Genre In Question Research Articles

Please explain what this diagnosis means because I don’t quite understand

Abstract Hospital discharge documents (HDDs) containing treatment information and recovery recommendations often cause concern or even stress for patients. Studies have shown that the language used in the document is often incomprehensible to the patient and seems intended mostly for (other) medical professionals. The aim of this article is to examine the discursive process of deconstructing medical knowledge encoded in HDDs through online dialogue between users of an open health-related forum in Polish. The analysis has revealed the discursive ways of sharing information and offering support by translating from Latin into Polish, converting from specialist to lay diction or explaining the way institutional conventions are applied in the document. Providing expertise and implicit reassurance in the course of dialogic interaction facilitates successful recovery. The conclusions from this exploratory analysis are hoped to increase the awareness of the parties involved of the function and significance of the medical documentation genre in question.

A Study of Elpis in Ancient Greek Literary Laments and Songs for the Dead: Hope and the Tradition of Greek Lament

Much of current scholarship aims at reconstructing ritual lamentation based on evidence from early Greek epic and lyric poetry and fifth-century tragedy. This paper, although it is an examination of a specific human emotion, elpis, within the corpus of early and classical Greek epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry that are thought to preserve the oral traditions of the genre, takes also into consideration the inscribed ancient Greek songs for the dead; that is archaic and classical epigrams and their later counterparts encountered, mainly, in the Greek Anthology. A study of elpis, a highly culturally dependent emotion, within these contexts will allow us to have a glimpse of the hermeneutic frames provided by each poetic genre, their performative contexts, and the expectation of the audiences, as well as of the general world-view that is shared by the poetic genres in question. In other words, a study of elpis in ancient Greek laments and songs for the dead will enable us to have a slightly clearer image of the evolution and the nature of this oral genre from archaic times until the Late Antiquity.

Языковая объективация критического формата англоязычного научного дискурса

The study aims to identify ways of objectifying the critical format of English-language scientific discourse. It is shown that the critical attitude to the results of scientific research is conveyed by linguistic constructions with the semantics of doubt, disagreement and refutation, lexical units associated with a negative characteristic in the linguistic axiological paradigm, as well as by neutral evaluative linguistic units that acquire evaluative content under the influence of context. The scientific novelty of the study lies in identifying the critical format of scientific discourse, describing the specifics of its linguistic actualization. The possibility of highlighting this format of scientific discourse has not been considered previously. As a result, the validity of identifying the critical format of scientific discourse is proved and the main means of its objectification are determined. The means of objectification of the critical attitude of the discourse subject to scientific knowledge are shown. It is found that the choice of verbalization means is determined by the value orientations of the discourse of the genre in question, namely, the possession of novelty and scientific significance, the pursuit of truth, and the verifiability of data.

Musical Imagination and Reading: The Role of Sight-Reading in the Constitution of Brazilian Musical Genres

We focus on professional Brazilian music of the instrumental genre and address the crucial role of sight-reading in its development. We argue that in addition to the standard concept of sight-reading — related to the strict deciphering of signs on the pentagram — other reading praxis founded, over the last two centuries, what came to be recognized as Brazilian music. In this sense, we highlight that the notational format internationally known as lead sheet (the notational standard used in the context in question) not only enabled the availability of essen-tial musical elements for the singularization of work and authorship but also led to the con-solidation of the collection of images musicals that constituted the genre in question. In this way, the interaction of imagined simulations of generic patterns—the action of embodied memory — with reading the lead sheet gave rise to works and defined a repertoire. Consid-ering assumptions of embodied cognition of music, stylistic-musical foundations, and the analysis of recordings and transcriptions, we speculate attributing a central role to sight-read-ing in the constitution of the stylistic field addressed — primarily represented by Choro. It is a musical production originated by and in performance, encompassing phrasal and harmonic improvisation, modes of articulation, and sonority.

Взаимодействие категорий экспрессивности и оценочности в персональных жанрах медийного дискурса США

The aim of the given research is to elucidate the correlation between lexical stylistic (expressive) devices and their contextual evaluative meanings in the genres of blog and column of the US media space. The categories of expressiveness and evaluativity are the most essential for adequate understanding and interpretation of modern media in the context of technological convergence, information exchange speed increase, tangible transformation of genre systems, and increased subjectivity. The results of linguo-stylistic, contextual, componential and quantitative analyses attest to some similarities as well as a number of significant differences in the expressive and evaluative organisation of the genres in question. The study has determined that idioms and similes are used as intensifiers of primarily negative evaluative meaning in both genres, whereas metaphors and epithets are utilised to augment the positive evaluative meaning in blogs and the negative evaluative meaning in columns. Unlike the column, the genre of blog is characterised by a wider range of combinations of lexical stylistic devices and the evaluative meanings amplified by them. Particularly in blogs, the phenomena deemed as negative can be stylistically presented in the light of positive evaluative meaning; the phenomena which are traditionally considered positive are shown through the prism of negative evaluative meaning; both positive and negative evaluative meaning can be attributed to the same phenomenon within one text; the shift from positive to negative evaluative meaning and vice versa can be observed within the ambit of sustained metaphors.

Хоррор-мотивы в творчестве А. Старобинец (на материале сборника «Икарова железа»)

The paper is devoted to analysing the collection “The Icarus Gland” (2010) by Anna Starobinets. The research was undertaken in order to identify the elements of horror in the prose writer’s short stories. First, the author of the paper summarises the opinions of researchers about the genre features of the phenomenon under consideration, then analyses the specifics of the existence of horror motifs and horror images in the texts of the Russian writer, comparing her plot collisions with literary and cinematic plots of Western predecessors. The research is novel in that it is the first to consider the plots of the short stories by A. Starobinets through the lens of foreign horror culture. As a result, it has been proved that the writer, taking into account the peculiarities of the canonical pieces of horror literature (the works of I. Levin, S. King, C. Barker), rethinks the nature of the emotion that the genre in question causes: Starobinets is not focused on fear of death, but on fear of reality, the phenomena of which are often inevitable (poverty, loneliness, loss of self etc.). The prose writer, using horror images and horror motifs popular in mass culture, hyperbolises everyday situations and brings them to the point of absurdity.

ΣΤΕΦΑΝΙΑ ΚΟΦΙΝΑ, Ἡ μεγάλη βδομάδα τοῦ Πρεζάκη: Από το διήγημα στην κομικ-ή μετάπλαση

The Big Week of Prezakis: From the short story to the comic transformation The object of the present study is the transposition of the short story The Big Week of Prezakis by M. Karagatsis into a comic and specifically into a graphic novel, in order to investigate and analyse all the remarkable medial transformations that result from this inter-artistic transposition. The study starts from the structure in each of the two works under consideration, that is the way in which the narrative material is organized to serve the inherent imperatives of the genre in question. The transcription of narrative voice and focus in mediated adaptation is also a research desideratum as well as the multiple artistic realizations of the narrator in the comic idiom. Narrative temporality, as a predominantly graphically represented axis in the world of the comic book, as well as the imaginary soundtrack of the works, with the remarkable effect it is found to exert as a verbal statement in both cases, has also been of interest to the study. Finally, both selected characters in the works and the spaces in which they move were put under the microscope. It should be made clear, however, that this consideration is aware of the heterogeneity of the two media and the different semiotic code that governs each of them. Consequently, it is released from any attempt to identify points of convergence or divergence between the two works if these do not take the study towards interesting interpretative results about the adaptation and the transformations it brings about. After all, every adaptation constitutes a creative "departure" from the source work, and it is through this prism that this paper views the whole inter-artistic project.

POEMS IN PROSE IN THE OSSETIAN LITERATURE OF THE FIRST HALF OF THE XX CENTURY: GENRE IDENTIFICATION

The article makes an attempt to determine the genre of the works of Ossetian writers, which they rank as prose poems. The presence of a small volume, lyrical beginning, as well as the characteristic compositional completeness, dynamism and emotionality of the narrative make it possible to attribute most of the analyzed works to the genre in question. A structural analysis of works of art showed that some of them gravitated more towards parables or fables, since they contained a didactic aspect (Ts. Gadiev). Other analyzed works of art are close in content to landscape sketches (S. Gadiev), a meditation poem (Ts. Gadiev), lyric miniatures (Dz. Gatuev, Niger (I. Dzhanaev), a message poem (H. Kaloev), a poem - confession (H. Kaloev), a farewell poem (H. Kaloev), a mandate poem (H. Kaloev). In the first-person narrative, the lyrical beginning of prose poems is manifested. The combination of lyricism with a prosaic way of conveying artistic reality is also characteristic of the creative method of Ossetian authors. The article also analyzes the pictorial and expressive aspect of the works, which plays an important role in revealing the ideological meaning of poems; emphasizes the identification of the figurative system with the inner world of the lyric hero. The lexical and syntactic means of artistic expression used reflect the deep feelings and thoughts of the lyrical hero, assess the depicted. The formal features of the analyzed prose poems are most often represented by simple sentences that give the narration a special dynamism.

Microtonality in the Conditions of the Piano Duet Genre

In the twentieth century, playing two pianos has become one of the leading forms of joint ensemble performance – many duet compositions have appeared all over the world, and the creation of works for such a composition is a separate branch of compositional creativity. The authors, representatives of different artistic trends, preaching various techniques and manners of writing, paid close attention to the piano duet. A special branch of the development of the genre at this time is represented by compositions in which quaternary is used as a unique, original method of creating compositions, suggesting special searches in the field of musical acoustics and aesthetics. They – the opuses of I. Vyshnegradsky, C. Ives, M. Cooper, S. Reich, V. Ekimovsky – for the first time in musicology became the main object of contextual analysis. The importance of such music for the heyday of the piano duet in the twentieth century can hardly be overestimated: it was she who brought into the genre a completely unknown acoustic imbalance of instruments, a dialogue of two personalized parts. The piano duet of the twentieth century is determined not only by its own artistic values expressed by specific duet works, but also by the significant contribution of the genre in question to the overall development of musical art – both composing and performing practice.

Contraste, concessão e contra-argumentação em textos académicos uma análise exploratória

The present study takes an integrated approach of grammatical elements and structures from the perspective of their functioning in texts/discourses. It focusses the semantic-pragmatic and argumentative-discursive values of utterances represented by the conceptual scheme Yes... But..., in academic writing, in particular master’s theses and reports. Its object are discursive sequences with a composite argumentative movement comprising concession and contrast /counter-argumentation. From a wide universe of works, made up of final reports from FLUP Master’s students, from the years 2020-2022, five works were selected in which the discursive sequences in focus frequently occur. The set of clipped sequences constituted the corpus of this study. After the theoretical framework, an exploratory analysis of qualitative and interpretative nature was carried out, based on procedures such as: the segmentation of utterances with movements of concession and contrast, starting from the identification of linguistic elements related to the conceptual scheme Yes..., But...; the categorization and description of these segments, taking into account syntactic-semantic and pragmatic-discursive dimensions; the comparison of the values displayed by the sequences of the different categories; the explanation of the occurrences in the academic genre in question; the articulation of the linguistic elements with the enunciative, interactional and contextual dimensions of discourse production. The results show that contrastive constructions, such as adversative and concessive, acquire, in discourse, very similar semantic-pragmatic and discursive-argumentative functions, serving to mark mitigated discordant polyphony and a confrontational strategy that combines agreement (even if partial) with disagreement, a strategy that proves to be particularly appropriate in the discursive genre under analysis. They also demonstrate that this movement is present in academic works with higher classifications, in the final assessment of the course, working as evidence of the author’s capacity for problematization and critical, divergent thinking. In this way, it may come to function as a specific marker to improve the academic writing competence.

Intertextuality in Early Greek Poetry: The Special Case of Epinician

AbstractThis paper offers a reappraisal of the role of intertextuality in fifth-century BCE epinician poetry by means of a comparison with the role of intertextuality in all of early Greek hexameter poetry, ‘lyric epic’, and fifth-century BCE tragedy and comedy. By considering the ways in which performance culture as well as the production of written texts affects the prospects for intertextuality, it challenges a scholarly view that would straightforwardly correlate intertextuality in early Greek poetry with an increasing use and dissemination of written texts. Rather, ‘performance rivalry’ (a term understood to encompass both intra- and intergeneric competition between poetic works that were performed either on the same occasion or on closely related occasions) is identified as a plausible catalyst of intertextuality in all of the poetic genres considered, from the eighth or seventh century to the fifth century BCE. It is argued that fifth-century epinician poetry displays frequent, fine-grained, and allusive intertextuality with a range of early hexameter poetry: theIliad, the poems of the Epic Cycle, and various ‘Hesiodic’ poems – poetry that in all probability featured in the sixth-fifth century BCE rhapsodic repertoire. It is also argued that, contrary to what is maintained in some recent Pindaric scholarship, there is no comparable case to be made for a frequent, significant, and allusive intrageneric intertextuality between epinician poems: in this respect, the case of epinician makes a very striking contrast with epic, tragedy, and comedy – poetic genres to which intrageneric intertextuality was absolutely fundamental. It is suggested that the presence or absence of intrageneric intertextuality in the genres in question is likely to be associated with the presence or absence of performance rivalry. A further factor identified as having the potential to inhibit intrageneric intertextuality in epinician is the undesirability of having one poem appear to be ‘bettered’ by another in a genre were all poems were commissioned to exalt individual patrons. This, again, is a situation that did not arise for epic, tragedy, or comedy, where a kind of competitive or ‘zero-sum’ intertextuality could be (and was) unproblematically embraced. Intertextuality in epinician thus appears to present a special case vis-à-vis the other major poetic genres of early Greece, whose workings can both be illuminated by consideration of the workings of intertextuality in epic, tragedy, and comedy, and can in turn illuminate something of the workings of intertextuality in those genres.

Logos of narration in a philological novel

The article is devoted to studying connection of the narrative strategy with the features of a philological novel. The strategy realises “event” of communication between the subject and the addressee of the narration as well as it is a marker of the genre variety. As a result the strategy turns out to be associated with the categories of genre and discourse. On the basis of the works of different scientists, the problem of the correlation of the concepts is considered. The hypothesis is put forward that the logos of narration serves as a «mediator» between the strategy and genre features of a philological novel. On the basis of Charles Sanders Peirce’s doctrine about the typology of signs, the logos of narration in Vladimir Novikov’s novel «A Romance with Language» and David John Lodge’s novel «Nice Work» is explored. The analysis reveals the presence of iconic and metabolic logos in Vladimir Novikov’s novel while emblematic, in Lodge’s novel. The features of discursiveness in the novels testify to its connection with the genre features of a philological novel (playing with the reader, irony, provocativeness and the search for an ideal recipient). As an indicator of narrative modality (it is one of the elements of the strategy), the logos of narration becomes a «mediator» between the strategy and the characteristics of the genre in question.

Ex Machina e Her: géneros de narrativa e narrativas de género

The films Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) and Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2015) are works often framed in the genre of science fiction. In this essay, we will seek to identify narrative elements that confirm their “science fiction” status, as this is considered an inflection point. At first, the theme of alterity and the representations of the Other will be problematized, as these are founding elements of the genre in question. Then, a reflection on human-machine relations and their articulations with gender theories will be proposed; namely, Feminist Science Studies, which use technological advances as an interpretive key for new meanings of gender categories. In this field, a dialogue will be established with Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Judith Halberstam, among others. It is understood that in the works in question there is an overlap between machine, female gender and the figure of the Other, which causes attraction and repulsion simultaneously. In this sense, it will be demonstrated how the representations of the female body also occupy a privileged place in the imaginary of science fiction and in our current technoscientific context. In other words, this is about perceiving the ways in which science fiction genre imaginatively inserts women into the history and future of science and technology.

Exploring Sociopolitical and Religious Meanings from a BBC News on a Terror Attack: A Functional Linguistic Analysis.

This study is a functional grammatical analysis of BBC news on a New York attack where eight were killed by a man driving a truck by the application of Halliday’s Systematic Functional Grammar (SFG). By analysing the systems of grammar at the clause level, I show that the text at the discourse level makes different meaning across the news. Sayfullo Saipov, an immigrant who came to the US in 2010, has developed negative actions such as killing eight people, hurting 11, aiming at innocents, striking cyclists, hitting a school bus, injuring adults and children, and in all of his actions eventually “the innocent” are affected as a goal. Another significant goal i.e. “note” was found which shows his cohesion with the so-called Islamic States. Nevertheless, they are using the name of “Islam” but they don’t know or they don’t follow the script of Islam or at least the basics of Islam, it proven by the killer are all actions because according to The Holy Quran” killing a single innocent is even strongly prohibited in Islam, it is like killing the whole humanity. Identifying and attributing processes have identified here “The attack” as a “terrible” incident which is done by the attacker and attributing processes ascribe “bad qualities” of carriers (the attacker). The Killer is the highest number of “Actor” in terms of the transitivity process, which means he is in a “destructive power”. The police are the second-highest “actor” who performs some physical actions such as shooting the driver, arresting the driver, taking the attacker to hospital. The situation was going to get ugly by the killer’s actions and for this reason; the police accomplish these professional actions to make meaning of “safety of innocent”. The killer is a “single” person but his negative actions convulsed the whole city even whole country, and all big names like President, City mayor, police commissioner immediately were made get involved into “verbal actions” interfering, and reacting, saying, commenting etc. Thus the study frets out some significant meaning through grammar choices in the news genre in question.

Metapragmatic discourses in differentiating genres in online media

One of the possible ways to explore contextualization is through external discourses referencing the pragmatics of the discourse in question. These are known as metapragmatic discourse. The purpose of this article is to theoretically integrate the concept of metapragmatics into genre analysis and apply metapragmatic tools to the analysis of specific genres. Five YouTube videos together with their accompanying comments exhibiting metapragmatic properties were analyzed. Methodologically, the analysis relies on the textually oriented content analysis. The results indicate that placing discourses nominally relying on one and the same generic form into a certain genre may be predicated on contextual variables that may have nothing to do with said form per se. These variables, however, may be verbalized by the original author and by their audience in the form of metapragmatic markers. This may mean that for the final addressee, the “effect” of the original discourse will depend on the attribution of this discourse, based on the metapragmatic markers, to one of the “competing” genre variations emerging, as it were, in an ongoing exchange between the author and his audience. A case in point are sponsored and “honest” review genres. A second observation resides in the realm of hybrid genres. An example here is integrating sponsored content into one of the “legitimate” lifestyle-genres (“hot tips”, vlog, etc.). A fraction of the discourse community seems to view this as delegitimizing the discourse and the genre in question, while others see it as an “unfortunate insert”, which does not, however, change the genre’s overall value. This leaves the question open whether such genres should be considered new and full-fledged genres, with sponsored content being one of their integral features.

Maya Angelou: biografia e crônica social em Eu sei por que o pássaro canta na gaiola

Neste estudo pretendemos analisar a autobiografia Eu sei por que o pássaro canta na gaiola, da escritora afro-estadunidense Maya Angelou, sob a perspectiva da filosofia da linguagem de Mikhail Bakhtin e seu Círculo, utilizando-nos, sobretudo, de conceitos-chave como exotopia e dialogismo. Além disso, tencionamos destacar o caráter social do gênero discursivo em questão, que, neste caso, permite à autora narrar sobre o vivido de modo subjetivo ao mesmo tempo que conta a história do sujeito afro-estadunidense e suas lutas e resistências, entrelaçando o discurso pessoal da biografia ao social. Enfatizar as vozes femininas no romance e seu protagonismo também é ponto relevante de nosso estudo, visto que a escritora conta a sua história com o objetivo claro de demonstrar que, embora haja especificidade subjetiva, há também uma espécie de destino comum das mulheres afro-estadunidenses. Por meio de uma prosa positiva e otimista, pode-se observar que as vicissitudes da vida não enfraquecem a resistência negra nos EUA.

El recurso metalingüístico y la performatividad en la samba. Una propuesta de análisis desde la semiótica cultural

The following study intends to put into practice a discursive analysis of Samba from a multidisciplinary perspective. For this we use, among others, the studies of cultural and musical semiotics by professor Juan Miguel Gonzalez Martinez; of the study of metalanguage in samba by Andre Nemi Conforte and the performative proposal in Austin. These works, in addition to serving as theoretical support, help us understand the mechanism by which samba is guided to build what Lubomir Doležel calls possible worlds, which is nothing but symbols and signs that become part of a reality and, therefore, of a collective memory. In this way, Samba - an intelligent text -, its composers and listeners build a semiotic framework capable of reproducing and providing feedback over the years, resulting in a social identity. Finally, the power of music is deduced, especially in the genre in question, which works not only as a channel of communication, but also plays an important role: to create a historical awareness.

ЛЕКСИКО-СЕМАНТИЧЕСКИЕ ОСОБЕННОСТИ ЖАНРА "КИНОРЕЦЕНЗИЯ"

The article describes distinctive features of a film review as a speech genre which is now one of the most popular genres of the mass media net discourse. The article proves its intertextual character and analyses its lexical and semantic features. Film reviews taken from the following sources: sites of cinema goers: www.imdb.com, www.empireonline.com, www.pluggedin.com ; official sites of film critics (e.g. R. Ebert) https://www.rogerebert.com; official sites of the newspapers: The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/reviews/movies, The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/film+tone/reviews and other sites: https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?keywords=movie-review, https://www.pluggedin.com/movie-reviews/. The material for analysis comprises about 100 film reviews released in 2020. The reviews are in open access in the Internet. The volume of the analysed material is about 200 pages. The method used to achieve the main objective is interpretation analysis of film reviews. As a result of the theoretical material analysis main directions in the genre research were specified; key distinctive features of a film review were studied. The actuality of the research is determined by the rising interest to net mass media discourse genres. The main objective is to elicit and describe lexical and semantic features of film reviews as a speech genre. The conducted research made it possible to prove the interdiscoursive and poly-discoursive nature of the genre in question and to systematize its lexical and semantic features. The analysis disclosed that intertextuality of a film review is actualized in the interaction of three types of discourse: that of the critic, that of the film and that of other people. Poly-discoursive nature of a film review is expressed through the combination of publicistic, literary and scientific styles features. Another important characteristic is evaluativity represented in emotionally coloured vocabulary. Among other lexical and semantic features are the following: usage of non-specific terms, cliches, rhetorical questions with precedent names, intertextual inserting, various stylistic devices, among which epithets and metaphors are most often used. It’s been observed that a film review is filled with bookish vocabulary as well as stylistically low words and expressions.

Through the Looking Glass: Writers' Memoirs at the Turn of the 21st Century by Robert Kusek

Reviewed by: Through the Looking Glass: Writers' Memoirs at the Turn of the 21st Century by Robert Kusek Dagmara Drewniak (bio) Through the Looking Glass: Writers' Memoirs at the Turn of the 21st Century Robert Kusek Jagiellonian UP, 2018, 227 pp. ISBN 9788323342908, $50.00 paperback. Life writing, especially autobiography and memoir, has become one of the most significant genres of our times. Although that may sound like a platitude that has already been proven by various scholars such as Leigh Gilmore, Thomas Larson, and Julie Rak, Robert Kusek revisits the idea in Through the Looking Glass: Writers' Memoirs at the Turn of the 21st Century—and he does it well and in an erudite manner. His study investigates memoirs written by contemporary writers, and through an in-depth analysis offers a problematized definition of the genre and its subgenres. According to Kusek, the book's goal is also to determine the "prodigality" and "generative capacity" of the memoir genre and its "borderline" genres, to discuss "the relationship between history and fiction, the self and other," and to prove that "memoirs are literature per se" (27–28). This broad scope is realized in eight [End Page 480] chapters, with a comprehensive introduction and conclusion, both stimulating for further research, and a bibliography. Furthermore, the book is accompanied by an author and subject index, and supplemented with extensive footnotes. The latter can be seen as both a drawback and an advantage, as the long notes add substantially to the discussion by offering new names, titles, and important information. On the other hand, they are so loaded with knowledge that they distract from following the main text, which is not really a serious deficiency. The main body of the text is grouped into two parts. Part One, in its three chapters, examines the status of the genre in question, identifies its "textual and paratextual marqueurs" (29), and last but not least, proposes a taxonomy of writer's memoirs. Kusek's meticulous book determines fifteen subgenres, or as he calls them, "species," of the memoir: "souvenirs d'enfance, souvenirs d'adolescence, falling away memoir, memoirs/scenes from life, patriography, matriography, parental memoir, autrememoir, pet memoir, (auto)patriography, (auto)thanatography, travelogue, periegetic memoir, ekphrastic memoir, and bibliomemoir" (29). Part Two, "Readings," offers close readings of five exemplary memoirs that respond to the above-mentioned aims. The detailed readings of the selected texts are clearly focused. Kusek's book urges its readers on to an even broader analysis that entails the scrutiny of the selected memoirs in reference to the remaining oeuvre of the memoirists, as well as ontological reflection on "the trajectory of human life" (29). Through the Looking Glass puts forth texts that reconsider and respond to the natural cycle of life from birth to death, thus connecting to a debate on particular life, illness, loss, death, and so on, with a meditation on the universal. This organizing idea behind the close readings gives the study another dimension, one more profound than "just" a contemplation of an individual's life. Taking into consideration the scope of the text, its particular aims, and widely sketched contexts, Kusek aptly recognizes the impossibility of using a single theoretical framework to discuss such disparate issues as generic hybridity, feminism, and memory and history. Instead, he offers a "polycentric" and "eclectic amalgamation" (32) of theories and approaches to accommodate his discussions of literature, philosophy, and at times history and anthropology. As perilous as this approach might have been, Kusek's knowledgeable analysis never fails to accomplish his aims, and he never loses control of his text and ideas. The structure of the book differs from the conventional pattern for scholarly studies. Instead of jumping straight into the theoretical part, Kusek's book offers a new opening in Part One. In chapter one, he provides a succinct examination of four memoirs including Doris Lessing's Alfred and Emily, Philip Hensher's The Emperor Waltz, Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk, and Simon Critchley's Memory Theatre to leave readers with substantial questions about the nature of the genre. The following chapters, and especially chapters two and three, attempt to answer these quandaries in the light of Lejeune...

ANÁLISE DE MATERIAL DIDÁTICO PARA A PRODUÇÃO DE ENSAIO ACADÊMICO NO CURSO DE LETRAS FRANCÊS-PORTUGUÊS

This article aims to analyze the didactic material used to teach academic essay production in French, in the course of Portuguese-French Letters, from a Brazilian university. Thus, we aim to identify the writing teaching approach that underlies the material proposal. For the analysis, we are based on the concept of literacies brought by Kleiman (1995) and on the models of approaches to writing and literacy of students in academic contexts, described by Lea and Street (1998). Our research is of documentary type. The results show that the analyzed material is part of the study skills model, that is, the didactic proposal suggests a generic approach to teaching production of the essay genre, taking into account only its linguistic aspects, without considering the disciplinary specificities for the production of the genre in question.