In a focused and compelling discussion, Anis Bawarshi looks to genre theory for what it can contribute to a refined understanding of invention. In describing what he calls "the genre function," he ...explores what is at stake for the study and teaching of writing to imagine invention as a way that writers locate themselves, via genres, within various positions and activities. He argues, in fact, that invention is a process in which writers are acted upon by genres as much as they act themselves. Such an approach naturally requires the composition scholar to re-place invention from the writer to the sites of action, the genres, in which the writer participates. This move calls for a thoroughly rhetorical view of invention, roughly in the tradition of Richard Young, Janice Lauer, and those who have followed them. Instead of mastering notions of "good" writing, Bawarshi feels that students gain more from learning how to adapt socially and rhetorically as they move from one "genred" site of action to the next.
As something that surrounds, extends, and presents a text to the world, the phenomenon of paratext is gaining more and more attention within the discipline of Translation Studies. This edited volume, ...with contributions by five Nordic scholars, aims to build on that attention by presenting five case studies on paratexts in translations into Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. A special focus lies on the paratextual mechanisms at play when works from different source cultures are translated into a Nordic target context. The translated works under scrutiny belong to genres such as literary novels, non-fiction works, and religious texts, and the paratexts surveyed include footnotes, covers, blurbs, introductions, and literary reviews. The scholars represented in the volume all work in Translation Studies, or at the intersection between Translation Studies and other disciplines.
It is widely accepted by New Testament scholars that the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles probably originated as two parts of one work by a single author. In spite of this, the books have ...been assigned to very different genres: Luke is traditionally viewed as a biography of Jesus, and Acts as a history of the early church. Comparing in detail the structure and content of Acts with the formal features of history, novel, epic and biography, Sean Adams challenges this division. Applying both ancient and modern genre theory, he argues that the best genre parallel for the Acts of the Apostles is in fact collected biography. Offering a nuanced and sophisticated understanding of genre theory, along with an insightful argument regarding the composition and purpose of Acts, this book will be of interest to those studying the New Testament, Acts, genre theory and ancient literature.
In this ambitious and venturesome book, Peter W. Rose applies the insights of Marxist theory to a number of central Greek literary and philosophical texts. He explores major points in the trajectory ...from Homer to Plato where the ideology of inherited excellence—beliefs about descent from gods or heroes—is elaborated and challenged. Rose offers subtle and penetrating new readings of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey , Pindar's Tenth Pythian Ode , Aeschylus's Oresteia , Sophokles' Philoktetes , and Plato's Republic . Rose rejects the view of art as a mere reflection of social and political reality—a view that is characteristic not only of most Marxist but of most historically oriented treatments of classical literature. He applies instead a Marxian hermeneutic derived from the work of the Frankfurt School and Fredric Jameson. His readings focus on illuminating a politics of form within the text, while responding to historically specific social, political, and economic realities. Each work, he asserts, both reflects contemporary conflicts over wealth, power, and gender roles and constitutes an attempt to transcend the status quo by projecting an ideal community. Following Marx, Rose maintains that critical engagement with the limitations of the utopian dreams of the past is the only means to the realization of freedom in the present. Classicists and their students, literary theorists, philosophers, comparatists, and Marxist critics will find Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth challenging reading.
Notions of Genre Grant, Barry Keith; Kurtz, Malisa
11/2016
eBook
Much of the writing in film studies published today can be understood as genre criticism, broadly speaking. And even before film studies emerged as an academic discipline in the 1970s, cultural ...observers within and beyond the academy were writing about genre films and making fascinating attempts to understand their conventions and how they speak to, for, and about the culture that produces them. While this early writing on genre film was often unsystematic, impressionistic, journalistic, and judgmental, it nonetheless produced insights that remain relevant and valuable today. Notions of Genre gathers the most important early writing on film genre and genre films published between 1945 and 1969. It includes articles by such notable critics as Susan Sontag, Dwight Macdonald, Siegfried Kracauer, James Agee, André Bazin, Robert Warshow, and Claude Chabrol, as well as essays by scholars in academic disciplines such as history, sociology, and theater. Their writings address major issues in genre studies, including definition, representation, ideology, audiences, and industry practices, across genres ranging from comedy and westerns to horror, science fiction, fantasy, gangster films, and thrillers. The only single-volume source for this early writing on genre films, Notions of Genre will be an invaluable resource for scholars and students of film genre, film history, film theory, cultural studies, and popular culture.
Originally published in 1988. Edgar Dryden challenges recent criticism that has tended to discredit—or at least devalue—the importance of "romance" as a thematic and generic category of American ...fiction. In The Form of American Romance, he examines its evolution and meaning through readings of five exemplary texts: Hawthorne's Marble Faun, Melville's Pierre, James's Portrait of a Lady, Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, and Barth's Letters. Each of these novels treats the problems of reading and writing in a self-referential way that reflects on the questions they dramatize, and Dryden has chosen each with the others in mind. Taken together, they chart a line of development with representative examples of what literary history calls romanticism, realism, modernism, and postmodernism, and thus they suggest a certain story about the continuity of the American novel.
PDF
