Exigency for this post: this week is my turn to present in one of my winter quarter classes (Professional Writing Thoery). We're supposed to give an oral presentation on a theory book of our choosing, and on Allison's glowing (and repeated) recommendation I've chosen Anis Bawarshi's Genre & the Invention of the Writer. I've been really curious about genre theories, especially since reading Carolyn Miller's keystone article "Social Theories of Genre" last year, so I'm glad to be reading this excellent work. Chapters in the book are first devoted to theory, and then to practical application within the composition classroom.
One moment that might make me look REALLY silly: let me start out by saying I'd like to hug his reference list. Amazing list of essays and books--the ones on it that I've read (in whole or in part) I've very much enjoyed, and the ones on it that I haven't yet read are ones I wish I had time to get into. Just some of the As and Bs, to give you a taste: Althusser, Bakhtin, Batholomae, Bazerman, Berlin, Bishop, Brodkey, Burke, Certau. Maybe this is just me being green....a lot of sources are really famous things that everyone has read. But it amused me.
At any rate, since I have to present this book in some detail (the rest of my class hasn't read it, so I'm responsible for summarizing the main ideas and applying it to Professional Writing practice), I'll be using my blog to go through the book chapter by chapter.
The preface is interesting, in that she immediately theorizes the idea of prefaces themselves--a preface is a genre that destabilizes a text and ts automony. They allow us to recognize (Althusser!! just read an excerpt of his chapter on individuals and ideology!!) that "writers and texts are never alone" (ix). Some key points from the preface:
- Texts have no "stable origin"; writers and texts are "always building on, always adding to other writers and texts" (ix)
- "In examining the dynamic relationship between writers and the texts they produce, I am interested in how writers both preface a text and are prefaced by other texts, namely genres, in relation to which they write. As such, the act of writing becomes a complex site for the enactment of prefaces, in which writers and texts preface each other, constantly inaugruating and deferring their own beginnings" (ix)
So, here's where I briefly go out on a limb. Two concepts immediately came to mind when I read this page of the preface and the first two pages of the introduction: intertextuality and rhetorical situation. Bawarshi's conception of the beginning of texts--of invention--is, admittedly, quite a separate idea from intertextuality, but I like to think of the rhetorical situation of a text being intertwined in just this "intertextual" way. That is, Bawarshi's writing about invention, which he sees as a beginning to the act of writing, and this beginning is always entwined with other ideas, with texts that relate to each other, gesture at each other, are nuanced by each other.... The rhetorical situation from which a text begins is always related to other texts: writing is always a kind of "at once an act of initiation and of continuation" (2).
I can already see how this will translate into practice: I think particularly of the passage of Rewriting in which Joseph Harris tells students that their writing is always a response to something, to other texts, to ideas. Writing builds on what has been said before, whether or not we are aware of it.
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UPDATE: More on Bawarshi's book available in this later post.
I can already see how this will translate into practice: I think particularly of the passage of Rewriting in which Joseph Harris tells students that their writing is always a response to something, to other texts, to ideas. Writing builds on what has been said before, whether or not we are aware of it.
- - - - - -
UPDATE: More on Bawarshi's book available in this later post.
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