Alternative Genre Research Articles

Genre as Reception: A Multidimensional Network Approach

Abstract A reception-oriented approach to genre will challenge the “objective” genre categories applied to the Bible by analyzing their culturally contingent place in the history of interpretation. It then gathers alternative genre groupings for the biblical texts from that history in order to comprehend the features of the texts more fully through the multiple ways readers have responded to their various capacities. This article incorporates conceptual blending and network theory with a growing reception-consciousness in biblical studies to develop a new three-dimensional version of the common comparison of genres to constellations. This new version communicates the value of a reception-oriented approach for appreciating the complexity of texts, biblical and otherwise, along with their readers’ cultural perspectives. The new multidimensional approach to genre that results is applied to the “Wisdom Literature” genre category as an example.

Sexy, slimy, monstrous: Infection as collaboration in Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth and Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia

This article offers a discussion of two eco-horror feature films, each released in 2021: Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth, and Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia. With a pandemic theme, both film fictions feature sentient woods and forests which infect humans with fungal spores. This is the non-human world enlisting human collaboration. Both films break the mould of the traditional eco-horror; invariably, the latter dramatizes how the natural world avenges itself on humankind. This storytelling mode involves the use of catastrophe narratives. Elizabeth Parker has explored the alternative genre, the ‘ecoGothic’ (), which stimulates ambiguous emotional responses to human–non-human hybrid forms. To date, there is little scholarship which analyses such hybrids through the lens of queer ecology. Therefore, I will bring Timothy Morton’s theory of queer ecology (), dark ecology () and his concept of the spectral non-human world () into dialogue with Simon C. Estok’s term ‘the slimic imagination’ (). My thesis is that both films engage an interaction between queer and slimic narratives in order to undo the catastrophe narrative. Queer slime is that which destabilizes gender binaries as a means of creating uneasy but intimate collaborations between the human and non-human world.

Impact of Short Story on the listening skills of the first year tertiary students in Indonesia

This study examines the effectiveness of short stories as alternative genre to engage students in listening practice. By employing quantitative approach, pre-experimental design was chosen to test the effect of short stories audio toward listening skills improvement. The participants of the research are first year college students of English Department in an Indonesian university. The phases in garnering the data was started with pre-test, followed by a designed treatment, and ended up with post-test to assess the effect. The result indicates that students' scores have increased after the treatment. The calculation of data with SPSS by considering Wilcoxon Rank Test results that there is improvement which post-test scores are higher than pre-test ones, which is 53.70 > 80.87, and the significance is 0.000 < 0.05. It suggests that short story is significantly effective for engaging students in listening practice and it further positively gives impact on listening skills. Therefore, short story could be an alternative genre used in the classroom as it possibly enthralls students to engage in listening activity.

Межкультурная коммуникация в транслингвальном художественном тексте (на материале цикла А. Жаксылыкова «Сны окаянных»)

The purpose of this article is to analyze the transcultural literary text as a space for the “meeting” of languages and cultures. The modern world exists in the conditions of global transculturalism (F. Ortiz), when sign systems interact, giving rise to new images of the world. The language, which translates into a wide communicative space the elements of the original culture for the author, experiences its influence on itself. The literary text acquires multidimensionality and “convexity” due to the inclusion in it of alternative genre forms, narrative strategies and tactics, archetypes. On the basis of the novel series “Dreams of the Damned”, written by the Kazakh writer A. Zhaksylykov, we demonstrate in this work the mechanisms of “internal intercultural interaction” between Kazakh and Russian cultures, using the methods of hermeneutic commentary, mythopoetic and narrative analysis. We come to the conclusion that cultural content requires the creation of adequate forms of artistic representation. The result is the creation of new novel forms of depiction, the complication of the artistic images of the world and the strengthening of the empathic effect that a literary text can provide.

The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic WorldFrom the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity

The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic WorldFrom the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity

Modulaciones narrativas experimentales en los cuentos de Los muertos, de Álvaro Bisama

Este ensayo pretende, primero, establecer algunos puntos teóricos primordiales para debatir sobre el “anticuento”, considerando, bajo la perspectiva lingüística y narratológica, su complicado establecimiento como género alternativo en su propia constitución y naturaleza. Más que notar textualidades reunidas bajo el nombre de “anticuento”, lo que este trabajo propone analizar, en su primera parte, son las diversas transgresiones experimentales que la narrativa ha tenido, sin que aquellas constituyan en realidad una ruptura de la estructura profunda del género cuento. A continuación, en la segunda parte se examinarán cómo los relatos del libro Los muertos (2014, reeditado en 2019 por DeBolsillo), del escritor chileno Álvaro Bisama, se aprovechan de dichas transgresiones, desafiando las expectativas del cuento tradicional a través de dispositivos literarios que pueden analizarse como patrones reiterados en su obra (la presencia de la cultura masiva o posmoderna como fachada; el uso de narradores falibles; la metaliteratura como ejercicio autorreflexivo, entre otros). Esto con la finalidad de determinar hasta qué grado esta experimentación estira los límites estructurales y genéricos del llamado cuento tradicional, produciéndose, en realidad, una focalización no tanto en las acciones, sino en los grados de trasformación interna de sus personajes y en la intención de dialogar con el contexto histórico y cultural.

Alternative Genre: Audience, Assessment, Awareness

Alternative Genre:Audience, Assessment, Awareness Katherine Cottle (bio) and Mark Hiller (bio) The following paper documents the collaborative project, Alternative Genre: Audience, Assessment, Awareness, recently incorporated by Mark Hiller's Biology 327: Advanced Genetics and Katherine Cottle's Writing 181: Writing Studies classes during the Fall 2017 semester at Goucher College. History: Spring 2017 The project was originally imagined at a spring 2017 semester CAST (Center for the Advancement of Scholarship and Teaching) workshop at Goucher College, led by Robin Cresiski, Director of CAST. The workshop paired professors of different disciplines for the purpose of reviewing, evaluating, and revising existing formal assignment sheets for clarity, depth, and recognizable goals within small-stakes and high-stakes semester frameworks. The pairing exercise proved successful and thought provoking for the majority of the participants, as the alternative perspective allowed for suggestions, views, and external recommendations that are typically unavailable within singular or closely related field settings. Katherine Cottle, assistant professor of writing in the Center for Contemporary and Creative Writing, was paired with Mark Hiller, director of the Center for Natural Sciences and associate professor of biology, for this exercise. During the exercise, Hiller and Cottle noted that two of their courses planned for the fall 2017 semester, Advanced Genetics and Writing Studies, would require alternative genre presentations of formal research projects. Hiller's Advanced Genetics alternative genre [End Page 323] presentation, entitled Lay-Audience Presentation, would be directed to a community outside of the specialized sciences, while Cottle's Writing Studies alternative genre presentation would be directed to peers within the course. Initial plans were made to collaborate on the alternative genre projects for both courses, specifically to provide an actual lay audience for the Advanced Genetics students' presentations: the Writing Studies students (first-semester, first-year, premajor students representing a wide range of educational backgrounds, interests, and experiences). Implementation: Fall 2017 August/September 2017: Early Weeks of the Semester: Establishing importance of External Audience and Awareness within Course Context BIO 327/Advanced Genetics and WRT 181/Writing Studies were notified in their individual classes about the collaborative alternative genre project to be completed/assessed beginning after the mid-semester break. Hiller and Cottle discussed the project in a generalized manner with their respective classes, highlighting the importance of audience and language in regard to research and accessibility on individual, classroom, field, and disciplinary levels. September/October 2017: Mid-Semester: Applications Mark Hiller presented the assignment requirements, and criteria for the alternative genre presentation to the BIO 327/Advanced Genetics class topics assigned to students included the following: Capsaicin, Autophagy, Circadian Rhythms, Serotonin, Dog Genome Project Porphyria, Monarch Butterfly Migration, Stem Cell Cancers, CRISPER, Biological Sex Determination (nonhuman), Li-Fraumeni Syndrome, Aging, Progeria, Autoimmune Disease, Gene Therapy, CDKN2, Biological Sex Determination (human), Telomerase, and Alzheimer's Disease. Assignment Requirements and Criteria for Alternative Genre Presentations • You will make a second presentation on the same subject. It will not be a traditional live presentation, but available to the audience online or as a physical object. In this presentation, your audience will be individuals who have not taken genetics. Students in a section of WRT 181 will review your work and help determine your grade for the project. It will also be available to the [End Page 324] Advanced Genetics class. The format of the presentation can include, but is not limited to, podcast, video, music video, epic poem, graphic novel, children's book, or comic book. You may suggest other avenues for expression, but you must have your presentation format approved. • The project will be graded on three criteria: (1) 10 points Scientific information and explanations must be factually correct. (3) 20 points The presentation must be presented at a level that a nonbiologist can understand. This will be a challenging aspect of this assignment. Pay attention to the vocabulary you use and the assumptions of prior knowledge of your audience. Assume they are intelligent (they are), but naïve about the subject area. (3) 20 points The presentation must emphasize the significance and importance of the information to a nonbiologist. The audience should understand why this research or study is important. Hiller proposed WRT 181 focus on (2) and (3) of the...

Crowdsourcing of information systems research

This paper addresses how technology-mediated mass collaboration offers a dramatically innovative alternative for producing IS research. We refer to this emerging genre as the crowdsourced research genre and develop a framework to structure discourse on how it may affect the production of IS research. After systematically traversing the alternative genre’s landscape using the framework, we propose a research agenda of the most substantial and imminent issues for the successful development of the genre, including contributor incentives, scholarly contribution assessment, anonymity, governance, intellectual property ownership, and value propositions. In addressing this research agenda, we reflect on what might be learned from other areas in which crowdsourcing has been established with success.

Talk vs chat-based radio: A case for distinction

Abstract This article considers the differences between talk radio and chat-based radio as specific genres of radio programming in an attempt to address the very broad use of the term ‘talk/talkback’ radio in radio research. Chat-based programming is a term devised by Tolson in relation to television, but this article argues that the definition as applied to television is relevant to radio, particularly in a contemporary media environment where media boundaries are increasingly blurred. It examines the key concepts that define ‘chat-based’ programming as they apply to radio, which are an orientation to personal topics, the use of humour, and potential for transgression. The format is increasingly popular, particularly on commercial radio. This article investigates three key questions: (1) Is there a difference between chat-based and talk radio programming?; (2) Why does genre matter in radio studies?; and (3) What are the implications for defining an alternative genre of talk? It argues that talk radio and chat-based radio are distinct formats, but that chat-based programming can and does incorporate issue-based ‘segments’ to engage listeners. In arguing for the distinction, this article lays some foundations and raises questions for consideration in future analyses of radio talk.

Making Connections: Network Analysis, the Bildungsroman and the World of The Absentee

ABSTRACTIn the late eighteenth century, European novelists discovered youth. Writers like Goethe, Austen and Scott developed a new genre, the Bildungsroman, in which young, enthusiastic protagonists explore the world, develop themselves and find a place to remain. This, at least, has been a popular argument in modern criticism. Recently, however, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse have brought it into question. Studying a number of British and American novels, they show that an alternative genre, the ‘network novel’, arose in the period, which ‘disrupted’ the image of an organic, domestic world that lay at the heart of the ‘domestic novel’ (their term for the classical Bildungsroman). Here, I propose that the ‘network novel’ and the ‘domestic novel’ can actually be seen as two distinct but interrelated aspects of the Bildungsroman. To demonstrate this, I use Maria Edgeworth’s The Absentee (1812) as a case study, utilising Franco Moretti’s innovative digital technique, ‘character network analysis’, to analyse its structure.

Le sentiment végétal: feuillages d’extrême contemporain par Marinella Termite

an image from Rétif de la Bretonne’s 1782 Le paysan perverti that shows two men (one of them the focus of chapter 7) standing in front of a high table, consulting and apparently discussing pages of illustrations. The image is a mise en abyme of our own situation as readers of a book replete with images. Beautifully produced on highquality paper, the book is enriched by over 100 illustrations. Tane suggests that this plate from Rétif’s novel underlines the human relationships that are linked to images as well as the power of images, which passes from those who produce them to those who look at them (19–21). As they move from creator to spectator, images alter. In this multimedia age, one does well to reflect upon past examples of the complex relationships between images and texts, of the reader as spectator and the spectator as reader. Many of the questions posed in this study bear upon contemporary art and design: for instance, whether book illustrations should be classified as“art”or“trade” (métier) (51–53). Far from being mere decoration, illustrations in eighteenth-century novels shaped readers’ experience of the text. Tane accords such images an active role in the functioning of fiction (461). He concludes by insisting upon a term that recurs throughout, saying that the eighteenth century was the era of the figure (484). Tane’s impressive volume will be of interest to scholars of the eighteenth century as well as to those who study book history and anyone interested in the interplay between text and illustration. University of New Hampshire Heidi Bostic Termite,Marinella. Le sentiment végétal: feuillages d’extrême contemporain.Macerata: Quodlibet, 2014. ISBN 978-88-7462-672-4. Pp. 223. 24 a. Termite identifies a ‘green’ corpus within the literature of the contemporary extreme: a new tradition of French “botanical novels,” in which an abundance of vegetal elements helps readers sensually reconnect with nature’s vitality. Termite argues that these novels tend to be characterized by a deliberately slow-moving pace, which runs counter to both the speed and the spatial organization of contemporary society: their narratives zoom in on vegetal details, indulging in micro-observations of the colors, sounds, odors, tastes, and tactile features of the natural world—all of which ultimately break up diegetic time and space. These narratives highlight and give consistency to the “proteiform” diversity of the living, thereby responding to a sensorially deprived society’s need for “outdoor life” (15, 188). Termite similarly contends that this literature is a form of resistance to our contemporary fascination with virtual realities and totalizing illusions. “Botanical novels” by writers such as Marie Nimier, Richard Millet, Pierre Michon, Tanguy Viel, Pierre Autin-Grenier, Noëlle Châtelet, Sylvie Germain, Marie NDiaye, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Jean Echenoz, Pierre Bergounioux, and Pierre Senges encourage us to experience both the palpable, everchanging , and currently endangered materiality of nature, and the literariness of their 210 FRENCH REVIEW 90.1 Reviews 211 own texts. Reading these novels is therefore said to be a quest for origins both natural and literary. Termite’s excellent close readings show how, through analogies and amplifications, discrete vegetal references seem to animate and to engender these fictions of the extreme contemporary. Syntagmatic narratives are broken up, as the vegetal decomposes both the author’s discourse and the material reality to which the latter supposedly refers. Instead of, or in addition to, functioning through metaphoric signs, which would try to represent stable concepts in their entirety, vegetal writing presents a flow of ever-fleeting sensations. The theoretical dimension of this argument, and arguably the novels’ own resistance to comprehensive interpretations, cause Termite to speak in abstractions, which at times are of difficult interpretation. Her textual analysis, however, fully supports the notion that vegetal imagery can engender and propel the narratives of the French contemporary extreme. With Le sentiment végétal, she suggests, we discover an alternative genre of ‘green’ writing, one that renounces the totalizing illusions of botanical (or more generally scientific) discourse, as well as the similarly recuperative motions of (a vaguely defined) nostalgic environmental criticism. With its focus on the present, the “botanical...

Serious Games as a Means for Scientific Knowledge Transfer—A Case From Engineering Management Education

Disseminating scientific findings through journal publications is the very nature of every academic discipline. However, with the emergence of knowledge society and lifelong learning needs, there is a growing demand for alternative ways to enhance the dissemination of research findings to a broader audience than academics and young students. In this paper, we first introduce the concept of serious games as a well-acknowledged alternative method to discourse and delivering current engineering or management-related research findings to society. Then, considering the lack of a unified serious game design framework and the gaps in the extant literature, we illustrate our design rationale for the development and evaluation of serious games. The proposed framework contributes the following advancements to the body of extant literature and practices. It is strongly centered on a well-known knowledge transfer framework, and it is strongly based on a participatory design approach deliberately involving iterative and frequent testing and fine-tuning sessions that overcome the inherent limitations of traditional stage-gate or waterfall development models. We conclude by providing some insights gained during the development of the game and the framework, as well as by discussing the challenges associated with the design and use of serious games as an alternative genre for disseminating engineering- and management-related research findings.

Philippians 2:6-11 as Subversive Hymnos: A Study in the Light of Ancient Rhetorical Theory

This study addresses the unsettled question concerning the genre of Philippians 2:6–11, long considered a poetic ‘Christ-hymn’, but more recently classified under a number of alternative genre headings: exalted prose, encomion , epainos , early Christian confession, didactic poem, and prose hymn. The study examines the text in the light of ancient rhetorical theory of hymnos and notes the essential features of the genre identified by ancient rhetoricians on a descriptive basis. The study then shows the presence of these same features in Philippians 2:6–11, albeit with one key innovation: conventional, Greco-Roman notions of honour and shame that typically shaped the hymnos genre are turned on their end, with the result that the god of the ‘Christ-Hymn’ is praised for taking up conventionally shameful stations in humility and service to others.

Doctor Who’s textual commemorators: Fandom, collective memory and the self-commodification of fanfac

Abstract Following ‘first wave’ fan studies and the seminal Textual Poachers (1992) by Jenkins, much scholarly work has focused on fan fiction or fanfic. This article argues that an alternative genre of fan writing – the autobiographical account of fan memory/experience – forms part of media fandom’s ‘textual productivity’. Defining this as fanfac (reflexively produced fact or faction, often shaped to entertain fellow fans), I examine this mode of commemorative fan writing in relation to a case study of the British SF TV series Doctor Who (BBC, 1963–89, 1996, 2005–). Drawing on prior work in memory studies, I consider how fans’ memories provide a resource that can be self-commodified and sold back to the fan culture, thus making fanfac very different to the typical social relations surrounding fanfic. Fans’ production of textual memories can be thought of as a form of ‘banal commemoration’, which Doctor Who fans themselves auto-commodify within the ‘commemoration industry’ surrounding this TV series that celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2013. More so than ‘textual poachers’ creating fanfic, sections of UK and US Who fandom can be theorized instead as ‘textual commemorators’ producing fanfac, which contributes to, and sometimes contests, the fandom’s collective memory.

New Evidence for the Influence of Gallic Canon Law in Anglo-Saxon England

The importance of canon law collections to Anglo-Saxon legal culture has long been thought negligible, especially in comparison to the considerable importance of an alternative genre of canonical literature known as the penitential handbook. Over the past several decades, however, evidence for the use and circulation of continental canon law collections in pre-Conquest England has been mounting, to the extent that it could challenge traditional notions about the dominance of penitential law in the early English Church. This study presents new evidence for the reception in Anglo-Saxon England of a major continental collection known as theCollectio vetus Gallica.

Making Faces: Information Does Not Exist

This paper uses the ‘strange’ case of human emotive facial expression as a means to help unpack and relate three inter–related concepts, each with a different intellectual pedigree: intentionality from philosophy, intensionality from linguistics and in-formation from the information disciplines. Both intentionality and intensionality are concepts which, although frequently used within the Information Systems literature, are rarely critically examined. Our examination of both theory and case not only identifies a number of limitations with our contemporary understanding of information itself: it also highlights the important, but much neglected role, that the communication of emotion or affect plays within information systems. As such, the work described offers a step towards the development of an alternative genre for thinking about the key locus of the ‘Information’ disciplines.

Music and Suicidality: A Quantitative Review and Extension

This article provides the first quantitative review of the literature on music and suicidality. Multivariate logistic regression techniques are applied to 90 findings from 21 studies. Investigations employing ecological data on suicide completions are 19.2 times more apt than other studies to report a link between music and suicide. More recent and studies with large samples are also more apt than their counterparts to report significant results. Further, none of the studies based on experimental research designs found a link between music and suicide ideation, prompting us to do a brief content analysis of 24 suicide songs versus 24 nonsuicide songs from the same album. Using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software, we found no difference in the content of the suicide songs and controls, including the percentage of sad words, negative affect, and mentions of death, thus providing an explanation for nonfindings from experimental research. In summary, ecologically based (which capture at-risk persons not in typical school-based samples) and more recent investigations (which have used superior or new methodologies) tend to demonstrate a linkage between music and suicidality. Experimental research is needed with a control group of songs from an alternative genre with low suicidogenic content.

Alternative Archaeology: Many Pasts in Our Present

Abstract This article introduces the field of alternative archaeology. After a short presentation of how the field has been received by professional archaeologists, different ways of defining it are discussed, and potential demarcations are examined. A survey of the most frequently discussed topics follows, together with a discussion of the methodologies employed and the theoretical presuppositions accepted by writers in the alternative archaeology genre, and how these differ from the methods and theories of conventional academic archaeology. A brief section on the relevance of alternative archaeology to the study of religion concludes the article.

‘Muddying the Wells’: Modernist Literary Instincts and the Operatic Ideal

Irene Morra shows how the conflict between words and music that was contested in “Billy Budd” can be extended to almost all modern British opera. Morra argues persuasively that a number of modernist writers came to view the libretto “as an alternative literary genre, one that would allow for the expression of literary ideals of musicality”.

Self-Published Web Résumés

A genre's continuing success after migrating to a new medium may be due in part to whether the genre secures a place within a viable genre system. To explore the role of genre systems, this study examined the well-established genre of the résumé in its new position on self-published Web sites. Results from surveying 100 authors of self-published Web résumés revealed that many respondents used their résumés for the previously overlooked purpose of attracting clients for their self-employment. These self-employed respondents rated their résumés as significantly more useful than did those who had not used their résumés for this purpose. The self-employed were more likely to publicize their sites through such business-related genres as business cards and advertising material, and in turn, their sites drew in communication from more socially distant populations. These alternative publicity measures and communication networks suggest that the self employed were able to situate their Web résumés within viable alternative genre systems.