As a response to Wang Ning's proposal for world poetics, this paper makes a brief revisit to Earl Miner's work on comparative poetics in connection with his pursuit of literary systems before dwelling on the tenets and principles of Wang's proposed world poetics. Subscribing to Wang's position that all literary theories from different cultures should be given equal access to the theoretical body of world poetics, it takes genre studies as the point of departure and examines Wang's conceptualization (...) of world drama in addition to narrative theory as particular cases to explore the means of constructing world poetics. (shrink)

Forensic authorship analysis is based on two assumptions: that every individual has a unique idiolect, and that features characteristic of that idiolect will recur with a relatively stable frequency. Yet, a speaker’s language can change with age, affective states, according to audience, or genre. Thus, studies on authorship analysis should adopt the theory that while some linguistic parameters of an idiolect can remain stable, others can change depending on various circumstances. This investigation, which takes a constructional and functional-based (...) approach to discourse-level phenomena in idiolectal stability, analyzes cross-genre data produced by nine Mexican participants throughout a twelve-year time span. This study contributes to a greater understanding of the linguistic elements that survive genre effects and are potentially useful in both investigative and evidential forensic linguistic work. We provide a detailed description of linguistic features, their specific values, and context-dependent interpretation, keeping in mind the context of expert linguistic testimony, with its preference for methods which “employ linguistically motivated analyses in combination with quantitative tools” (Solan & Tiersma, 2004, p.463). Our findings show that idiolectal style tends to remain stable across genres and communication modes in epistemic modality constructions. Epistemic markers —specifically, markers indicating low commitment by the speaker (e.g., _no sé_ ‘I don’t know’) or expressing indirectness when introducing the illocutionary force (e.g., _la verdad [es que]_ ‘the truth [is that]’)— display idiolectal stability, as these markers seem to be the most effective in terms of allowing speakers to strategically manifest the extent of their knowledge regarding what is said. (shrink)

The blogosphere’s heterogeneity has significantly increased in recent years. Thus, the blog-as-diary approach has shown its limitations. Viewing blogs as a genre is also misleading, as it confuses medium and genre. Considering that the studies of blog genres still need further theoretical and empirical investigations, we propose a method to assess blog posts, understood as utterances, the minimal unit of a blog. We then conduct an analysis of two large datasets from 100 Brazilian blogs. Three reviewers read (...) and judged 5218 posts from 50 A-list blogs and 1527 posts from 50 non-A-list blogs, captured in a 30-day period. Posts’ compositional form, theme and style were cross-analyzed in and between datasets. Our findings lead to the conclusion that blogs in the A-list group tend to post more and stick to themes that attract audiences. Non-A-list blogs post less and focus on themes of interest to bloggers themselves, not necessarily hype topics. (shrink)

Narratives are everywhere. We tell narratives about ourselves and we make the world meaningful through storytelling. We position others through the narratives we tell and are positioned by stories told about us. And yet, while narratives have, of course, been analysed in critical discourse studies (CDS), including in one of its most popular approaches, the discourse-historical approach (DHA), this article proposes to go a step further by systematically integrating the concept of narrative into the core of the DHA. More (...) specifically, I consider narrative from the perspective of the concept of narrative genre. That is, I propose a focus on how meaning arises via the narrative genres of romance, tragedy, comedy and irony, i.e. through (modes of) emplotment. Such an integration does not contradict the DHA’s (and CDS’) focus on detailed textual analysis or reject existing foci, e.g. on argumentation, but recognises the centrality of the narrative form for social life and offers further concepts for empirical analyses. This focus on narrative genre contributes, furthermore, to the critical study of meaning-making by revising Jürgen Habermas’ Critical Theory and offering a novel integration of the latter into the DHA, thus providing a theoretically justified, immanent foundation for its critique. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Narratives are everywhere. We tell narratives about ourselves and we make the world meaningful through storytelling. We position others through the narratives we tell and are positioned by stories told about us. And yet, while narratives have, of course, been analysed in critical discourse studies (CDS), including in one of its most popular approaches, the discourse-historical approach (DHA), this article proposes to go a step further by systematically integrating the concept of narrative into the core of the DHA. (...) More specifically, I consider narrative from the perspective of the concept of narrative genre. That is, I propose a focus on how meaning arises via the narrative genres of romance, tragedy, comedy and irony, i.e. through (modes of) emplotment. Such an integration does not contradict the DHA’s (and CDS’) focus on detailed textual analysis or reject existing foci, e.g. on argumentation, but recognises the centrality of the narrative form for social life and offers further concepts for empirical analyses. This focus on narrative genre contributes, furthermore, to the critical study of meaning-making by revising Jürgen Habermas’ Critical Theory and offering a novel integration of the latter into the DHA, thus providing a theoretically justified, immanent foundation for its critique. (shrink)

The present studies investigate morality’s influence on aesthetics and one potential moderator of that influence: genre. Study 1 finds that people’s moral evaluation positively influence their aesthetic evaluation of an artwork. Study 2 and 3 finds that this influence can be moderated by the contextual factor of genre. These results broaden our understanding of the relationship between morality and aesthetics, and suggest that models of art appreciation should take into account morality and its interaction with context. [Unpublishable (...) 2010-2017.]. (shrink)

The introduction claims that there might exist an evolutionary bridge from possible genres in nature to human cultural genres. A sub-hypothesis is that basic life-conditions, partly common for animals and humans, in the long run can generate so-called life-genres. To investigate such hypotheses a framework of interrelated key communicational concepts is outlined in the second, main part. Four levels are suggested. Signs are seen as elements in utterances. Further, sufficiently similar utterances can be perceived as kinds of utterances or genres. (...) Genres are kinds of communication in a species' life-world. Utterance and genre are the framework’s key concepts. Both are seen as products and processes and as constituted by five reciprocal aspects: form, content, act, time, and space, the necessary elements to initiate and interpret communication. A model illustrates this integrative principle. Part three dwells with the idea of life-genres, and part four exemplifies and problematises how a chimpanzee’s ‘begging’ for meat, a fish’s nest-making, and kinds of birdsongs, could be seen as possible life-genres. The last, short part gives a brief summary, highlights challenges, and reflects over the framework’s relevance for biosemiotics. (shrink)

Dans son introduction à la collection Moving Words. Writing Dance consacrée à une analyse des évolutions de la recherche anglophone des années 1990 sur la danse, Gay Morris souligne l’héritage d’une historiographie « anecdotique, sans théorisation, et avec un appareil critique très rudimentaire ». Carol Brown confirme que l’histoire de la danse est fondée essentiellement sur l’écriture des « balletomanes » qui ont idéalisé le corps de la danseuse comme une entité anhistorique. Rattachée à un...

Regardless of the increasing research attention paid to peer-to-peer accommodation worldwide, our understanding of consumer experiences across different languages and cultures is limited. Extant research tends to support the view that consumer experiences are homogeneous, while overlooking possible cultural divergence across cultures. To fill this gap, this study uses a cross-cultural perspective based on genre analysis and cross-cultural rhetoric study to compare English and Chinese reviews about users’ peer-to-peer accommodation experiences in two popular platforms in China, Airbnb and Xiaozhu. (...) Through analyzing 584 online reviews, we found similar moves in both sets of data, including reviews about the accommodation and about the host, expressing feelings, and making a recommendation. However, we found significant differences in expressing these moves in communication styles. We found that there was a stronger sense of a close and family- like relationship between the guest and the host in the Chinese reviews, while English reviews stressed the importance of space and privacy. (shrink)

This book provides a fresh interdisciplinary perspective on genre and identifies developments in genre studies in the early 21st century. Genre approaches are applied to examine a fascinating range of texts including ancient Greek philosophy, Holocaust visual and literary texts, contemporary Hollywood films, selfies, melodrama, and classroom practices.

This study investigates the cognitive-pragmatic motivations for the emergence of a genre of health communication called Patient Decision Aid. It elucidates genre as struggle, i.e. how the emerging genre exemplifies various struggles on three strata: the difficulties facing patients, doctors, and health providers at practice level; the changes anticipated to take place at discourse level; and the tensions in the pragmatics-cognition-society nexus. Particularly illustrated here are five struggles that characterize changes or breakthroughs that PDAs are anticipated to (...) make. It suggests that the five struggles roughly correspond to five principles for genre theory proposed by Berkenkotter and Huckin, with some modification of the latter. It also illustrates that genre intervenes in the complexity between social issues and social cognition and that PDAs as a new genre involve restructuring, reshaping and redesigning the key discourse facets. Based on examples of Chinese-language PDAs officially released in Taiwan and on information from health professionals, policy makers, and PDA developers, this study contributes empirical evidence toward a better understanding of an emerging genre. (shrink)

The study of how languages differ in their portrayal of motion events has received much attention since Talmy provided the first detailed account of the phenomenon. Interest has extended from real, or factive motion, to imagined or fictive motion, and from there to metaphorical motion, in which experience in one sensory domain is understood in terms of motion. Studies of metaphorical motion have, however, concentrated so far on a limited number of sensory domains, principally vision, and drawn data from (...) a limited number of textual genres. The aim of this study is to identify the extent to which motion expressions are employed to express organoleptic sensory experiences, that is experiences of taste and smell. Drawing on analytical categories put forward by Talmy in his treatment of Satellite- and Verb-framed languages and on treatments based on Cognitive Metaphor Theory, and particularly the concept of ‘embodiment’, we investigate the variety and complexity of organoleptic Paths evidenced in two self-built corpora of craft beer reviews, one in Spanish, the other in English. We also compare the level of complexity evident in these sensory Path types with those of another, closely related, sensory domain: vision. The study finds, in line with related studies, that English has greater variety and complexity of sensory Paths than Spanish. A more unexpected result is the finding that organoleptic Paths are more varied and complex than visual Paths. This finding, then, may encourage us to reconsider Path complexity differences in sensory domains as a multifactorial issue and not simply as a cognitive-linguistic phenomenon. It is proposed here that external factors such as genre, or specifically, its communicative functions and linguistic constraints, coupled with the unique ‘perceptual landscapes’ created by each sensory modality, may transcend perceived physical boundaries of a Figure’s trajectory. (shrink)

Although using different labels, genre theorists from different traditions have generally given privilege to the communicative purpose, in this article referred to as rhetorical objective, as genre determinant. Genre analysts who have studied press releases in particular tend to share this view, but nevertheless categorize communicative events conveyed through the press release as belonging to one genre despite variation in rhetorical objectives. This article argues that although the press release may be seen as a genre (...) on the basis of textual form, it does not qualify for the genre label if analysed in terms of content and rhetorical objective. To substantiate my claim, I shall discuss a small corpus of press releases, all focusing on a specific biotechnological issue. In my analyses I shall discuss staging in terms of content as well as logico-semantic relations between stages, patterns of stage combinations and their linguistic realizations with the aim of identifying variation in rhetorical objective. (shrink)

This study uses the genre analysis methodology used in the English for Specific Purposes school, relying mostly on Bhatia’s and Swales models of genre analysis. Two hundred letters of appeal written by postgraduate students whose native language was other than English in a public university in Malaysia were included in the study. The sample included letters written by a variety of students from different language backgrounds. The criterion for selecting the corpus was the communicative purpose of the letters: (...) stating a request. The study analyzed the genre of the letters of appeal to identify the structural or rhetorical moves that existed in the genre. (shrink)

This study develops a biosemiotic framework for a descriptive phenomenology. We incorporate the set utterance-genre-lifeworld in biosemiotic theory by paralleling it with the Peircean-Uexküllean notions of sign, habit, and Umwelt (respectively). This framework for empirical semiotic studies aims to complement the concepts of affordance and scaffold, as applied in studies on learning.The paper also contributes to bridging Bakhtinian-Hallidayian-Habermasian views on utterance, genre, and lifeworld with biosemiotics. We exploit the possibility that biosemiotics offers to bring together hermeneutic (...) and phenomenological analysis. We relate these views to integrated levels in a systemic framework for communication. Signs are seen as inter-dependent construction elements in utterances. Repeated use of utterances in shifting contexts generates shared recognizable kinds of communication, or genres. ‘Life-genre’ is used in a zoo-communication context, to avoid anthropocentrism. Life-genre serves animals’ life-functions. Genres make up a systemic network of communicational resources, along with the related concepts of event, affordance, and scaffold. Utterance, genre, and lifeworld have five aspects, constituting an integrative approach to communication: form, content, act, time, and space. Semiosis and positioning are processes that connect aspects and levels. Levels, aspects, and processes make up the framework as a system.While biosemiotics supports a phenomenological notion of life-genre, in turn, this notion also contributes to the development of the former, bridging a gap between organisms’ sign experience on a micro-level and organisms’ phenomenal lifeworld/Umwelt. Comparisons of lifeworld and Umwelt reveal that, although not identical, these are sufficiently similar to be perceived as an overall macro-level for signs and communication. Starting from a construal of utterance and genre as dynamic, dialogical, and reciprocal, genre is positioned as meso-level, mediating between signs in utterances and the lifeworld/Umwelt level. We propose genres, understood as semiotic scaffoldings built through affordances, as an analytical concept to capture meso-level phenomena. Scaffolding is determined by both ongoing events and (pre-)available genres. Events are manifestations of these scaffolding processes.Identifying animal and educational communication as two particularly relevant fields for future applications, we compare key socio-semiotic concepts to the notions of sign, habit, and Umwelt. The notions affordance and scaffolding are particularly important to think of learning as continuous with adaptation.An overall aim is to broaden as well as finetune semiotic phenomenology as a platform for empirical analyses of communication. We conclude by exemplifying and summarizing how the framework facilitates this. (shrink)

Genre has been a critical issue in discourse analysis as well as in other disciplines. Based on a literature review of the concept of genre and taking judgments as one type of genre in legal settings, the present study provides a corpus-based insight into the nature of genre. The literature review per se reveals that genre has one typical feature of a sign, that is, being subject to multiple and alternative interpretations; in other words, (...) class='Hi'>genre as a sign may have various interpretants. The present study unravels the actual generic structures, distinguishes different types of generic structures within the given genre, and then defines the dominant generic structure of judgments in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China. This study also examines and contrasts the generic structure potential of judgments in each jurisdiction. In addition, the variation of Mainland China's judgments over time is briefly discussed. Comparing the generic structures of judgments among the three jurisdictions, as well as the structures of judgments in Mainland China over time, the paper argues that genre also has the essential features of a sign, that is, the characteristics of temporality and spatiality. (shrink)

The problem of political discourse genre specificity has been in the center of attention of Russian and foreign scholars, which is determined by the relevance of political discourse as a multidimensional object of study with its linguistic properties in particular. The ambiguity of principles for genre gradation of political discourse is linked to the variability of understanding genre proper. The definition of genre as goal-oriented text characteristics allows accentuating some genres of political discourse depending on their (...) subject content. Herewith, its distinctive feature will be the purposeful content of the utterance. Apart from that, the proposed gradation is based on the principle of considering political activity, which determines a person’s communication in a certain situation. In accordance with the above principles, we propose to differentiate between the following genres of political discourse: information genres; persuasive; invocatory genres; apology/repentance genre. The specificity of genres of political discourse is determined by the leading intentions of the utterance as well as the type of dicteme as a text thematization unit where speech acts are realized. For each of the proposed genre groups there are dictemes of different types where the subject content of the utterance is actualized. Propaganda as spread of a certain political ideology, views and beliefs can characterize all genres of political discourse. (shrink)

While the genre-based approach has assumed increasing prominence in discussions of writing pedagogy for diverse classrooms, little is known about how secondary school student-teachers understand and adopt genre pedagogies in the English as a foreign language writing class. Based on the data from semi-structured interviews and teaching materials, this study examined Chinese EFL student-teachers’ knowledge and use of genre-based writing instruction during the teaching practicum and explored the challenges they encountered in enacting it. The findings demonstrated that (...) teacher informants showed some familiarity with genre pedagogies, especially in terms of scaffolding the linguistic features and semantic patterns in the focused genres. However, they were generally confused over the connection between language, content, and context, and their GBWI practice scarcely involved the explicit teaching of the linguistic and semantic choices for a specific audience and context, which gave rise to some perceived tensions in the teaching reality. Further probing has revealed the complex interplay between Chinese EFL student-teachers’ professional knowledge, perceived difficulties, and genre instructional practice in the secondary school writing class. The study concludes with practical implications for the student-teachers’ professional development of effective GBA. (shrink)

This article examines genre as knowledge organization. Genres are fluid and historically changing categories, and there are different views about the scope and membership of specific genres. The literature generally agrees that genre is a matter of discrimination and taxonomy, and that it is concerned with organising things into recognisable classes, existing as part of the relationship between texts and readers. Genre can be thought of as a sorting mechanism, and genres are not only a matter of (...) codes and conventions but also call into play systems of use and social institutions. This article explores the history of genre analysis across a broad range of disciplines, including literary studies, rhetorical and social action studies, and English for academic and professional purposes. It considers genre theory as a framework for librarianship and knowledge organization and explores the use of genre within librarianship and knowledge organization. Finally, the article discusses the Library of Congress Genre/forms Terms for Library and Archival Materials which, itself an evolving and changing standard, offers a step towards standardisation regarding genre terms and the scope of genre categories. (shrink)

This paper examines Johann Ulrich Bilguer’s 1761 dissertation on the inutility of amputation practices, examining reasons for its influence despite its nonconformance to genre expectations. I argue that Bilguer’s narratives of patient suffering, his rhetorical likening of surgeons to soldiers, and his attention to the horrific experiences of war surgeons all contribute to the dissertation’s wide impact. Ultimately, the dissertation offers an example of affective rhetorics employed during the Enlightenment, demonstrating how bodies and environments—those “ambient rhetorics” made visible in (...) a text—can contribute to an analysis of genre deviations and widen the scope of genre studies. (shrink)

Preface LITERARY FORM, PHILOSOPHICAL CONTENT: HISTORICAL STUDIES OF PHILO- sophical Genres aims at a wide audience and is intended to be serviceable for ...

Not many studies have focused on the analysis of the rhetorical organization of a genre and the respective frequency of occurrence of moves and steps as they occur in a corpus across disciplines – particularly, with a complementary qualitative-quantitative approach. This article aims to become a step in helping to fill this gap in research on Spanish. In this way, the textbook genre, the occurrence of its rhetorical macro-moves, moves and steps and disciplinarity are the central focus (...) of this study. More specifically, in this article we seek to determine and to compare the frequency of occurrence of macro-moves, moves and steps in a corpus of 126 university textbooks across the academic discourse of four disciplines. We distinguish the major areas of knowledge as well as the specific disciplines. The main findings show there are differences between the occurrence of some discourse moves and steps across the texts of disciplines under study, which reveals a distinctive feature in the didactic component of textbooks. So we can infer that knowledge construction process through this genre is not carried out in the same way and that disciplinarity plays an important role in the diversifying organizational discourse patterns detected. (shrink)

Affect Theory, Genre, and the Example of Tragedy employs Silvan Tomkins' Affect-Script theory of human psychology to explore the largely unacknowledged emotions of disgust and shame in tragedy. The book begins with an overview of Tomkins' relationship to both traditional psychoanalysis and theories of human motivation and emotion, before considering tragedy via case studies of Oedipus, Hamlet, and Death of a Salesman. Aligning Affect-Script theory with literary genre studies, this text explores what motivates fictional characters within (...) the closed conditions of their imagined worlds and how we as an audience relate to and understand fictional characters as motivated humans. (shrink)

Philosophy is textual - it is written and it is read - yet today much of philosophy regards itself as a kind of science, sometimes reducing itself to a species of intellectual bureaucracy. It is important to see these qualities as having their own aesthetic. Even realism is a genre. The aesthetic of the empirical and the bureaucratic, the aesthetic of the rhapsodic and of the clinical... in each of these the genres of philosophy are as creative as they (...) ever were. They are productive of worlds, not only worlds of thought, but 'real worlds' enabled by the technological and other changes that thought has envisaged. This book explores genres through the history of philosophy, providing new ways of thinking about philosophical writing. Exploring a wide range of both European and analytic philosophers and their works - including Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Wittgenstein, Derrida and Rorty - Genres of Philosophy explores the reading and writing of philosophers who themselves read and write, revealing the textual relation to the history of philosophy. While the focus of the book is in aesthetics, Ferrell reveals that the interest in philosophy's writing turns out to be a metaphysical question. The question becomes one of evaluating the ontological basis for writing - its subject and its means of expression - within a world of thought which is presently captivated by a particular aesthetic, that of the empiricist. Presenting fresh readings of classic texts in aesthetics, and offering an original approach to the question of philosophical writing, this unique analysis will prove of particular interest to readers in European philosophy, the history of philosophy, aesthetics, and literary studies. (shrink)

Though not as widely studied as the Research Article, the abstract has attracted increasing interest among researchers over last decades. A number of contrastive or comparative studies of abstracts in English and other languages have already been carried out considering mainly the hard sciences and some soft sciences such as linguistics and history, however no cross-cultural analyses have been conducted so far between RA abstracts in English and RA abstracts in French published in the legal field. This paper seeks (...) to investigate genre variation and changes in frame sequences comparatively in English and French RA abstracts from criminology journals. Using a genre analytical approach to qualitative and quantitative data, the paper reports on two comparable corpora, i.e. English and French, of electronically retrieved abstracts from Criminology Journals published in 2014. The two corpora are composed of three journals per language, namely Criminology, Journal of Criminal Justice, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology for the English corpus, and Champ Pénal, Criminologie, Revue Canadienne de Droit Pénal et Criminologie for the French corpus. The analysis will be carried out following two main steps, i.e. a macro-analysis and a micro-analysis. In the former step, the corpora are compared by the analysis and discussion of the basic IMRD rhetorical move structure for the RA often proposed in the literature and the additional five moves model postulated by Dos Santos with the aim of investigating the linguistic and rhetorical variation in the abstract genre from a cross-cultural perspective. In the latter, we look at frame sequences combining forms of self-mentions and frame markers, i.e. personal patterns, impersonal patterns and locational patterns. Provisional results show that the abstracts under investigation largely follow the international conventions based on the norms established by the English-speaking international academic community. However, variation across the two cultures emerged from the linguistic realizations of framework sequences. Cross-cultural implications are discussed at the close. (shrink)

The development of genre-awareness is a key issue in legal translator training, as, according to research, semantic text comprehension depends largely on the recognition of genres/text types. Legal translators must be familiar with the rhetorical and textual conventions of legal genres both in the source- and the target language – the two code systems – to realise the communicative aim of the translation, and to be able to produce texts that are acceptable by the professional community. Consequently, in legal (...) translator training the development of intercultural competence has double implications: it refers not only to the ability to transfer between legal systems, but also between legal genres. The biggest challenge of translator training is to improve skills and competences effectively through a selection of texts that realistically meet the changing needs of the translation market, but, at the same time, can be successfully adjusted to the level of proficiency attained by students at different levels of the training. Drawing on both practical experience and empirical research, the paper attempts to present a methodological scheme for the selection and grading of legal genres and text types in legal translator training, taking into account some of the functional typologies, and several other relevant aspects. With a practical approach, the selected genres are introduced in the context of exercises aimed at improving genre-transfer competence and some other skills vital for legal translators. Although the presented scheme/case study has been designed for an actual 3-semester legal translator training where students have legal degrees, it is supplemented with further methodological guidelines so that it can be adapted to other legal translator trainings of any level. (shrink)

This article focuses on discursive regularities that can generally be observed in text corpora produced in similar communication situations (medical interviews, political debates, teaching classes, etc.). One type of such regularities is related to the so-called ‘discourse genres’, considered as a set of tacit instructions broadly constraining the forms of utterances in a given discursive practice. Those regularities highlight the relatively regulated, non-random nature of most of our discursive practices and epitomize the necessary constrained creativity of meaning making in discourse. (...) In this perspective, we suggest that the concepts of Thirdness and Habit, as theorized by Charles S. Peirce, can be fruitful in describing the role and importance of such regularities in our sociodiscursive life. More specifically, we believe that discourse regularities are ideal case studies if one wishes to investigate instances of predictability in semiotic (discursive) processes. Overall, we suggest that their study can be one of many research orientations through which a prediction-based scientific conception of semiotics could be applied. (shrink)

For sociologists, interpretations of cultural objects, whether grouped into genres or taken individually, are intermediate steps toward understanding more fully the contexts in which they are produced. This does not deny the satisfaction implicit in grasping the significance of aspects of objects themselves; I hope that the analysis I have presented lends viewing the Sangatsu-dō sculptures a degree of comprehension, and pleasure, not present before. The ultimate test, however, and the justification for undertaking any sociological examination of cultural objects, is (...) the usefulness of the resulting account in confirming or rejecting ideas about the social conditions surrounding their production. The important question in judging the appropriateness of examining individual objects is therefore not whether sociologists (as opposed, for example, to art historians) ought to concern themselves with such analysis; it is whether such analyses increase the ability of objects to serve as evidence in investigations of interesting social phenomena. My goal is not therefore to supplant generic analysis with a focus on individual objects: it is as possible to fetishize the study of the object as it is to ignore its potential. In fact, it is most useful to see the two approaches as complementary, making possible fuller analyses than each can enable separately. We would do well to take more seriously the benefits of locating objects in the contexts in which people deal with them most commonly: as distinct elements in more inclusive fields, in which meaning and appeal are closely tied to difference. (shrink)

This article maintains that African philosophy should consider those discourses that function as channels of important ideas in African cultures, without prejudice against their language and, especially, their genre. What are such philosophical discourses? This article starts from a case study, Swahili culture, and interrogates the communicative resources available to it to serve as vehicles of philosophical thought. The survey includes language itself, proverbs, musical performance (sung lyrics), metric and free-verse poetry, novelistic prose, theoretical writings, and translations. Based on (...) this spectrum of genres, the article ventures some general observations about the relationship of African philosophy to language and genre. (shrink)

In the present paper I sketch three genres of sociology of knowledge and trace their roots to Marx and Marxist literature while reconstructing two causal and one hermeneutic strand in this context. While so doing the main focus is set on György Lukács and György Márkus and their interpretation of Marx’s contribution to sociologically minded theories of knowledge. As a conclusion I point out that Marx-inspired sociologies of knowledge are more sensitive to the relation of larger-scale social and historical processes (...) than to the actual practices of knowledge production, and that recent developments in science studies tend to integrate larger- and smaller-scale sociological sensitivities. (shrink)

Dans cet article, Christelle Taraud revient sur trente ans d’histoire des femmes, du genre et des sexualités au Maghreb à l’époque coloniale. Mettant l’accent sur l’apport fondamental des gender, subaltern & colonial studies, l’article vise aussi à faire un bilan critique des avancées, et au contraire des absences et résistances dans un champ qui, au moins depuis les années 1970, est en voie de constitution. Au cœur de l’article, cinq grandes thématiques – colonisation, peuplement et femmes européennes ; (...) femmes européennes et femmes « indigènes » : une rencontre coloniale? ; l’orientalisme recontextualisé ; sexualités en situation coloniale ; et femmes, hommes et guerre en contexte colonial – permettent d’avoir une vision claire, quoique non exhaustive, de la production historiographique des années 1980-2010. (shrink)

Did Beethoven and Mozart have more in common with each other than Clapton and Hendrix? The current research demonstrated the widely reported Mozart Effect as only partly significant. Event-related brain potentials were recorded from 16 professional classical and rock musicians during a standard 2 stimulus visual oddball task, while listening to classical and rock music. During the oddball task participants were required to discriminate between an infrequent target stimulus randomly embedded in a train of repetitive background or standard stimuli. Consistent (...) with previous research, the P3 and N2 ERPs were elicited in response to the infrequent target stimuli. Own genre preference resulted in a reduction in amplitude of the P3 for classical musicians exposed to classical music and rock musicians exposed to rock music. Notably, at the pre-attentive stage of processing beneficial effects of exposure to classical music were observed for both groups of musicians. These data are discussed in terms of short and long-term music benefits on both conscious and unconscious cognitive processes. (shrink)

Genre analysis has been applied to a sizable body of linguistic studies on various text types. However, little attention has been paid to advertorials as an emerging hybridized genre. To identify the generic and linguistic characteristics of advertorials, and therefore to classify advertorials into an appropriate genre, this study carries out a comprehensive genre analysis of advertorials based on Bhatia’s seven-step genre analysis methodology. A corpus of 55 advertorials was collected from four English-language magazines (...) and two English-language newspapers, from which a sub-corpus of 12 samples was further selected for a thorough examination of linguistic characteristics. Attempting to gain a comprehensive view of generic features of advertorials, this study makes a critical comparison of advertorials with three inextricably related genres: advertisements, news stories and editorials. Linguistic evidence sufficiently demonstrates that advertorials share fundamental generic and linguistic natures with advertisements and proposes classifying advertorials as a sub-genre of advertisements. (shrink)

Is genre film comparable to a thought experiment?Revising concepts of determinism and agency in three film noirs The philosophical approach of film genres, first popularized by authors like Stanley Cavell, allows to consider genre films as narrative variations as pertinent to philosophical discourse as can be a traditional thought experiment, since every question on the essence of a genre and every discussion related to its inner functions, its mechanisms and its themes, generate naturally a philosophical discourse on (...) the way a director uses filmic and narrative tools to transform his intentions into a specific system of meaning. This study adopts formalist and philosophical approaches to connect the narratives of the movies to the discourses it is prone to generate. The corpus draws on the ‘primitive scene' in three films noirs, Out of the Past, The Lady from Shanghai et Criss Cross : the tragic meeting of an anti-hero with the woman who will be responsible of his fall. Indeed, the sequence showing this first meeting becomes an exercise in style where forerunning signs of the two protagonists' fall organize the writing and the mise-en-scene, and explicitly shows how questions of agency and determinism are intimately articulated to the narrative and formal frame of the movies. (shrink)

Until a relatively recent period, colonial history had focused on the study of the colonized, and, if some attention was dedicated to the colonizers, only the role men played in the process was deemed fit to require attention, thus arbitrarily assigning to the women of colonization contradictory features. More recent researches in women anthropology and sociology set out to analyze the image and agency of the white woman in the colonies. According to the ideological needs of the moment, as well (...) as the different challenges opposed to the colonial rule, supposed needs, wills, political and ideological features were ascribed to these women, including racism. A closer scrutiny tends to show that one could draw a parallel between the different ways racial problems were dealt with, and the definition of the role of women in the colonization, varying according to the different demands of the imperial project. This could be explained by the ambiguous status of women in this period of history : they were both subordinates in colonial hierarchies and agents of empire in their own right. (shrink)

Genre theory, as it has developed in the last forty years, has made use of what I call a constitutive concept of genre, a concept that has built into it the assumption that genre plays a central epistemic role in the interpretation of verbal discourse. In this paper I argue that there are theoretical problems with such a concept that have not been recognized and that make it unsuitable as a critical instrument in literary history and literary (...) studies. A fruitful concept of literary genre needs to be pragmatic with only a heuristic and not an epistemic function. As an example, the article looks at the criticism produced in connection with the picaresque novel and in particular at the account given of the origin of the genre, an account that could not have been given if one had employed a constitutive concept of genre. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to apply theEntrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model(EC-Model hereafter; seeSchmid 2014,2015,2016,2017,2018;Schmid & Mantlik 2015) of language knowledge to genre, with the aim of showing how a unified theory of the relation between usage and linguistic knowledge and convention can shed light on the way genre knowledge becomes entrenched in the individual and shared conventional behavior in communities. The EC-Model is a usage-based and emergentist model of language knowledge and convention rooted in cognitive linguistics and usage-based approaches. (...) It sees knowledge as emerging from language usage, and explains the processes underlying the intertwining of social practice and cognition. However, so far, no suggestion has been advanced on how to extend the model to account for entrenchment and conventionalization at the supra-sentential level. In the area of genre studies various attempts have been made by scholars to develop or apply theories belonging to different scientific domains to understand the nature of genre. However, so far, there has been no research that applies a unified model in the attempt to link entrenchment of genres in individuals to their conventionalization at the societal level. I largely focus on the long tradition of rhetorical studies of genre, one among the different approaches that, over time, have regarded genre as their main topic of investigation. I concentrate on this tradition as it opens up the entire field of enquiry that defines contemporary genre research. To these I add by showing how the explanations provided so far can be cognitively clarified and unified under the EC-Model. The paper, then, argues that the EC-Model is theoretically apt to address questions about the nature of genre, capturing in an elegant way the interplay between cognition and social interaction in genre emergence, evolution, stabilization and variation. (shrink)

This study compares the use of interactional metadiscourse in a British newspaper, the Daily Mail, and a British news magazine, The Economist, in reporting on the Brexit referendum. We adopted Hyland’s (2005a:48–54) framework to analyze hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagements, and self-mentions. One hundred news articles were randomly selected from online archives from February to June in 2016, during which time the debatable issue was discussed ardently. Quantitative and qualitative results of this study revealed both similarities and differences between the (...) newspaper and the news magazine in the use of interactional metadiscourse. For example, quantitatively, the frequencies of boosters in both genres were similar; however, the newspaper used much more engagement markers and self-mentions whereas the magazine used more hedges and attitude markers. Qualitatively, while most self-mentions were the same in both genres, a unique choice of self-mentions was found in the news magazine. (shrink)

Past experience with video games and cognitive abilities have been hypothesized to independently facilitate a greater ability to learn new video games and other complex tasks. The present study was conducted to examine this “learning to learn” hypothesis. We examined the predictive effects of gaming habits and cognitive abilities on learning of two novel video games in 107 participants. One video game was from the action genre, and the other was from the strategy genre. Hours spent gaming per (...) week and working memory were found to specifically predict learning of the novel strategy video game, after controlling for the effects of age, gender, and action game learning. In contrast, self-identification as a “gamer” was the only specific significant predictor of action game learning, after controlling for the effects of age, gender, and strategy game learning. Age of the participant negatively impacted learning of both games; however, the pattern of the predictive relationships on both action and strategy game learning was not moderated by age. Importantly, a preference for the action versus the strategy game genre had no differential effects on learning of the two novel games, nor were there any gender differences in identification as a gamer or genre preference. Findings from this study suggest that while past gaming experience and cognition do appear to influence the learning of novel video games, these effects are selective to the game genre studied and are not as broad as the “learning to learn” model suggests. (shrink)

On the definition of genre of Dostoevsky's works. The article mostly addresses Dostoevsk's own definitions of genres of his works, either explicated in the texts (subtitles, prefaces) or contained in the writer's letters; or rather the relationship between the scholarly strategies of defining genres and the writer's own view, as evidenced. by subtitles which, in some sense, are part of the text (in nearly, but not precisely, the same way as the titles themselves are). The writer's own definitions, then, (...) can be regarded as possible objects of the scholarly interpretation. Agreement, or lack thereof, between the author's and the scholars' definitions may be due both to similarity vs dissimilarity between the definition standards inherent in the respective epochs and to specific interpretation aspects. In the latter case, agreement is more cornman in studies focusing on vastly different problems unrelated to genre, whereas disagreement is more frequent in studies concerned with the genres of Dostoevsky's works. One of the reasons why his own definitions must be critically revisited is that certain titles of his workscan be basically viewed as subtitles or genre definitions insofar as they in some way define the variety of the text regardless of the underlying criterion: narrative, "discourse", type of source, genre, or genre variety. Indeed, both these subtitles and, sometimes, the writer's own genre definitions tum out to be pretense, an imitation of "standard" subtitles or genre definitions, respectively. Titles themselves sometimes look like subtitles, thus "exposing the device" and demonstrating this mimicry not merely by violating semantic and syntactic relations in the case of subtitles (sign/name/title/ subtitle and virtual reference/"reality" of text - and relationships such as those between title and subtitle; title and the principal text; and subtitle and principal text), but also by the fact that their position is "marked". Dostoevsky not just failed to follow his own "final genre definitions" within the text, as reflected in the subtitles, and not just changed them repeatedly in his letters, but in the official documents, too, he sometimes defined genres in a way which did not agree with either the subtitles or his own definitions given in his letters.Dostoevsky frequently changed the genre definitions not merely during his work on a text, which would be only natural, and not merely many years after it had been completed, published, revised, and republished (which might be ascribed to memory errors), but also shortly after the completed manuscript had been shipped to the publishers or after the text had been published or republished. While the logic underlying these changes must be studied and interpreted, it is evident that the scholars are often unable to accept the author's own "final genre definitions" both because these are often unavailable in subtitles, and because of the "Proteic" nature of their use by the writer in various contexts. (shrink)

On the definition of genre of Dostoevsky's works. The article mostly addresses Dostoevsk's own definitions of genres of his works, either explicated in the texts (subtitles, prefaces) or contained in the writer's letters; or rather the relationship between the scholarly strategies of defining genres and the writer's own view, as evidenced. by subtitles which, in some sense, are part of the text (in nearly, but not precisely, the same way as the titles themselves are). The writer's own definitions, then, (...) can be regarded as possible objects of the scholarly interpretation. Agreement, or lack thereof, between the author's and the scholars' definitions may be due both to similarity vs dissimilarity between the definition standards inherent in the respective epochs and to specific interpretation aspects. In the latter case, agreement is more cornman in studies focusing on vastly different problems unrelated to genre, whereas disagreement is more frequent in studies concerned with the genres of Dostoevsky's works. One of the reasons why his own definitions must be critically revisited is that certain titles of his workscan be basically viewed as subtitles or genre definitions insofar as they in some way define the variety of the text regardless of the underlying criterion: narrative, "discourse", type of source, genre, or genre variety. Indeed, both these subtitles and, sometimes, the writer's own genre definitions tum out to be pretense, an imitation of "standard" subtitles or genre definitions, respectively. Titles themselves sometimes look like subtitles, thus "exposing the device" and demonstrating this mimicry not merely by violating semantic and syntactic relations in the case of subtitles (sign/name/title/ subtitle and virtual reference/"reality" of text - and relationships such as those between title and subtitle; title and the principal text; and subtitle and principal text), but also by the fact that their position is "marked". Dostoevsky not just failed to follow his own "final genre definitions" within the text, as reflected in the subtitles, and not just changed them repeatedly in his letters, but in the official documents, too, he sometimes defined genres in a way which did not agree with either the subtitles or his own definitions given in his letters.Dostoevsky frequently changed the genre definitions not merely during his work on a text, which would be only natural, and not merely many years after it had been completed, published, revised, and republished (which might be ascribed to memory errors), but also shortly after the completed manuscript had been shipped to the publishers or after the text had been published or republished. While the logic underlying these changes must be studied and interpreted, it is evident that the scholars are often unable to accept the author's own "final genre definitions" both because these are often unavailable in subtitles, and because of the "Proteic" nature of their use by the writer in various contexts. (shrink)