The art and science of exploration: A study of genre, vision and visual representation in nineteenth century journals and reports of Australian inland exploration

Gattungsgeschichte und ihr Gattungsbegriff am Beispiel der Novellen

Genre analysis has become a prevalent approach in the linguistic analysis of various specialized genres. A concept of genre, emerging from literature, has received a broader dimension in the last decade, focusing on establishing recognized structures and language exponents of a specific genre in a particular discourse community. In addition, the expansion of ESP and the rise of subgenres in many rising professional vocations require users to have competence in the English language. In addition, language researchers need ‘to dig into’ the pragmatic context of genres. With this mind and resting on the concept of genre and discourse communities, the paper sheds light on how the genre analysis approach can be applied in teaching different marine electrical genres to students and future ETO officers. The marine electrical engineering discourse community is specific and relatively novel. In this paper, the focus is placed on seafarers, future electro-technical officers and the analysis of genres they utilize in their professional work on board ships. The results of the paper can be inspiring to ESP teachers involved in teaching specialized and technical genres.

<i>Genre Matters: Essays in Theory and Criticism</i>. Edited by Garin Dowd , Lesley Stevenson , and Jeremy Strong . Bristol and Portland, OR: Intellect Books, 2006. Pp. 178.

With the globalization, people communicate with each other more frequently and extensively. Whatever the oral or written form, the culture, especially the thinking pattern has a great effect on the communication. Language reflects our thinking and thinking can be expressed on different language form. Based on the previous study on different thinking patterns.

Reviewed by: Im Grunde ein Bild: Die Darstellung der Naturforschung bei Kant, Goethe, und Alexander von Humboldt by Michael Bies Sean Franzel Michael Bies, Im Grunde ein Bild: Die Darstellung der Naturforschung bei Kant, Goethe, und Alexander von Humboldt. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2012. 371 pp. This rich study provides a new and welcome look at the concept of Darstellung, a central linchpin of the aesthetics of the Goethezeit. Though philosophical and literary articulations of Darstellung have been dealt with in detail in recent decades by Winfried Menninghaus, Martha Helfer, and others, Michael Bies pursues a compellingly synthetic project that brings Kant, Goethe, and [End Page 270] Humboldt into resonance with each other in original ways. Specifically, Bies tracks the aesthetics of Darstellung and the preoccupation with the role of the image (Bild) in new knowledge production across scientific writing, in literary and philosophical exposition, and in Goethe’s and Humboldt’s experiments with visual images in their botanical studies. As Bies describes it, the model of an image that can manifest a holistic conception of nature in an immediate and vivid way—in contrast to a purely abstract depiction or one that manifests only the limited results of a single scientific discipline—served to organize much of the diverse literary, philosophical, and scientific output of the period. Along with addressing issues of central poetic and aesthetic importance, this study will also be of value for scholars working on the history of science and the popularization of science, as well as on media and performance studies. One of the benefits of Bies’s study is that he casts the aesthetic problem of Darstellung against the backdrop of the emergence of modern scientific disciplines. If the general trend of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is one of disciplinary Ausdifferenzierung, then for Bies the model of Darstellung serves as a locus of de-differentiation (Entdifferenzierung), which synthesizes aesthetics with modes of new knowledge production. Bies thus rightly treats discussions about Darstellung as a key site of contact between aesthetics and the sciences. This insight has far-reaching implications: for one, Bies convincingly argues that this model of Darstellung is at work in the popularization of science (commonly associated later in the nineteenth century with a model of Humboldtian science) and in the more general problem of the place of literary style in philosophical and scientific exposition. Additionally, Bies shows how the problem of intermediality (particularly the intersection of text and image) lies at the heart of modern conceptions of new knowledge production; here the interaction between text and image at work in Goethe’s botanical drawings and in Humboldt’s famous plates depicting plant geography overlaps with these authors’ synthetic visions of the natural world as lebendige Natur. Following the general Foucauldian thesis of the early nineteenth-century turn away from a “classical” Enlightenment model of abstract representation, Bies describes what he calls an epochal “Medienwandel von Text zum Bild” that poses the question of the interrelations of text and image, of abstraction and concretion, in new ways. The book opens with a detailed study of Kant’s theory of Darstellung against the backdrop of eighteenth-century poetics. Drawing on Klopstock’s distinction between lively presentation that accesses the imagination and intuition (Darstellung) and abstract, scientific presentation (Abhandlung), Bies shows how Kant’s concepts of Anschauung, Darstellung, hypotyposis, and aesthetic idea articulate an emergent aesthetics of the lively image. Indeed, he situates Kant as one of the crucial instigators of the aesthetics of Darstellung that would come to preoccupy Goethe, Schiller, and the Romantics. Additionally, Bies considers the extent to which certain features of Kant’s style lend themselves to be read as examples of Darstellung. Bies then turns to Goethe, exploring his work on botany and the philosophical roots thereof in Goethe’s engagement with Kant and Spinoza. Bies compellingly lays out how Goethe’s reception of the Critique of Judgement—and in particular Kant’s analogy between the work of art and the natural organism—influenced his botanical studies and his various attempts to formulate their results. He explores Goethe’s idea of the “naturgemäße Methode” of studying nature, as well as his aspiration to give the results...

Speech Genres in Cultural Practice

Popularizing, Moralizing, and the Soul of American Science

Constructing Whiteness: Popular Science and National Geographic in the Age of Multiculturalism Lisa Bloom (bio) In some arenas of mainstream science studies, all too often questions that explore the relation between scientific practices and everyday life, popular culture, economic relations, ideologies, and distributions of power continue to be deemed of little immediate relevance to the activities of scientists and thus are deferred, or even dismissed for methodological reasons. Take, for example, the following quote by Bruno Latour: After three chapters there has not been a word yet on social classes, on capitalism, on economic infrastructure, on big business, on gender, not a single discussion of culture, not even an allusion to the social impact of technology. This is not my fault. . . . It is because [scientists] know about neither [society or nature] that they are so busy trying out new associations, creating an inside world in which to work, displacing interests, negotiating facts, reshuffling groups and recruiting new allies. 1 Most of these issues never return as full-fledged objects of study in Latour’s work. Recently people have begun to recognize that what is involved here is not simply adding a new angle to the study of scientific practices, but rather viewing these practices as an interlocking dynamic, such that one cannot properly theorize, say, the production of knowledge within scientific practices without reference [End Page 15] to a range of critical issues, such as cultural discourses of sexuality and race. In what follows I examine the specific example of the intersection between science and popular culture in order to consider how science together with its photographic as well as cinematic record makes its objects within its own discourse, and the positions—national, racial, sexual—from which these discourses are spoken. I draw on various documents from the National Geographic, an institution through which American science and popular culture became identified together. 2 There is a whole subfield in cultural studies, an area called colonial discourse studies (in which I am situated), that has also only recently taken into account the workings of gender. 3 Although earlier texts in this interdisciplinary field, such as Edward Said’s Orientalism and Homi Bhabha’s collection Nation and Narration, have widened the field of colonial discourse in the past decade, what is absent from their theory is an understanding of the way that the politics of imperialism and nationalism are tied to broader questions of gender. 4 This essay makes an intervention by foregrounding [End Page 16] these connections in the way that it links recent scholarship on gender and ties these issues to those of nationalism, colonialism, and popular culture within specifically the U.S. context. It takes its departure in feminist scholarship’s interest in analyzing gendered and racial constructions of science, but in so doing it broadens the question of gender to include racialized models of masculinity and nationalism. I will argue that while recent work in mainstream science studies is challenging the entrenched view that science and visual representations are produced somehow “beyond” or “above” the social world, 5 it is also important to extend such recent analysis to include scholarship that takes into account differences of gender, sexuality, nationalism, and so on. Now, in confronting the legitimacy of other grand narratives, such as that of “science,” which have often silenced women and minorities, feminist scholarship has put emphasis on the issue of the “location” of the critic, as a pragmatic way to retain some grounding as the older, more universalizing narratives come under scrutiny. Adrienne Rich, for example, uses the term “the politics of location” to insist on the situated nature of experience. 6 Others, such as Caren Kaplan, use the concept of “deterritorialization” as a description of identity which is understood in relation to a territory from which one is displaced and with which one continues to negotiate, if only to dismantle it. 7 Writing more directly about the [End Page 17] field of science studies, Donna Haraway recommends that feminists work from their own embodied perspectives in order to produce what she refers to as “situated knowledges.” 8 These three women’s located analysis of the current workings of discourse has put emphasis on two important...

This chapter discusses the applications of genre analysis in translation research and training. Following initial interest in text types in the 1970s, genre analysis gained in importance since the 1990s as a consequence of, first, the application of discourse analytical methods and, next, of corpus linguistics to translation research. Genre analysis identifies distinctive features of genres, known as generic conventions, generic structure, and social, communicative, cultural, cognitive and ideological factors behind the use of genres. The main methods used in genre analysis in the past were qualitative but more recently quantitative, corpus-based methods have been used, especially to study lexico-grammatical patterns. The chapter discusses three major models of genre analysis, those of Biber and Conrad (2009), Borja et al. (2009) and Bhatia (1993, 2004), which offer a holistic approach. Translation-oriented genre analysis has focused on identifying differences in generic structures, conventions and expectations across languages and cultures (contrastive rhetoric, textology), as well as strategies for dealing with generic differences between the source language and the target language (genre fidelity, genre violation). Another important area of research invesitgates how genres affect the translators' decision-making process. Genre analysis is also of relevance for translator training, both in the process of ST interpretation and TT production. The internalisation of genre knowledge is an important component of professional translators'ability to perform effectively.

The nineteenth century was an era of spectacularization. From the fairground freak show to the World's Fair, the proliferation of popular exhibitions during this period attests to a fascination with novelty. Popular Exhibitions: Science and Showmanship, 1840–1910 argues for a renewed ‘emphasis on science as a resource, part of the repertoire of popular shows’ (p. 5) and in doing so presents the reader with an array of case studies that argue for the interrelationship between popular science and spectacle. This book is ambitious in its scope, taking as its cue the panoramic view of popular exhibition culture in the nineteenth century first presented in Richard Altick's Shows of London (1978). Like Altick, the editors view exhibitions as an intrinsic part of ‘rational entertainment’, recreations that sought both to amuse and instruct in equal measure.1 While museologists have demonstrated a long-standing engagement with the study of exhibition culture, more recent work in the History of Science has turned towards the detailed consideration of both popular science and the scientific showmen who were responsible for disseminating scientific knowledge to educated audiences. Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman's Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences (2007) explored the role of science in consumer culture, directing the reader's attention towards both the producers and consumers of scientific exhibitions. With a similar focus on both production and reception, the essays in this collection seek to explore the full spectrum of popular scientific exhibitions, sometimes bringing the reader into close encounters with ‘talking fish’, gorillas, and southern African Zulus, and at others exploring the ways in which new technologies and theatrical techniques were appropriated by scientific showmen to create innovative spectacles such as magical seances and public mummy unwrappings.

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.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to account for the genre characteristics of non‐linear, multi‐modal, web‐mediated documents. It involves a two‐dimensional view on genres that allows one to account for the fact that digital genres act not only as text but also as medium.Design/methodology/approachThe theoretical framework of the article is the Swalesian genre theory used in academic settings all over the world to investigate the relationship between discourse and social practice and to teach genre conventions to students of language and communication. Up till now most genre research has focused on the characteristics of “printed” texts, whereas less has been done to apply the genre theory to digital genres.FindingsThe article discusses the characteristics of digital genres, notably the media constraints that have a significant effect on the production and reception of digital genres and suggests an extension of the Swalesian genre model that takes the digital characteristics into account.Research limitations/implicationsThe suggestion for a revised genre model is not based on an extensive empirical study of various types of web sites. The observation is restricted to a limited number of commercial web sites.Originality/valueThe article proposes new insights into the concept of genre adapting traditional models of genre theory to web‐mediated texts. A revised two‐dimensional genre model incorporating media elements into the concept of genre thus takes account of the particular characteristics of the navigation and reading elements of web‐mediated genres.

Rethinking Genre Theory Film Genre: and Beyond, by Barry Langford, Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Barry Langford correctly contends that while has become an increasingly contested concept in scholarship, the film continues to dominate much of Hollywood's annual output. To add to his point, at the time of this review, the top-grossing films in the United States include two horror films, a sports film, an action/adventure film, a historical drama, two teen films- one a musical and another a college comedy-and, finally, an animated children's film. While genre theory has traditionally focused on the formation of such Classical categories as the Western, the gangster, the romantic comedy, the horror, and the combat film, the need for a redefined understanding of genre-one which accounts for the post-Classical emergence of the notoriously difficult to define science-fiction and blockbuster action that make up the bulk of multiplex fare every summer- is more necessary than ever. Langford's Film Genre successfully addresses this growing need by working through the question of how the academic and industrial concept of genre emerges, and convincingly promoting an evolutionary model that focuses on genre formation as a process rather than as constant and internally consistent. Instead of decrying the post-Classical impulse toward genre blending and bending as a threat to traditional notions of genre theory, Langford effectively demonstrates that these impulses have been a key feature of genre since the beginning of narrative film. Langford carefully balances his critique of the constantly evolving generic categories between two audiences. On one hand, he pitches his discussion toward students who might be coming to an understanding of genre for the first time, and on the other, he successfully navigates the various and sometimes competing assertions of genre scholars. More specifically, Film Genre extends and revises the expert's sense of genre by pointing to the prescient need to reformulate rigid conceptions of genre films as being only systematic, routinized, and internally consistent productions intended for mass audiences. Langford divides his book into three major sections. First, he traces the emergence of four Classical genres-the Western, the musical, the war/combat film, and the gangster film-and provides significant examples of how scholarship and the industry have shaped the ways in which audiences have come to understand the key signifiers of each. The second section focuses on what he refers to as transition genres of the horror and science-fiction film, clarifying how each contributes to the destabilization of the categories described in the first section. Finally, the third section explores contemporary post-Classical genres like noir, the action blockbuster, and other complex forms like documentary, the Holocaust film, and pornography in order to demonstrate how the mutability of generic form has been a constant and consistent feature of narrative film. Each chapter, moreover, includes a discussion that goes beyond Hollywood to explore how other national cinemas have treated the specific genres under consideration. Lastly, each chapter provides a case-study of a specific analyzed within the matrix of scholarly approaches employed by the author throughout the book, which makes Film Genre especially useful for students. Langford's approach to Film Genre allows him to successfully achieve the important goals of extending the pioneering work of genre theorists like Thomas Schatz, Rick Altman, and Steve Neale, and providing an accessible explanation of Hollywood's historical relationship with the genre film. Langford's flexible definition of genre depends heavily on reinvestigating the significance of melodrama to narrative film. Identifying what he refers to as the melodramatic modalities of genres, Langford's theory helps to clarify why genre films often fail to fully satisfy the rules of their form. …

This action research study investigates how genre theory can be integrated into the practice of a writing enrichment program and how the frameworks of Critical Discourse Analysis and Multimodal Analysis can help assess and improve both student learning and teacher practice. A multilayered exploration of teacher-student discourse in an urban public elementary school in the Midwest United States discloses the various ways in which the concept of genre is both successfully and unsuccessfully constructed among fourth-grade students. Grounded in sociocultural and genre theory, I define and develop a three-way understanding of the word genre: genre as a literary term; genre referring to the analytical tool used in CDA as developed by Fairclough; and Genre, referring to pedagogical theories which suggest that social purpose is at the heart of all text making and must be considered and made explicit when teaching about genre.

Academic attention to educational podcasts has grown significantly in recent years. However, to date, the concept of genres in podcasting is yet to gain scholarly attention. By examining genres emergent from a corpus of educational podcasts available online, this paper introduces the value of genre analysis to educational podcast research. It proposes three genres, named ‘The Quick Burst’, ‘The Narrative’ and ‘The Chat Show’. The three genres show both the versatility of podcasting for education and how genre analysis could introduce new ideas to the educational podcasting literature, including ideas about supporting deep learning in e-learning environments.