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GENRE ACROSS THE CURRICULUM

UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

1 The Idea of Genre in Theory and Practice: An Overview of the Work in Genre in the Fields of Composition and Rhetoric and New Genre Studies Anne Herrington and Charles Moran.....................12 Reading and Writing, Teaching and Learning Spiritual Autobiography Elizabeth A. Petroff..........................................................................................................213 Writing History: Informed or Not by Genre Theory? Anne Beaufort and John A. Williams.............................................................................................................444 Mapping Classroom Genres in a Science in Society Course Mary Soliday.............................................................................................................................655 "What's Cool Here?" Collaboratively Learning Genre in Biology Anne Ellen Geller..................................................................................................................836 "I Was Just Never Exposed to This Argument Thing": Using a Genre Approach to Teach Academic Writing to ESL Students in the Humanities Rochelle Kapp and Bongi Bangeni............................1097 "Getting on the Right Side of It": Problematizing and Rethinking the Research Paper Genre in the College Composition Course Carmen Kynard........................................................1288 The Resum as Genre: A Rhetorical Foundation for First-Year Composition Shane Peagler and Kathleen Blake Yancey..................................................................................1529 Teaching and Learning a Multimodal Genre in a Psychology Course Chris M. Anson, Deanna P. Dannels, and Karen St. Clair...........................................................................17110 The Teaching and Learning of Web Genres in First-Year Composition Mike Edwards and Heidi McKee..................................................................................................19611 Writing in Emerging Genres: Student Web Sites in Writing and Writing-Intensive Classes Mike Palmquist...........................................................................................21912 What We Have Learned: Implications for Classroom Practice Anne Herrington and Charles Moran.....................................................................................................245References..........................................................................................................................................................................................254Contributors........................................................................................................................................................................................268Index...............................................................................................................................................................................................271

Chapter One

An Overview of the Work in Genre in the Fields of Composition and Rhetoric and New Genre Studies

Anne Herrington and Charles Moran

GENRE IN CLASSICAL RHETORIC

Genre is an idea with a history perhaps as long as that of thought itself. Early creation myths often speak of a creator who brings form out of a formless chaos-in Scandinavian mythology, a cow licks the form of the first human out of a shapeless ice block; in Judeo-Christian mythology, a creator brings order out of a universe "without form and void," and then in the next six days populates it with the "kinds" of animal and plant life. But for our limited purposes here, an inquiry into the value of explicit attention to genre in the teaching of writing, we begin with Plato and Aristotle, both of whom have, in different ways, framed the issues the teachers and students in subsequent chapters will struggle with. What are genres in writing? Do they exist as ideal forms in an empyrean, or in the structures of the brain? Or are these forms to be found in the language that participates in recurring social action? And how are these genres, once described and understood, best taught and learned? In the Phaedrus, Socrates argues that advice about form in the existing handbooks is misguided because it ignores the organic relation between form and content. He outlines advice about the form of a speech allegedly drawn from contemporary handbooks:

Socrates: "First, I believe, there is the Preamble with which the speech must begin. This is what you mean, isn't it-the fine points of the art?

Phaedrus: Yes.

Socrates: Second come the Statement of Facts and the Evidence of Witnesses concerning it; third, Indirect Evidence; fourth Claims to Plausibility. And I believe at least that that excellent Byzantine word-wizard adds Confirmation and Supplementary Confirmation.

Phaedrus: You mean the worthy Theodorus?

Socrates: Quite. And he also adds Refutation and Supplementary Refutation, to be used both in prosecution and defense. Nor must we forget the most excellent Evenus of Paros, who was the first to discover Covert Implication and Indirect Praise. (Plato 1995, 266d-276a)

Socrates' point is that form is not fixed but organic: that the parts must relate organically to the whole, and that form cannot be abstracted from content and practice, then codified, then taught. "Every speech must be put together like a living creature, with a body of its own; it must be neither without head nor without legs; and it must have a middle and extremities that are fitting both to one another and to the whole work" (264c). For Socrates, and by inference Plato, handbook rules will not guide you to this organic unity; the true guide is not the rhetorician's prescriptions but the soul's memory of its experience of the "heaven" of the true and the beautiful.

Aristotle, as Plato's pupil, echoes the language of organic form, particularly in the Poetics, where he divides poetry into kinds or categories: "I propose to speak not only of the art in general, but also of its species and their respective capacities; of the structure of the plot required for a good poem; of the number and nature of the constituent parts of a poem ... Epic poetry and Tragedy, as also Comedy, Dithyrambic poetry-and flute and lyre-playing-are all ... modes of imitation" (1954, 1447a).

The emphasis in the Poetics is most steadily on its description of the structure of the "species"-which we want to begin to consider genres: the epic, the tragedy, the comedy. True, for Aristotle the study of drama is valuable because of its social use: the function of tragedy, for example, is famously the catharsis, a process by which the performance leaves the audience better than it was through the "proper purgation of the emotions." But the emphasis in the Poetics is upon the formal properties of the performance, an emphasis that has carried into the idea of genre in contemporary literary criticism.

Shakespeare's plays, for example, are most often considered tragedies, comedies, or history plays. Those plays-such as Much Ado about Nothing-that do not fit these...