Role Of Genre Research Articles

“Standing in Terri Schiavo's Shoes”: The Role of Genre in End-of-Life Decision Making

This article reports the findings from analysis of end-of-life court cases and case files from one state public guardianship administrator as well as interviews with guardians or surrogates to identify how language and principles of the courts are operationalized in end-of-life decisions for those who are unable to make decisions for themselves. We found that physicians and guardians worked well within the requirements of the genre to ensure the best interests for those whom they represent.

The role of genre in information structuring in English

In a recent paper, Biber and Gray (2010) provide empirical evidence for the dramatic increase of compressed structures in English academic writing over the last 100 years. According to their corpus findings, the grammatical complexity of academic writing displays a phrasal rather than clausal character, the corollary of which is a compressed rather than elaborated discourse style (the latter one being typical of spoken registers). Given this finding, the question arises as to how far the traditional view that information structure should be viewed as a single partition of information within a given utterance adequately accounts for genre-specific information packaging strategies. To provide an answer to this question, the current study sets out to explore and compare information structuring within what will be referred to here as ‘compression strategies’, namely the use of adverbial subordinate clauses, -ING constructions, and complex NP constructions across two different genres: the highly compressed genre of research article abstracts, and fiction. The findings reported here suggest that in more compressed discourse styles such as academic writing, there is a higher probability of encountering information structure partition not only at the clausal but also at the phrasal level. The present paper highlights the importance of genre variation as one predictor of variation in information structuring within constructions.

Exploring Post-critical Composition: MEmorials for Afghanistan and the Lost Boys of Sudan*

Abstract This article seeks to extend the concept of “post-critical composition” through an analysis of two MEmorials, the post-critical genre Gregory Ulmer [Ulmer, Gregory L. (2005). Electronic monuments. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press] has been exploring for 15 years. I resist the tendency on the part of some post-critical theorists to reject the role of genres and models in favor of perpetual re-invention of genres and pedagogies with each composition. Through a combination of product analysis and process reflection, this article documents the necessary but flexible role the genre of MEmorial played in a student composition, “MEmorial for Afghanistan,” and in my own composition, “Strangers in Strange Lands: A MEmorial for the Lost Boys of Sudan*.” This essay is an extension of not only post-critical composition but also online memorialization, described by National Public Radio [National Public Radio. (2007, May 28). Online memorials to the war dead. Day to day. Retrieved June 5, 2007, from http://www.npr.org ] as a “modern phenomenon” and identified by Joyce Walker [Walker, Joyce. (2007). Narratives in the database: Memorializing September 11th online. Computers and Composition 24(2), 121–153] as a potentially powerful means of encouraging “cyborg citizens.”

"Emotions-Only" versus "Special People": Genre in fan discourse

This essay looks at genre as a complex set of discursive threads running unevenly through production, TV text, and fan reception. Through a case study of the reception of fan favorite Roswell, this essay interrogates the role of genre in spectatorship. In its mixing of teen and science fiction elements, Roswell trod upon contested generic spaces, eliciting strong reaction from its viewers. Connections between genre and gender came to the fore, as producer commentary linked science fiction with male audiences and teen romance with female audiences. Fans responded with analyses that greatly complicated and at times overtly rejected industrial suppositions regarding the gendered work of genre. Through these fan conversations, we can witness the complexity of genre as discursive thread moving through not only TV texts but also multivariant fan responses. I intend this essay to work at two levels. My analysis of fan responses to Roswell models the possibilities of a close study of genre discourse. At the same time, my case study probes the nature of genre in fan engagement, as genre discourses intersect with other fan concerns such as character identification, perceptions of textual quality, and questions of gender representation. While we cannot necessarily look to fan accounts for proof of how viewers engage with genre, they do tell us how fans frame their engagement with genre, how they incorporate genre into their performance of fannishness, and how they perform and thus enact genre itself as a shared cultural process.

Editor's desktop

We begin this issue with ASIS&T news and activities. ASIS&T 2008 President Nancy Roderer brings us up-to-date with her President's Page on a number of important projects that are engaging the attention of the Board of Directors at present, including the re-compete of the contract to publish our journal (JASIST) and the search for a new JASIST editor. The Board has also approved our trying to create a new global alliance among information societies. Nancy also mentions the work of the placement task force and of the task force considering whether ASIS&T should become involved in the accreditation of information science programs. In another important development the Board has recently approved an open access policy for JASIST that allows authors to post preprints of their articles on their personal websites or the repositories of their institutions (but not subject repositories). Since we are a society with members heavily engaged in information research, including research about scholarly communication, ASIS&T and our Journal publisher, Wiley-Blackwell, have decided to study the effects of such a move. To implement this program, they jointly administered a baseline survey in January of this year, which Margeaux Johnson and Nancy Roderer discuss in their article “ASIS&T Scholarly Communication Survey” in Inside ASIS&T. Apart from activities at the national level, it is always interesting to look at the ASIS&T local chapter events, where so many innovative ideas are nourished. Also in this issue of Inside ASIS&T, Aaron Louie of the Pacific Northwest Chapter (PNC) reports on ASIS&T's first “unconference,” in this case a “BarCamp” called “InfoCamp,” jointly sponsored by the PNC and the University of Washington's ASIS&T Student Chapter. Don't know what a BarCamp is? Here's your chance to find out, and, more importantly, to discover how your chapter also might host a low-cost, exciting unconference. Our special section might be a good topic for a BarCamp — except that BarCamps don't have topics. Those of us who have had much exposure to library cataloging are sensitized to genre (and form) and their use of subject headings and classification systems. Catalogers, at least, also know the complexity and difficulties of genre, while all librarians deal with it in the arrangement of their collections. Archivists and records managers are also keenly aware of genre or form in records, which is usually closely related to the type of transaction being documented by the record creator and thus of great importance. And all of us are very much aware of the new genres that are being created by the digital environment — the homepage, the FAQ, the “about,” the blog, the wiki and so forth. What should the role of genre be in information retrieval on the web? Is genre information potentially a cost-beneficial addition to web search engines as a primary or a limiting attribute? Is it well enough defined for such broad use? Can it be identified automatically? How can its purpose — its link to the activity that produced the document — be exploited to add another dimension to retrieval and to the study of user behavior? These questions and others are the subjects of this issue's special section: Bringing Genre into Focus, edited by Luanne Freund and Christoph Ringlstetter. Six authors treat both sides of the debate and address some of the practical problems. Finally, if you want to sell your managers on adding genre to your website search engine, Ted Sienknecht and Andrew Carlin have some excellent advice for you. In our Information Architecture (IA) column Ted lays out how to use information advantage to your advantage to justify any IA innovation, while in a feature article Andrew Carlin provides some very practical, nuts-and-bolts guidance on how to make any interview, whether for academic research or for requirements analysis, a successful and productive experience for all concerned.

Melodrama and ethics in François Ozon's Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brûlantes/Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000)

François Ozon's third full-length feature film, Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brûlantes/Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000), was based on a text written by the German film-maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, well known for his interest in melodrama in the films of the Hollywood director Douglas Sirk. Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brûlantes also imitated Fassbinder's filmic style and borrowed from his visual motifs. This article argues that, far from being merely a post-modern exercise in style, Ozon's film makes an important contribution to current debates in contemporary French film-making concerning the role of genre in film-making. It traces the ways in which Ozon's film is linked to Fassbinder's subversive project and argues the case that Ozon's own film can be seen as an ethical intervention.

Acknowledging the Rough Edges of Resistance: Negotiation of Identities for First-Year Composition

In the interest of better understanding the challenges of enacting new pedagogies in the classroom, the following essay focuses on the role of genre and uptake in the relational negotiation of self-presentation. I argue that to bring our teaching practices in line with our best intentions and most progressive pedagogies we need to be aware not only that reliance on the legibility associated with familiar subject positions motivates student resistance in the composition classroom but, moreover, that our interest in securing self-presentations as teachers may motivate everyday interactions that work to maintain the status quo.

Constructing Genre: A Threefold Typology

Much genre research focuses on genre as typified, recurring discursive actions used by members of discourse communities. This article discusses the role of genre in a project that includes participants from different discourse communities. The participants created a single text to assist multiple audiences to ensure that buildings and facilities are accessible to people with disabilities. The author proposes a functional framework for considering the role of genre knowledge on the cross-disciplinary project.

Genre Analysis in Technical Communication

An increasing body of research relies on genre to analyze academic and professional communication and to describe how members of a community use language. The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of genre-based research in technical communication and to describe the different approaches to genre and to genre teaching. While some research focuses on the textual analysis of genres, other studies focus on the analysis of the social context and the ideology and structure of the discourse community that owns the genre, and on the role of genres as social rhetorical actions of the community. These two perspectives are also reflected in the teaching of genre in technical communication.

The Role of Genre in a Text: Reading through the Waterworks

In this article the authors analyze a child’s reading and retelling of a "complex text" that contains multiple story threads and genres to demonstrate how the reader deals with the text’s complexity as he reads. The authors discuss how struggling readers comprehend complex texts that are whole, rich and meaningful.

Television Teen Drama and HIV/AIDS: the role of genre in audience understandings of safe sex

Television Teen Drama and HIV/AIDS: the role of genre in audience understandings of safe sex

Television Teen Drama and HIV/AIDS: The role of genre in audience understandings of safe sex

This study focuses on audience understandings of safe-sex messages ?contained? in television drama. It focuses on the process of audience construction of meaning; on the work that audiences engage in to understand HIV-related television messages. Data consist of 20 focus group discussions conducted subsequent to the viewing of one of two AIDS-related television programmes. Following a Shotterian approach to meaning construction, analyses of audience transcripts indicates that genre is an important hermeneutic tool shaping audience understandings of, and engaement with, health related messages. However, audience emphasis on ?the messag? works against audience engagement with this message. The message is so clearly signalled to viewers that they are able to prepare their defences against the message before it even arrives. The implications for health promotion via mass media generally are discussed.

Television Teen Drama and HIV/AIDS: the role of genre in audience understandings of safe sex

Television Teen Drama and HIV/AIDS: the role of genre in audience understandings of safe sex

The Role of Genre in Preschoolers’ Response to Picture Books

Studies five preschoolers’ response to four genres of picture books: fantasy, realistic, poetic, and information. Finds (1) distinct patterns of response for each genre; and (2) personal associations to the characters, events, images, and topics seemed to form the basis for interpretation.

Responding to technical writing in an introductory engineering class: The role of genre and discipline

A case study of an experienced professor's comments on a design report in a first‐year engineering class was conducted over the period of an academic year. When compared with the commenting styles of technical writing teachers, the engineering professor's comments were found to be highly directive, and thus at odds with the preference for facilitative comments that prevails in composition studies. However, differences in genre conventions explain much of the discrepancy.

The Role of Genre in the Psycholinquistic Guessing Game of Reading

Introduces briefly the social, meaning-based linguistic perspective of genre. Describes how written language is different from oral language. Shows the complexity of written language structure by illustrating how the "element of description" is realized in various written genres. Examines the implications of making genre a more critical concern in literacy research and instruction.

The Ascent of Love: Plato, Spinoza, Proust

EW LITERARY HISTORY has been a pioneer in exploring the boundaries between philosophy and literature. Because of Ralph Cohen's creativity and vision, thejournal has asked hard, illuminating questions about the connections between philosophical form and literary content, about the moral vision embodied in works of narrative literature, about the role of genre and convention in the two disciplines, about the question of realism and antirealism. I feel great personal gratitude to Ralph and to the journal for the encouragement I received at the very beginning of my work on some of these questions, when Ralph agreed to publish an exchange between Richard Wollheim and me about Henry James's The Golden Bowl, inviting a distinguished group of literary and philosophical critics to comment. Without that encouragement I might have been less confident about devoting so much of my time to those issues, and perhaps much of my subsequent work would have been delayed or perhaps would not have existed at all. The quite marvelous thing about Ralph is that very many people in many disciplines in the humanities can tell the same tale. It would not be very profitable, I think, to pronounce in an abstract and general way on the role the journal has played in arbitrating what Plato calls the quarrel of long standing between the poets and the philosophers. It therefore seemed to me best to get on with the concrete exploration of that quarrel. I want to argue here that there is a part of the Western tradition of thought about love and its reform or ascent that cannot be well understood unless we do cross the boundaries that

Editor's Introduction: Essays toward a New Art History

Like most fields the humanities, art history is caught up what is sometimes called (melodramatically) a crisis or revolution methods, aims, and theoretical foundations. Symptoms of this transformation are not difficult to see: an interest subaesthetic, marginal, and noncanonical artifacts; skepticism and self-consciousness about the discourse of art history and its claim to be called a history; a questioning of the ontological and semiotic status of the objects of art history, particularly their relation to language; a reexamination of standard models of the producer and beholder that questions the cult of the artist as individual genius and the spectator as a finely tuned but passive sensorium; a reconsideration of the traditional divisions of labor between art historian and art critic, or between the silent visual artist and the loquacious commentator. following articles are best described as essays in, not on, the New Art History. They exemplify what we regard as some of the most interesting new directions the practical understanding of art: the discourse of art historical description (David Summers); the materiality of the pictorial surface (Charles Harrison); the role of genre (Norman Bryson); the relation of visual representation and language (Robert Morris, Jan Baetens, and W. J. T. Mitchell); and the mediation of social and economic history through painting (Elizabeth Helsinger). These essays constitute a kind of first installment of work resulting from our call for papers The Disciplines of the Eye. This call continues to go out, and we shall welcome contributions that attempt to take stock of current thinking the visual arts a more general way-essays on as well as in the patterns of thought emerging the study of visual representation.