittá, l'etica del suo tempo, quella che riconosce giusto 'ció che é comunemente giusto' e sbagliato 'ció che é comunemente sbagliato' (p. 249). II volume si chiude con le riflessioni conclusive che, pur rischiando di leggere in maniera forse troppo sistemática il movimento sofistico, all'interno del quale Gorgia, retore e filosofo, figurerebbe anche come un esperto di 'diritto' (p. 252) e la filosofía espressa nei suoi discorsi si presenterebbe come una gnoseologia capace di guidare il sofista anche in senso etico (ibidem), disegnano con coerenza l'orientamento teorético con cui Gorgia merita di essere interrogato. Dopo la bibliografía e prima dell'indice dei nomi, correda il volume una serie di riproduzioni fotografiche dei frontespizi di alcune edizioni dell'opera gorgiana possedute dall'Autrice. Piera De Piano Universitá degli studi di Salerno Fabrice, Robert, Les œuvres perdues d'Ælius Aristide: fragments et témoignages. Édition, traduction et commentaire, Paris, De Boccard (coll. De l'Archéologie à l'Histoire), 2012, 743 pp. ISBN 978-2-70180332 -6 Cet ouvrage est issu d'une thèse soutenue à l'Université Marc BlochStrasbourg II en 2008 sous la direction de Laurent Pernot, et constitue une importante annexe au projet dirigé par ce dernier et consistant à éditer dans la collection Budé l'ensemble des quelque 501 discours conservés d'Ælius Aris- Æe dénombrement interfère avec les questions d'authenticité. E Robert, sur la quatrième de couverture, évoque 53 discours conservés dans les manuscrits médiévaux. P. 10, il fait état de 50 discours complets auxquels s'ajoutent deux discours mutilés et un apocryphe (or. 35). D'après la n. 9, il s'avère qu'en réalité deux autres discours (or. 25 et 30) ont vu leur authenticité discutée et que le n° 25 (Discours rbodien ) est toujours suspect aux yeux de certains. Deux déclamations ont été retirées du corpus chez tous les éditeurs postérieurs a Dindorf, les « déclamations leptiniennes, dont la numérotation et le mode de transmission ne sont pas indiqués. L'attribution à Reviews 213 tide (iie s. ap. J.-C.), le plus fameux représentant de la Seconde Sophistique. Fabrice Robert y réunit toute la documentation disponible sur les ceuvres disparues du sophiste et connues seulement de manière indirecte, que ce soit par des mentions d Ælius Aristide lui-même dans d'autres oeuvres ou par des citations ou des mentions faites dans des textes postérieurs. Les éditions de ce genre posent, on le sait, de nombreux problèmes de méthode. Il s agit d isoler, d identifier les vestiges, de distinguer fragments et témoignages - ce qui n'est pas toujours commode -, d'assigner ces morceaux plus ou moins consistants à telle ou telle œuvre, à tel ou tel genre, de procéder à leur classement, afin de resituer autant que possible le fragment dans son contexte, et de donner une place réfléchie aux œuvres dans le recueil, sans même parler de l'exigeant travail de commentaire, dont dépend la compréhension et l'appréciation des vestiges eux-mêmes et des raisons aussi bien de leur survie et de leur usage que de la perte de leur contexte. Fabrice Robert a pris la pleine mesure de la complexité de sa tâche. Les 190 fragments...
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Educational Genres in Eastern Europe: A Comparison of the Genres in the Humanities Departments of three Countries of Three Different Universities in Three Different Countries ↗
Abstract
The intercultural study of genres provides an opportunity not only to gain an understanding of the differences in writing cultures but also to sharpen the view on what is particular for each learning context. As little previous research has undertaken systematic comparisons of genre systems at European universities, we collected data on educational genres used in writing from the Humanities departments of two universities in Eastern European countries (Romania and Ukraine) and one in a Southeastern European country (Republic of Macedonia). A questionnaire with listed genre names was distributed at the three universities to assess the importance and the perceptions of academic genres in the respective cultures. Open questions were used to validate the results and gather hypotheses on the meaning of the mentioned genres. Results show differences in the frequencies of genre use, which, however, do not allow typifying differences in the learning/writing cultures. Genres are labelled differently and emerge from different traditions but seem to resemble a similar pool of genres in each of the studied countries.
February 2015
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Abstract
Arabella Lyon's Deliberative Acts begins with a rhetorical question: “Shall we speak of Abu Ghraib and torture; shall we educate the children of illegal immigrants; shall we guarantee health care for all or for most; shall we intervene in the governance of other nations; shall we ban the hijab (head scarf), medical marijuana, and prayer in the schools; shall we find one hundred million missing women, the lost boys of Africa, and los desaparecidos (the disappeared)?” (1) With this list of violations framed as a question, Lyon suggests that through the media, popular culture, and politics, we are constantly confronted with and compelled to deliberate on issues of rights, so much so that human rights have become the grounding for the work of democracy. Thus, Lyon's major intervention is located at this intersection of human rights discourse and the political deliberation necessary in democracies. She seeks to advance a theory of “performative deliberation” (3) that conceives of deliberation within theories of performance and performativity as an activity that refocuses on the present and the constitutive moment of recognition within the specific context of each speech act. In order to do so, Lyon turns to human rights case studies as represented in the media and life stories because they, by nature, attend to radical difference and because they “require examinations of both being and situated knowledge for the many coming to action, an action potentially transformative of being and knowledge” (4).Rhetorical studies has been surprisingly late in taking up a human rights critique. Although many have been engaged in critiquing human rights from a rhetorical perspective for years, and even more have been engaged in critiquing human rights through discourse analysis and literary analysis, the lack of conversation in rhetoric prompts Erik Doxtader to question whether rhetoric should have a role in human rights discourse in the first place.1 Despite his question, the past several years has seen a renewed interest in rhetorical approaches to human rights. In fact, a special issue of RSQ coedited by Arabella Lyon and Lester Olson in 2011 (subsequently published as a book in 2012) and Wendy Hesford's book Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (2011) were among the first in this new wave of rhetorical studies to focus directly on human rights as such. Lyon's Deliberative Acts is situated within this relatively recent rhetorical turn to human rights and provides a useful and necessary theoretical grounding on rhetorical concepts and deliberation across difference as they relate to human rights case studies on which others can build. Additionally, for scholars engaged in conversations surrounding deliberative rhetorics, Lyon offers a convincing model of performative deliberation that accounts for the fluidity of poststructuralist notions of agency and subjectivity through an overdue rethinking of rhetorical concepts including identification, recognition, and performance/performativity in persuasion. However, for scholars participating in the conversation and critique directly surrounding human rights discourse, a critique that is predominantly located in the humanities and rapidly expanding out from its literary foundations, Lyon's book may be controversial, as it does not necessarily critique the discourse of rights itself, nor the amorphous “we” constructed in her first sentence. Rather, she is interested in critiquing how that “we” employs, deploys, and deliberates over human rights cases, including the claims made by Libyan woman Eman al-Obeidi's to Western journalists that she was raped and abused by Gaddafi's military, the Chinese one-child policy, Rigoberta Menchú's testimony, and women's suffrage in the United States.Lyon's introduction locates her intervention in the conversation surrounding deliberation and deliberative democracy in a global and transnational era. To begin, Lyon distinguishes deliberative democracy (a way for states to legitimize decisions) from deliberation (a rhetorical practice), a distinction that suggests that the problem with deliberative democracy is that “it finds difference disruptive rather than productively diverse” (11). This is problematic because “in responding to rights conflicts” Lyon claims, “citizens are asked to deliberate, to recognize interlocutors, to comprehend their competing claims, and weigh definitions of the issue and the consequences of their decisions on people whom they have never seen” (4). Lyon's introduction articulates three major critiques that scholars of deliberative theory might find very useful. First, she critiques its origins in procedural democracy, which engages in forensic rhetoric, rather than deliberative politics, which engages in deliberative rhetoric. Stated differently, deliberative democracy is future oriented and focuses on action and procedure rather than present context. Second, in its privileging of reason, deliberative democracy values Western notions of speech-action that delegitimize alternative and embodied strategies of persuasion. Thus, deliberative democracy ignores the contextual forces that constitute reason in the first place. Third, Lyon argues that deliberative democracy values consensus, which “creates problems for theorizing radical deliberation, because it is hard to imagine even basic norms of justice achieving practical consensus” (19).The first chapter, “Defining Deliberative Space: Rethinking Persuasion, Position, and Identification” theoretically situates the book and redefines some foundational rhetorical concepts including identification, recognition and persuasion. Lyon suggests that instead of deliberative rhetoric being a futurist discourse, it can instead be constitutive of the present, “a doing based in speech and act and not in persuasion and identification” (30). For example, identification predicated on recognition, argues Lyon, will always subsume difference and is thus inadequate for discourse across difference. Lyon critiques deliberation as a persuasive discourse on three grounds. It is inadequate for human rights and cross-cultural engagement since it is predicated upon an unequal relationship between speaker and audience (rather than an equal relationship between interlocutors); it is future rather than present oriented; and it assumes certain sets of communal knowledges that will always “seek to remove otherness” (31). In order to remedy these problems Lyon turns to “alternative rhetorics,” including feminist rhetorics and Confucian notions of remonstration, that can help scholars conceive of deliberation “as a dramatic event or a series of enactments” and as “the discursive acts responsible for altering the subjectivity of the participants, their discourses, and their beliefs” (36–37). Ultimately, Lyon proposes a conception of deliberation as a continuum of political perspectives, suggesting that if each interlocutor values the other over the outcome, then deliberation can occur. If we understand deliberation as a “regularly occurring human act” (49), she claims, then recognition does not have to occur prior to deliberation; the act of deliberation is itself an act of recognition and thus humanizing.Understanding recognition as occurring in the moment of engagement with the other seems to solve the poststructuralist problem of the fixed individual of rights, but it gets more challenging when the subject of rights is not a subject who can engage in deliberation at all, such as third generation rights of/to the environment. However, in critiquing Aristotle's notion of persuasion so as to redefine deliberation not as a discourse oriented toward the future bent on persuasion but rather as one constitutive of the present bent on recognition, Lyon opens the possibility of deliberation across difference that does not reproduce the hegemonic structures always present in discourses of persuasive deliberation.The second chapter, “Performative Deliberation and the Narratable Who,” begins with the story of Eman al-Obeidi, the Libyan woman who, according to Lyon, became a symbol of defiance against Gaddafi when she entered the Rixos Hotel in 2011 (a hotel where Western journalists covering the uprising gathered) and claimed that she had been gang-raped by Gaddafi's military. During this telling of her rape, Gaddafi's military entered the hotel and again abducted al-Obeidi despite the journalists' attempts to protect her. Lyon uses the story of al-Obeidi throughout the chapter to argue for a theory of performative deliberation as a way to account for the complexities of agency, recognition, and narratability in deliberative discourse. The chapter offers a further critique of identification and recognition through a close reading of J. L. Austin's notion of the performative, Kenneth Burke's concept of performance, and Judith Butler's notions of performativity as “a continuum of form and forming” (25) that scales outward from the individual to the structural. In an attempt to locate individual agency within structural notions of subjectivity, Lyon then provides a close reading of issues pertaining to narration and agency that she traces through Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood, and Adriana Cavarero. Through these theories and the story of al-Obeidi, Lyon proposes to extend speech act theory in four main ways. First, by analyzing “tensions between conforming and forming within speech act theories to reveal the agency inherent in discourse” (69), Lyon shows how al-Obeidi shifted the focus of her speech act from an individual act of rape when she was talking with the journalists in the restaurant of the Rixos Hotel to a violation within the normative and structural discourse of human rights when she was interviewed much later by Anderson Cooper on CNN. According to Lyon, this intentional slippage shifts blame “from the shame of the woman to the shame of the patriarchal state” (69). Second, because speech acts do not just conform to normative conventions but also maintain space for agency and can be inaugural sites themselves, then “the nature of the cultural change is visible in abnormal or infelicitous performances” (69). Therefore, she reads al-Obeidi's decision to burst in on the breakfast of Western journalists covering the war in Libya as an example of an infelicitous speech act that was able to redefine the norms of testimony. Third, Lyon seeks to find agency in the embodied performance of the speech act (69), and fourth, the chapter claims that agency is found in navigating existing norms by “using both felicitous and infelicitous acts to widen possibilities” (69), exemplified in al-Obeidi's navigation of the Western media. This chapter is one of the more compelling chapters because of its thorough critique of identification and recognition.The third chapter critiques U.S. media representations of what Lyon calls “the most major human rights crisis in the world today: missing women” (108) in Asia and China due to the one-child policy. The chapter, titled “Narrating Rights, Creating Agents: Missing Women in the U.S. Media” with an intended pun on “missing women,” suggests that if the media, like literature, could work to foster compassion, then it could initiate the kind of relationships necessary for performative deliberation. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero's account of the narratable self, Lyon modifies Arendt's view of compassion as an emotion that demands action rather than the slow movement of deliberation in order to develop a theory of deliberation that employs compassion from a distance. Her theory of compassion is the rhetorical equivalent of theories of literary witness articulated by Anne Cubilié in Women Witnessing Terror (2005) and Wendy Kozol (2011) in her essay “Complicities of Witnessing in Joe Sacco's Palestine.” All three scholars articulate a notion of witness that demands action rather than spectatorship, the latter implying passivity and consumption. Lyon argues that the media representation of China's missing women revives Cold War sentiments and the fear of China surpassing the United States as an economic and global superpower. Negating any form of cross-cultural recognition, family planning gets mapped onto the United States' own political fears and Chinese women become allegorical figures for the nation-state. The U.S. media thus misses the missing women because they are not seen as a human rights violation but rather a symptom of family planning or abject suffering, made the subject of narratives, argues Lyon, that foreclose deliberation across difference. To counteract this, Lyon calls for a kind of “global citizen” who is located in the United States but who is educated and informed and who can advocate for women's rights in other cultures. Lyon argues that literature can offer this kind of compassionate education that underwrites performative deliberations and turns to Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club as an example, thus contributing to the wealth of scholarship that suggest literature does human rights work. However, Lyon ends her chapter by backing away from the work literature can do, suggesting that “storytelling becomes a means of recognition, but not of political action” (126).Chapter 4, “The Beauty of Arendt's Lies: Menchú's Political Strategy,” analyzes the reception of Rigoberta Menchú's I, Rigoberta Menchú and U.S. scholars' attempt to explain away the inconsistencies of the controversial testimonio. In so doing, the chapter “reconceives the ethics of lies, arguing that they are examples of imaginative, performative acts in the service of (potentially new) political regimes” (27). Returning once again to Arendt, Lyon furthers Arendt's sanction of lies for diplomatic political use, particularly those told to enemies, and legitimates Menchú's inconsistencies as an expression of her political agency by which she negotiates norms. Suggesting that Menchú's lies facilitate human rights deliberation, this chapter more deeply examines issues of recognition within normative conventions of the genre of testimonio. Thus, Lyon not only provides a helpful reading of the normative conventions of the testimonio in this chapter but also critiques the ways in which narratives are frequently recognized based on their adherence to normative conventions of testimonial veracity. The chapter ends with an apologia of sorts that explains why Lyon advocates the political tactic of lying, claiming that “the state's legitimacy relies on its truthful adherence to its laws, but citizen agents must speak back to dishonest states, even with lies” (149).The final chapter of Deliberative Acts, titled “Voting like a Girl: Declarations, Paradoxes of Deliberation, and Embodied Citizens as a Difference In Kind,” moves the discussion of rights onto U.S. soil and into the past in an examination of the deliberations over women's suffrage. One of the chapter's most interesting interventions is Lyon's claim that paradoxes are generative of deliberation because they counteract consensus and because they disrupt the stability of answers. This reframing of paradox is incredibly useful for human rights because of the inherently paradoxical nature of human rights, but it should be noted that Lyon articulates a particular definition of the paradox as “indicating a set of radical claims about women that challenge traditional beliefs and doxa” rather than “an irresolvable proposition” (154). Lyon examines four particular paradoxes: the tension between old and new ideas (exemplified by competing interpretations over time of the First Amendment and free speech), the tension between the normativity of rights and the inherent (de)limitations of those norms, the chicken-or-egg dilemma regarding the political origins of rights as they relate to the formation of the citizen, and finally, the irresolvable tension between language as describing rights and constituting them as such. The chapter examines these paradoxes through a detailed reading of deliberation surrounding the First Amendment, suggesting that Susan B. Anthony's illegal performance of citizenship and the Seneca Falls Convention's rewriting of the Declaration of Independence, like al-Obeidi's testimony and Rigoberta Menchú's testimonio, are infelicitous performances that serve to negotiate and expand what was and is considered normative and thus expand the notion of “what it means to embody citizenship and rights” (172). Lyon ends her book by reiterating the performative, and nature of to the conversation surrounding rights discourse is in that she articulates how deliberation over human rights can potentially a subject of rights. In the Lyon to articulate a definition of rights, and thus a subject of rights, that is and are seen as relationships through speech acts and with the of being and situated they are as of in conversations among and out in or which them as and as through based and deliberation, and in However, seems to be a tension throughout the book on the one an of rights in their or discursive as an by a set of normative conventions and that and constantly on the an of them as political and by the critique are U.S. and the of rights are whom they have never seen” particularly in her that “performative deliberation must extend the concept of recognition from one of people visible to one of the it have understand recognition as a of being and rather than one of and or However, on recognition rather than persuasion and hegemonic discursive structures through “a agency in the present moment of seems to that all are at the and that all are as and studies has it is those who are not recognized as who rights the In other the is only human when she or is as a the Lyon this problem in chapter when she articulates the paradox of rights as the chicken-or-egg of what citizen who advocates for rights or the rights to the citizen as such. In Lyon's in chapter that al-Obeidi's to the of the violation from the individual to from the to the of the is also an analysis of the rhetoric of rights However, it could be interesting to on Lyon's by more deeply if this the norms of testimony the that the reason al-Obeidi was able to her claim and her testimony as a of rape was because she has a and had an audience the Western who both and that testimony and of it as a If the Western media had not been to the al-Obeidi's rape, and have as In other it is more through which normative cultural Libyan or al-Obeidi's speech is 4, does a account of the and problems of recognition, as in it Lyon offers a particularly reading of the norms surrounding Menchú's testimony and her of lies for political within the normative discourse of her useful critique of a an titled “The and many media in chapter Lyon out the ways in which the popular media representations of women not facilitate an space where may and initiate This chapter's critique of the popular representation across of missing women is to further Lyon's theories of performative deliberation in specific it the media for missing women and a rather view of the of U.S. Additionally, how Lyon's critique of the and other U.S. media as to a of engaged who can then in deliberation are by the on in China the one-child to to that will then to including the U.S. and the Chinese in the world of media and or what she of the recent turn to literature by human rights her that “storytelling becomes a means of recognition, but not of political action” tension between the notion of normative rights as subject and the notion of rights as a set of that to be by a Western “we” lies at the of Lyon's but does not from her theoretical notion of performative deliberation as constitutive of human rights In fact, Lyon's reading of identification and the theoretical of deliberation, particularly in the first chapter, are very useful for scholars at the of human rights discourse and rhetorical particularly those scholars interested in of global transnational rhetorics, and deliberative democracy. If rights are and made normative by narratives, whether or Lyon's examination of deliberation provides a for the of reading across reading that is potentially subject Although the first of the book is theoretical and can across as from the of rights discourse and from the of rights claims example, what does it of of rights violations to suggest that they the possibility of a relationship with their or of Lyon's critique of the discourse of deliberation as persuasion and her of performative deliberation across difference is within more practical discourses in the second of the Lyon's critique of deliberation in human rights discourse, particularly her from identification as a in persuasion across is and should be a foundational one for those of in rights discourse because it to the very on which rights claims, particularly within like the have been In one of the more of the in chapter 4, Lyon Judith in claiming that one does not as a subject of recognition, to the and to be one must or the of that telling the is also problematic if it does not recognize as For scholars in human rights discourse to expand the notions of what is this is useful as we and critique that may or may or may not or may not be recognized as or existing normative of what human rights, rights narratives, rights claims, and of rights.
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Abstract
While there is consensus that dialogic teaching should involve a repertoire of teaching and learning talk patterns and approaches, authorities who enjoin teachers to engage in dialogic teaching generally characterize classroom dialogue in terms of surface features such as open questions. But dialogic teaching is not defined by discourse structure so much as by discourse function. When teachers adopt a dialogic instructional stance, they treat dialogue as a functional construct rather than structural, and classroom oracy can thrive. Our research finds that dialogic talk functions to model and support cognitive activity and inquiry and supportive classroom relations, to engage multiple voices and perspectives across time, and to animate student ideas and contributions. Employing narrative analysis and cross-episodic contingency analysis, we tell a story in three episodes about how oracy practices promote dialogic functions in a third-grade classroom. We unpack how a particular teaching exchange—one we have selected specifically for its nondialogic surface appearance—reflects dialogic teaching. Findings show how supportive epistemic and communal functions of classroom talk are more important to successful dialogic teaching and learning than are surface dialogic features. We argue it is necessary to look beyond interactional form and unpack function, uptake, and purpose in classroom discourse. There is no single set of teaching behaviors that is associated with dialogism. Rather, teachers can achieve dialogic discourse in their classrooms through attention to underlying instructional stance.
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Abstract
This article connects the pedagogy of the multimajor professional writing (MMPW) course with two important contemporary discussions in composition studies: the pedagogy called writing about writing (WAW) and the conversation about the transferability of rhetorical knowledge from school to work. We argue that the capaciousness of the WAW approach accommodates the best of genre-based and client-based pedagogies for the MMPW course and provides a framework for expanding the course beyond skill-based outcomes to include preparing students to be learning transformers. The article includes two iterations of what a writing about writing–professional writing (WAW-PW) course can look like.
January 2015
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Abstract
This study examines an ethnographically-collected set of social media posts from 5 applications in order to understand the rhetorical functions of something we call "metacommunicative" hashtags (e.g., #PackersGottaWinThisOne, #thisweddingisawesome). Through a process of inductive analysis, we identified recurring genre functions that are both context-specific to applications' ecologies and, at the same time, "stabilized enough" (Schryer, 1993, p. 204) to warrant the use of rhetorical genre theory as a tool for understanding their communicative purposes
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Abstract
ABSTRACT Through examining Jarena Lee’s employment of hymns in her spiritual autobiography, The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, a Coloured Lady, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel, I demonstrate how hymnody, a largely understudied literary genre in rhetorical studies, proved a critical instrument in authenticating her spiritual conversion and validating her qualifications to serve as a ministerial leader. Using Chaim Perelman’s concept of “presence” and recent research in neuroscience (on the brain and music) I show how Lee’s excerpts of the nineteenth century’s most popular hymns create an aural ambience reminiscent of a worship service that engages her Christian readers’ pathos and sense of piety in order to disengage their prejudice against her race and gender.
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Abstract
This article pilots a study in statistical genre analysis, a mixed-method approach for (a) identifying conventional responses as a statistical distribution within a big data set and (b) assessing which deviations from the conventional might be more effective for changes in audience, purpose, or context. The study assesses pharmaceutical sponsor presentations at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) drug advisory committee meetings. Preliminary findings indicate the need for changes to FDA conflict-of-interest policies.
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Abstract
As more and more multimodal projects emerge through writing program curricula, and as community literacy projects redefine what it means to facilitate change and reciprocity through generating multiple texts for multiple audiences, we think it would be useful to consider the significance and prevalence of the selfie as a genre, particularly in regard to its potential power to inspire social activism and critical consciousness.
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Toward a Typology of Activities: Understanding Internal Contradictions in Multiperspectival Activities ↗
Abstract
Professional writing scholars have often turned to activity theory (AT) as a rich framework for describing and theorizing human activity. But AT-based studies typically emphasize the uniqueness of activities rather than examining how certain types of activities share configurations. Consequently, these analyses often miss the chance to examine activities’ internal contradictions that are a result of interference between different configurations of activity. This article argues that a typology of activities can deepen our understanding of these internal contradictions. Drawing from a range of literature, it describes the general characteristics of different types of activities, providing examples from other AT-based studies. It concludes by discussing how this typology can help such studies to better analyze internal contradictions in activities.
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Abstract
Science reporting in the media often involves contested issues, such as, for example, biotechnology, climate change, and, more recently, geoengineering. The reporter’s framing of the issue is likely to influence readers’ perception of it. The notion of framing is related to how individuals and groups perceive and communicate about the world. Framing is typically studied by means of content analysis, focusing primarily on the “stories” told about the issue. The current article, on the other hand, springs from an interest in writer behavior. I wish to investigate how news writers strategically exploit their rhetorical competence when reporting on contested issues, and I argue that text linguistics represents a fruitful approach to studying this process. It is suggested that genre features may serve as a basis for identifying key framing locations in the text, and that the notion of evaluation plays an important part in writers’ framing activity. I discuss these aspects through a case study involving six news reports on a geoengineering experiment.
2015
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Unblocking Occluded Genres in Graduate Writing: Thesis and Dissertation Support Services at North Carolina State University ↗
Abstract
In 2013, the Graduate School at North Carolina State University launched Thesis and Dissertation Support Services, a rhetorical, genre-based approach to assisting students with their graduate writing. Through a description of the program’s founding, goals, and first year of services, we summarize this genre-based approach that is informed by the work of Carolyn Miller, John Swales, Charles Bazerman, and Michael Carter. The goal of the program is to offer services to students writing theses and dissertations that will improve the quality of the work, increase degree completion rates, reduce time to degree, and, above all, develop life-long scholarly writers who are prepared to undertake the writing necessary to be successful in their careers. The theoretical concept of genre system provided a conceptual basis for achieving these connected goals, and each of the workshops, seminars, or other events that we host focuses on a single genre, a genre system, or subgenres related to graduate education. This profile describes our approach to the services through a description of our institutional context, core offerings, and a summary of reflections and lessons learned after a year of offering these services, concluding with recommendations for other writing program professionals who may want to establish similar support for graduate students and a summary of changes to our program after one year.
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Abstract
This program profile explains and illustrates a pedagogical application of Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) to a one-semester, upper-division online Professional Writing course. We explain our use of a heuristic, which we liken to “night-vision goggles,” that enables students to systematically analyze field data that they gather from a participating worksite. We adapt an RGS methodology developed by Anthony Paré and Graham Smart to create our course heuristic and add a more explicit framework for investigating concepts of genre set, genre system, and activity system. We argue that our course design addresses transfer concerns by helping students develop meta-awareness, or specifically critical genre awareness, that they can then apply to future workplace writing situations.
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The Development of Disciplinary Expertise: An EAP and RGS-informed Approach to the Teaching and Learning of Genre at George Mason University ↗
Abstract
In the U.S., international enrollment trends have increased the pedagogical imperative to address multilingual graduate student writers’ linguistic needs/growth in the process of their developing disciplinary expertise. In the context of this internationalization effort, what can two disciplines—Applied Linguistics and Composition—constructively offer in terms of a pedagogical approach to address such growing institutional demands? With regard to the various ways in which these disciplines approach the teaching and learning of disciplinary expertise, what might a research-informed English for Academic Purposes (EAP)/Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) curriculum arc look like and how might multilingual graduate writers respond to such an integrated pedagogical trajectory? Further, to what extent might such a curriculum be able to balance evolving student needs and institutional expectations for students’ linguistic development? This program profile examines the potential of Tardy’s 2009 model for building genre knowledge among a specific student population: first-year multilingual international graduate students enrolled in a "bridge" program at George Mason University. In addition to describing the practical work of enacting Tardy’s model at the program and course levels, the authors detail the results of a related study aimed at exploring students’ development of genre knowledge over the course of the bridge year. Results point to the complexity of designing and implementing an EAP/RGS-informed course structure which values the intersectional nature of disciplinary knowledge development and suggest the need for such an approach to explicitly foreground the visibility of language teaching, learning, and assessment in order to ease student anxiety around both language and genre development.
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Abstract
This article presents and illustrates a qualitative research methodology for studies of uptake. It does so by articulating a theoretical framework for qualitative investigations of uptake and detailing a research study designed to invoke and capture students’ uptakes in a first-year writing classroom. The research design sought to make uptake visible by disrupting habitual uptakes and encouraging students to design their own uptakes. The study employed the qualitative research methods of observation, survey, interview, and text analysis to uncover uptake processes and influential factors that inform them. Ultimately, this article argues that a disruptive methodology can provide much needed insight into how individuals take up texts and make use of their discursive resources.
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Abstract
In this article, I challenge the scholarly consensus that suggests students only rarely forge meaningful connections between the genres they compose in different domains of writing (Reiff and Bawashi; Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak). I argue that the genre and domain categories composition researchers have imposed through data collection and analysis account for at least some of what has been identified as students’ inability to articulate how they transfer prior knowledge. When four focus groups and ten college juniors and seniors were interviewed and prompted to compare and contrast their own writing from various contexts, they forged idiosyncratic, action-oriented metageneric connections that are not limited by domains. My data, illustrated here by close discussions of four of these students, suggests that this student-driven metagenre-invention process may have three benefits for students, teachers, and researchers: it enables students to access prior genre knowledge that they may not have otherwise considered relevant; it enables students to re-envision their goals as writers; and it offers researchers and teachers insight into ways we might foster transfer by attending to students’ idiosyncratic metageneric connections.
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Abstract
This article situates one possible future for rhetorical genre studies (RGS) in the translingual, multimodal composing practices of linguistically diverse composition students. Using focus group data collected with L1 (English as a first language) and L2 (English as a second language) students at two large public state universities, the researcher examines connections between students’ linguistic repertoires and their respective approaches to multimodal composition. Students at both universities took composition courses that incorporate rhetorical genre studies approaches to teaching writing in conventional print and multimodal forms. Findings suggest L2 students exhibit advanced expertise and rhetorical sensitivity when layering meaning through multimodal composition. This expertise comes in part from L2 students’ experiences combining and crossing various modes when they cannot exclusively rely on words to communicate in English. Through this evidence, the researcher argues the translingual practices of L2 students can bridge connections and help develop pedagogical applications of multimodality and RGS, primarily by helping writing instructors teach genres as fluid and socially situated. In addition, the researcher presents a methodology for analyzing the embodied practices of composition students, which can further expand how genres are theorized and taught in composition courses.
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Abstract
Since Carolyn Miller’s Genre as Social Action, North American Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) has facilitated analysis of how typified rhetorical actions constitute the contexts and communities in which writers write. In first-year writing (FYW) specifically, RGS approaches have focused on macro-level textual constructs, like the audience and evidence expectations of different genres, and have bolstered valuable attention to genre awareness and transfer. In its attention to context and macro-level features, however, RGS has focused less on recurring linguistic patterns in written genres, which has contributed to two gaps in genre-based approaches to FYW: few large-scale analyses of first-year written genres, and little attention to language patterns in genre-based FYW pedagogy and research. This article aims to interrogate these gaps and offer a way beyond them, in three parts. First, it historicizes the institutional separation of U.S. rhetoric-composition and linguistics. Second, it outlines recent pedagogical genre research in RGS and English for Academic Purposes (EAP), which together offer valuable insights for approaches to FYW. Finally, it delineates selected observations from a context-informed corpus linguistic analysis of 19,463 FYW argumentative essays that draws on both RGS and EAP genre traditions. The analysis highlights rhetorical cues of the essay prompts (often absent in EAP corpus linguistic research) alongside shared linguistic patterns (often absent in RGS studies). The analysis likewise outlines overall patterns that distinguish FYW from published academic writing. The article closes with implications for pedagogy, research, and assessment.
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Abstract
Traditional Rhetorical Genre Study (RGS) methods are not well adapted to study exclusion because excluded information and people are typically absent from the genre, and some excluded information is simply unrelated to the genre because of genre conventions or social context. Within genre-based silences, how can scholars differentiate between an item of silenced information that suggests exclusionary practices and another item that is unrelated to the genre? This article serves as an example of how augmenting RGS with rhetorical listening and silence can benefit our pedagogy, research, and practice. Incorporating exclusion gives a more complete understanding of a genre’s social action and responds to cross-cultural issues with genre practices. To illustrate the benefits of this combination, the article draws from the researcher’s ongoing inquiry into the construct of the “well-rounded individual” that has become routinized in the U.S. résumé and cover letter.
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Abstract
Rhetorical Genre Studies has noted the importance of emotion to the study of genre, focusing on how writers’ attitudes and dispositions influence their perception of a genre. To continue to validate emotions as part of the experience of creating and shaping genres, this study traces the emotional valences of one writer, “Jocelyn,” in shaping the genre of a sorority recruitment video, a genre of media used in sororities nationwide to showcase the sorority in a desirable way. Analyzing an interview with Jocelyn and coding the images in Jocelyn’s video and her model text for their rhetorical function suggests that Jocelyn replicated the rhetorical aims of her model text but selected certain images that were emotionally resonant for her and her group. Jocelyn is inspired to shape the genre to the extent that she finds the existing genre emotionally inadequate and emotionally inauthentic to represent her group. Jocelyn’s video “remakes” herself and her friends as “sorority girls,” but also “remakes” the sorority in a way that’s both palatable and emotionally authentic for her. I suggest the metaphor of “settling in” to genre to represent the embodied feedback loop writers use when they take up a new genre and unpack this metaphor for explaining the role of emotion in genre pedagogy.
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Metagenre on the WPA-L: Transitional Threads as Nexus for Micro/Macro-level Discourse on the Dissertation ↗
Abstract
In Carolyn Miller’s Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre, she revisits her assertion that genres are cultural artifacts and questions the nature of the relationship between micro-level, individual speech acts, and macro-level genres and systems. To demonstrate this relationship, I analyze meta-genre accounts of the dissertation posted on the Writing Program Administrator (WPA) listserv, a forum for Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). Within this discourse, I identify transitional threads —moments when the discussion shifts, which show the relationship between micro- and macro-level interaction on the listserv as well as constructions of the dissertation within Writing Studies. CMC highlights how micro-level speech acts aggregate and are impacted by macro-level culture, and it showcases the heterogeneity inherent in the rhetorical community of the listserv.
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“The Fact That I Could Write About It Made Me Think It Was Real”: An Interview with Carolyn R. Miller ↗
Abstract
In this interview, Carolyn Miller describes the origins and struggle to bring to publication her now-landmark article Genre as Social Action (1984) and its subsequent uptake as a powerful explanatory construct across many disciplines. Readers will also find an account of the fall—and subsequent resurrection—of interest in genre in rhetorical and communication studies as well as thoughts on a research agenda for new scholars in genre studies.
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Abstract
Two-course writing sequences are valuable because they extend the time that students spend focused on developing as writers and researchers, yet they cannot rely on a “more is better” argument to justify their ongoing implementation, especially when general education curricula are shrinking and one course often looks much the same as the other. This program profile describes how West Virginia University is adopting a proactive stance on preserving and advocating for two-course writing sequences by recasting its second, sophomore-level course as an essential building block in the formation of undergraduate research identities. By combining axiologies of research identities with those of genre, metagenre, and metadisciplines, the program at West Virginia University is reshaping and repositioning its writing curriculum to more adequately address the diverse needs of students on pathways to many different disciplines.
December 2014
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Abstract
In The Rhetoric of Science rhetorical concepts can the persuasive work of scientific arguments Communicating Science the history of the scientific article as a genre, showing how it evolved in length, style through the nineteenth centuries Insight, with Harmon, communication and argues for the salience of visual modes of persuasion in scientifi illustrate Gross's mastery of different scholarly methodologies, from the theoretically and visuals, to the comparison of tactics across several works, to the compilation of large databases statistically sampled.Altogether Alan Gross's body of work, including seminal articles and significant anthologies, has established the field of the rhetoric of science and given it methods and a trajectory.No one after him has had to take this ground.The study presented here It applies classical analysis; it looks at historical practices texts as the initiating and formative precursors of later practices; and it considers visual persuasion.The particular case the renewal of botany in the sixteenth century and examined is how forms discourse arts of the time
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Abstract
Reading response holds a prominent place in the English language arts curriculum. Despite its importance, few studies have explored students’ performance on the task from a linguistic perspective. This article examines a random sample of reading responses generated by students enrolled in a middle school online language arts course using a genre-specific tool that addresses content, logic, stance, and engagement. Results from the linguistic analysis show that the adolescents’ responses typically focused on personal feelings, story retelling, and character analysis, with little evidence of thematic interpretation. This finding is discussed in light of the current literature on response writing and language arts pedagogy.
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Component Content Management and Quality of Information Products for Global Audiences: An Integrative Literature Review ↗
Abstract
Research problem: For many organizations, high-quality technical information products for global audiences are becoming an increasingly important part of doing business. Component content management attempts to facilitate the creation of such information products. A growing number of technical communication groups are adopting the strategies, standards, and technologies of component content management. This integrative literature review examines the impacts of component content management on the quality of multilingual information products. Research questions: How are the impacts of component content management on multilingual quality conceptualized? How do best practices address the impacts of component content management on multilingual quality? Literature review: Two divides characterize component content management and multilingual quality. The divide between the academy and industry is marked by different levels of interest in quality, particularly its practical aspects. The divide between technical communication and technical translation and localization is defined by the lack of communication between the representatives of each field that leads to a narrower understanding of multilingual quality. Therefore, a comprehensive picture of the impacts of component content management on multilingual quality requires combining the perspectives of scholarly and industry authors in technical communication and technical translation and localization. Activity Theory provides an approach for bridging the divides and creating such a comprehensive picture. Methodology: To provide such a comprehensive picture, I systematically reviewed literature sources on component content management and multilingual quality in scholarly and trade sources in technical communication and technical translation and localization, then classified all selected publications by their relationships to the research questions, themes within them, and characteristics of the source. Results and conclusions: Contradictory conceptual understandings exist on the impacts of component content management on multilingual quality. While some sources praise benefits of component content management, particularly increased consistency and the promise to provide additional adaption possibilities, other sources focus on the challenges of using it, especially a lack of context, text segmentation, and human resources. Although best practices offer some suggestions for overcoming these challenges, the suggestions do not resolve them sufficiently and do not reconcile the contradiction between consistency and adaptation of information products based on the different expectations of audiences around the globe. This study is limited by the fact that it primarily focused on English language publications. Future research needs to be conducted collaboratively by stakeholders in academia and industry and from technical communication and technical translation and localization.
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Abstract
Background: Online, informative videos are a popular genre of technical communication but little information is available for instructors to integrate the genre into technical communication courses. Research questions: (1) What are the logistics, considerations, and problems encountered when assigning authentic informative videos in introductory technical writing service courses? (2) Is an authentic informative video project in introductory technical writing service courses an effective learning assignment from the students' perspectives? Situating the case: Video has been discussed in technical communication literature since the 1970s and our discussion of video parallels technology development making video production and viewing possible for mainstream consumers. Recently, a revitalization of interest in video (particularly since 2012) reflects widespread adoption of smart phones with video recording capabilities, preinstalled and relatively simple video production applications on computers, video-sharing websites (YouTube), and high-speed internet connections enabling rapid video downloads by viewers. Yet, low-cost and easy-to-use communication technologies are often associated with the idiosyncratic application of design features and often do not transfer into effective communication. We often claim that technical communication programs are well situated to take a “leadership role” in mastering a new communication technology but our instruction of video has not kept pace with the rapidly evolving technology nor is it necessarily consistent with our own research findings. How this case was studied: In this experience report, I took a teacher-researcher role and triangulated my personal observations with a student-perception questionnaire and other student reflections on the assignment. About the case: The informative video project was used in a junior-level, introductory technical communication service course. The informative video assignment was an experiential learning assignment in which students worked in small teams to develop “real-world” communications for a peer audience. The learning objectives emphasized in the project include genre analysis, audience analysis, scriptwriting, visual-verbal communication, video production and technology, and project management and teamwork. Results: The logistics and considerations for developing informative videos in technical communication courses are discussed and student feedback reveals that this assignment was particularly useful for teaching audience analysis, technology skills, verbal-visual synergy of communication channels, and teamwork. Conclusions: Informative videos are a challenging project but offer a unique opportunity to examine audience analysis and teach verbal-visual parallelism. Furthermore, the equipment and production software are no longer barriers to assigning the project in technical communication courses.
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Abstract
Reviewed are: Singing School: Learning to Write (and Read) Poetry by Studying with the Masters by Robert Pinsky; reviewed by Rob Wallace Basic Skills Education in Community Colleges: Inside and Outside of Classrooms by W. Norton Grubb with Robert Gabriner; reviewed by Keith Kroll Rhetorical Strategies and Genre Conventions in Literary Studies: Teaching and Writing in the Disciplines by Laura Wilder; reviewed by Abigail Montgomery
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Feature: The Poetic and the Personal: Toward a Pedagogy of Social Equity in English Language Learning ↗
Abstract
In this essay, two poets who have taught language learners in the United States and abroad argue for the use of personal writing, preferably poetry from students’ home cultures, as a bridge to writing in academic genres.
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Abstract
Preview this article: From the Editor: A Mixed Genre—Locations of Writing; (Another Beginning), Another Farewell, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/66/2/collegecompositionandcommunication26214-1.gif
November 2014
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Abstract
Abstract In systems of meaning that run on a regular setting, allegory is about filling in the blanks that disclose the “other story.” In the modern setting that Walter Benjamin tracked (back to the seventeenth century), allegory must turn significance out of the blank itself, working the blank as a turning point for drawing the reading onward. The “psy-fi” genre is the hub where bona fide science fictions, documentations of psychosis (memoirs and psychiatric and psychoanalytic studies), and tracts on mass psychology or psychological warfare, meet and cross over toward the evolution of new norms. Is it possible to construe a series of references in works of the “psy-fi” genre to Zeno's paradox of a con-test involving human and animal subjects as allegory of the test situation in which blanks secure the last or new step, which ultimately is taken toward mourning, the final frontier? Yes.
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Abstract
Traditionally, rhetorical theory has been defined as the study of human symbol use, which posits at the center of “the rhetorical situation” a knowing subject who understands himself (traditionally, it is a he), his audience, and what he means to communicate; indeed, this capacity to mean what he says and say what he means is, putatively, what distinguishes him as human. According to this very traditional approach, each of the elements in the rhetorical situation remain discrete—rhetor, audience, exigency, constraints, purpose, context, and message—and a successful outcome depends on the capacity of the rhetor to invent, organize, style, and deliver a message that will move this particular audience at this particular moment to some sort of action or attitude. Over the last several decades, the profoundly humanist and foundationalist (not to mention sexist) presumptions of this perspective have been challenged in various ways and to various ends by both continental philosophers and rhetorical theorists and practitioners.Decades of feminist scholarship has challenged the deeply sexist assumption that the rhetor is male, noting rhetoric's collusion with patriarchal and phallic modes, in addition to its accompanying complicity with racist and classist institutional privileges. That is, scholars have questioned the fundamental assumption that the rhetor is granted rhetorical agency precisely because of his humanity, which traditionally is associated with being a white, male property owner.1 Building on this critique, subsequent scholars have further challenged the humanist foundation of rhetoric by inviting our attention to the various ecologies that instantiate any so-called rhetorical situation, including material geologies as well as networked relations.2 Acknowledging how “the human” is indelibly networked in its relations to place, space, matter, and especially to technology and various media, many have theorized a notion of the “posthuman,” of a human that is fundamentally a technological construction or prosthesis.3This focus on the technological, on the networked, on that part of the so-called human that is arguably ahuman, has challenged us to consider in what ways human being is networked with “things,” with objects or technologies that are theorized to have their own rhetorical agency, their own ontological existence. The ensuing proliferation of “object-oriented ontologies” and rhetorics has proved a rich challenge to human-centric ontologies and rhetorics, inviting human beings once again to rethink the world and our supposed central relation to it.4Other scholars have asked us to think about the presumptive category of “the human” as the primal rhetorical being, investigating rhetorical practices of divination and prayer in relation to the dead and the divine.5 And still others have addressed the conscientious practices of forests, for example, as well as the communicative practices of the so-called nonhuman animal, including the intricate messages of chimpanzees and the mourning practices of elephants, to reveal the deeply humanistic assumptions that we hold, as rhetorical scholars, about communication and identification.6This special issue on extrahuman rhetorical relations aims to further a thinking of rhetoric beyond human symbol use. In the invitation we sent to potential contributors, we requested pieces examining how “the human” is produced through anahuman communications, but we left entirely open the range of potential approaches to our prompt; as a result, the responses published here are quite diverse. We did not, for obvious reasons, invite contributors who would simply challenge this prompt in an attempt to return to humanist notions of rhetorical exchange; therefore, you will note in each of these articles, despite their great diversity, an unapologetic push for us to move beyond traditional, humanist presumptions.We reproduce here a section from our letter of invitation (August 2012), which describes the general goals of the issue: The focus of this special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric is extrahuman rhetorical relations, including any aspect of the scene of responsive engagement with or among nonhuman others. It's true that traditionally rhetoric names a specifically human art or science, requiring at least one discrete human subject at the center of its operations. Even what the discipline of communication studies calls “extrapersonal communication,” which involves communication with a nonhuman other (an animal, a plant, a deity, a ghost, an object, a machine, etc.), presumes first of all a preexisting human subject who uses rhetoric to establish the connection. However, we aim to honor this weighty inheritance in the tradition of what Avital Ronell has called the noble traitor, inviting essays that take it up in order to expose its limits and presumptions.We invite, for example, essays that examine the ways in which “the human” is produced through ahuman or inhuman communications very broadly conceived; essays that attend to a generalized notion of rhetoricity—a fundamental affectability, persuadability, or responsivity—that remains irreducible to “speech” and symbolic exchange more generally; essays that interrogate the predicament of addressivity or responsivity in the face of (or among) animals, objects, deities, and the dead—but also essays that deconstruct the clean distinctions implied in such designations as “the animal,” “the object,” “the dead,” and “the divine,” that expose the ways in which these dangerous supplements are mobilized in the name of the collective noun “the human.”Our aim is to open a space for provocative reflection on extrahuman—rhetorical—relations, on what takes place at the dimly lit intersections of these three terms. We welcome a diverse range of theoretical and methodological lenses, from deconstructive, psychoanalytic, feminist, and postcolonial approaches to more familiar philosophical, rhetorical, literary, and historical methods of inquiry.It was not our intention to produce a volume that systematically covered every angle of our theme, leaving no remainder. We were not interested, that is, in finally wrapping up the nagging question of extrahuman rhetorics but in holding it open, in probing and pushing the limits of the anthropos, in part by zooming in on the relations that constitute the conditions for the appearance of the figure of “the human” itself.In the interview that opens the issue, Avital Ronell contemplates “places where there's contamination, where there are installations of the nonhuman, the machinic, the theological trace, the stall in, or even the stated impossibility of, constituting what counts as ‘the natural,’ ‘the human.’” She ponders the “equip-mentality of the anthropos,” the fact that “we're already equipped with receptors for drugs,” that “we're already made up of all sorts of apps and calling instruments and all manner of technological ciphers and chemical command centers,” all of which “require us somehow to break out of the humanist presumption.” This paradox of the living machine, what Elissa Marder describes in her contribution as the human's “primal relation to artifice, imitation, technology, rhetoric, and death” is taken up in various ways by each of the contributors here. The very notion of a living machine challenges the putatively clean distinctions between life and death, human being and technology, and—given the typical alignment of “the animal” with “the machine”—human and animal. If life itself is already machinic and vice versa, a host of prized presumptions are called into question, including those that situate an indivisible line between mortal and immortal life, the human and the divine.Marder offers Pandora, “first woman and first android,” as “a prehuman figuration for a nonanthropomorphic and nonnatural concept of the human that is, perhaps, still to come.” This extrahuman character, Marder proposes, becomes a figure “for what, within the human, challenges the possibility of defining the limits of the human.” An “animated artificial entity” bestowed “with special, technological powers,” Pandora is “not modeled after life but rather is the very model for life itself.” She both simulates divine life “(through language and representation)” and remains “inextricably bound up with sexuality, temporality, technicity, and alterity,” making it “difficult to decide whether she herself is alive or … merely an imitation of life, like an android, a robot or automaton.” Either way, after her “human life can no longer be simply opposed to death or figured exclusively as human.” Michael Bernard-Donals and Steven Mailloux describe the technics of a primal relation with the divine in terms of an unavoidable call (to or from the divine) that operates as limit structure, separating what it also joins. Mailloux offers a rhetoric of prayer, defining “angels” as the “finite, contingent conditions” in which it takes place, and Bernard-Donals explicates the ways in which the call from or of the divine initiates a violence that is constitutive of the human. Thomas Rickert also contemplates a divine call, linking Parmenides's sophisticated logical techniques not to reason but to revelation by examining this historical figure's dedication to incubation, an ancient Greek practice in which one sleeps (usually in caves, sometimes with the help of pharmaceuticals) on the ground in hopes of receiving divine inspiration through dreams.Laurence Rickels demonstrates in what he calls the “psy-fi” genre an allegorical link between standards of “normal” human behavior and “the maimed animal test subject” discussed by Adorno and Horkheimer. Allegory, by identifying or filling in the blanks “that disclose the ‘other story,’” turns “significance out of the blank itself,” Rickels suggests, “working the blank as a turning point for drawing the reading onward.” But “allegorical legibility,” he adds, “would appear to require the broken-down psychotic state for discerning what goes into the norms into which we are plugged.” Indeed, he shows that psy-fi presents test situations in which “blanks secure the last or new step, which ultimately is taken toward mourning, the final frontier.” Michelle Ballif, on the other hand, zooms in on an “originary mourning,” which she situates as the very condition for any rhetorical address. The relation between the living and the dead, the visible and the invisible (specter) constitutes, she argues, the “ethical relation between the self and the other, the otherness of the self, and the otherness of the other.” Writing is, for her as for Derrida, “the very graphic scene of mourning,” a mourning “of the self as other and the other as other” that overflows the traditional limits of “the rhetorical situation.”Cary Wolfe describes two types of finitude at the heart of the extrahuman relation: the finitude of embodiment that we share with all other living beings and the (also shared) finitude of our prosthetic subjection to language or to any semiotic system from which concepts and modes of communication are drawn, and so through which “extrahuman relations” are recognized and articulated to begin with. These relations involve a scene of address in which all the possible modes of comprehension and expression were “on the scene” well before the interlocutors showed up. In the case of relations with extrahumans, this “iterative language” or “meaning,” Wolfe notes, is required to “form a recursive loop that can braid together different life worlds in a third space reducible to neither—the very space of ‘relation.’” James Brown, Joshua Gunn, and Diane Davis also take up, in distinct ways, this shared finitude of prosthetic subjection. Brown exposes some of the “machinic roots of the rhetorical tradition,” suggesting that “rhetoric is a collection of machines (‘whatsits,’ ‘gadgets’) for generating interpretive arguments.” Tracing what he calls the “robot rhetor,” which would be any “entity that ‘machines language,’” he calls into question the clear distinction between human and robot.Gunn runs Henri Bergson's formula for laughter (“something mechanical encrusted upon the living”) through Jacques Lacan's subversion of the subject to suggest that laughter names “something lawful encrusted upon the living.” Language here aligns with the lawful or the mechanical (the “Symbolic”), and Gunn examines the way it “comes to bear on that nominal domain of human spirit that Bergson dubbed the ‘life impulse,’ and that Sigmund Freud referenced as ‘the drive.’” Davis describes this prosthetic subjection as a kind of “preoriginary rhetoricity” through which every being, to be what it is, marks itself off from the other in a gesture of self-reference, repeating itself to gather itself and therefore to relate both to itself and to the other. At least since Descartes, self-referentiality has been taken as the putatively indivisible line distinguishing “the human” from “the animal,” but Davis proposes that self-reference or autodeixis is not a specifically human power to disclose an ontological “as such” (as Heidegger wanted) but the extrahuman operations of an allegorical “as if,” which names the already relational condition for the singularity and functioning of any living being.We would like to express our deep gratitude to each of the contributors in this issue, for their willing participation, their thoughtful and envelope-pushing essays, and their patience as we pulled it all together. Thanks especially to Cary Wolfe for so swiftly accepting our invitation to write the response piece that closes the issue. We are profoundly grateful to Avital Ronell, who graciously agreed to sit down with Diane for two hours on a Saturday morning in New York City for the interview that opens the volume; as always, her insights are both provocative and far reaching. We want to thank those colleagues who generously agreed to review the contributions published here: Janet Atwill, Erik Doxtader, Daniel Gross, Debbie Hawhee, John Muckelbauer, Jenny Rice, Greg Ulmer, and Victor J. Vitanza. We are grateful to each of you for your time and for your immensely helpful feedback and suggestions. Thanks also to Sam Baroody, a graduate student in the Department of Classics at the University of Georgia, for checking Greek translations in two of the contributions published here, and to Eric Detweiler, a graduate student at the University of Texas, for transcribing the interview with Avital Ronell. And finally, we want to thank Jerry Hauser for inviting us to edit this special issue of Philosophy and Rhetoric—we are extremely grateful for your guidance, your trust, and your inspiration.
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Indirect Challenges and Provocative Paraphrases: Using Cultural Conflict-Talk Practices to Promote Students’ Dialogic Participation in Whole-Class Discussions ↗
Abstract
English education researchers have established that whole-class discussions can support language and literacy learning. However, few studies have provided examples of whole-class discussions in which students explicitly reference their classmates’ ideas in order to elaborate different, but related, perspectives. Research that has described students’ uptake of their classmates’ ideas has typically portrayed disagreement either as an obstacle to student participation or as a step toward eventual consensus. In this article, I offer a sociolinguistic discourse analysis of two conversations in which a preservice teacher encouraged her urban, 10th-grade students to disagree. My analysis demonstrates the positive effects of the teacher’s use of indirect challenges and provocative paraphrases—features of the African American sociable conflict-talk practice known as The Dozens—to promote collaborative disagreement during whole-class discussion. I argue that teachers can promote collaborative disagreement in whole-class discussions by appealing tostudents’ home-cultural disagreement practices, which may already overlap with argumentation practices valued in school settings. I call for further research into the influence of teachers’ and students’ out-of-school discourses on discussions characterized by collaborative disagreement—a practice that is essential to ELA curricula and to participation in a democratic, literate society.
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Abstract
While many adolescents in US school settings do not achieve basic levels of writing proficiency, new standards and assessments hold all students, regardless of academic performance history and language background, to higher standards for disciplinary writing. In response to calls for research that can characterize a range of adolescents’ writing experiences, this study investigated the amount and kinds of writing adolescents with different academic performance histories and language backgrounds produced in math, science, social studies, and English language arts classes in schools with local reputations of excellence. By applying categories of type and length, we analyzed the writing of 66 students from California, Kentucky, New York, and Texas: 26 English learners (L2) and 40 native English speakers (L1), of whom 19 were identified by school norms as lower performing and 21 were identified as higher performing. We found the majority of writing tasks adolescents completed did not require composing more than a paragraph. Exceptions were essays in English language arts and persuasive essays and reports in social studies—almost half of which were source-based tasks. In addition, considerable differences were noted in the rangeof genres and amount of extended writing produced among L1 writers with histories of higher performance in contrast with L1 writers with histories of lower performance and L2 writers. These findings are discussed in light of Common Core State Standards shifts and the implications they hold for content area teachers who teach adolescents with different achievement histories and language backgrounds.
October 2014
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Poetic Signs of Third Place: A Case Study of Studentdriven Imitation in a Shelter for Young Homeless People in Copenhagen ↗
Abstract
During a series of writing workshops at a shelter for young homeless people in Copenhagen, I examined to what extent the literary practice of student-driven imitation with its emphasis on self-governance and a dialogical approach can engage marginalized learners in reading and writing. I found that studentdriven imitation had the potential to engage different kinds of writers and that they adopted the practice with ease and confidence. In addition, I experienced that the residents’ preferred genre was poetry and that they generally sought a neutral space with low attention to social status, characterized by dialogue and a homely feel. This space is comparable to Oldenburg’s third place, and I suggest that poetry is a textual marker of this space. Reading, however, is free. —Quintilian (X.I.19)
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Abstract
Review Article| October 01 2014 The Multimodal Turn in Higher Education: On Teaching, Assessing, Valuing Multiliteracies Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres. Edited by Bowen, Tracey and Whithaus, Carl. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013. Lauri Bohanan Goodling Lauri Bohanan Goodling Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2014) 14 (3): 561–568. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2715859 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Lauri Bohanan Goodling; The Multimodal Turn in Higher Education: On Teaching, Assessing, Valuing Multiliteracies. Pedagogy 1 October 2014; 14 (3): 561–568. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2715859 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2014 by Lauri Bohanan Goodling2014 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.
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Abstract
In hospitals around the world it is common to find clinician researchers who play the dual roles of clinician and researcher. In major Chinese hospitals, the young generation of clinical doctors, especially those who hold a doctoral degree, is commonly expected to stay research-active. The study reported in this article was conducted at a major hospital in East China, featuring a group of orthopedic surgeons for whom there is an SCI-publication requirement. The study draws upon cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) to illuminate the medical doctors' boundary crossing between clinical and research activity systems. Based on analyses of observations, interviews with 11 research-active doctors, and 2 weeks of activity logs kept by three of the doctors, the article demonstrates how the doctors take the advantage of rich clinical data for research purposes and how they “squeeze time” for research.