Emerging Genres

So: this week we wrap things up. For Tuesday, please read my Stranger in a Strange Land: Grokking in the Americas, and come with thoughts from the paper-you-will-just-have-written about this emerging genre? medium? we've been calling "the blog." For Thursday, come ready to perform for us all what you've learned...and have yet to think about. Please archive those scripts here.

And thanks. I've learned a ton.

Anne 

This week, our theorizing about the genre of blogging will encounter a few test cases: Tim Burke's Easily Distracted and Kate Thomas's Words on Food; we'll also be having conversations with Tim and Kate in class. And Christina has a challenge for all of us....

We turn our attention, for the remaining weeks of this class, to the newly emergent genre of the blog. IS it a genre? What genre is it? Something we've seen before? (think: novel--> romance-->autobiography--> diary-->). Or is it a hybrid? Or something completely novel?

What examples of blogs can you call our attention to here, that might be useful as test cases for our study? What do you see? What do you think about what you see?

We ended our last class with this passage from "The Custom House," Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Introductory to The Scarlet Letter":

"we may prate of the circumstances that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent and within these limits, an author, methinks, may be autobiographical, without violating either the reader's rights or his own."

So... What are the rights of the reader?
What are the rights of an author?
What happens to our understanding (and experience) of The Scarlet Letter if we read it as an example of the genre of autobiography?
What are the characteristics of an autobiography?
If this novel...

This week we'll be reading some theory by the "father of deconstruction," Jacques Derrida, and by the feminist critic Mary Eagleton, who applies Derrida's deconstructive theories to the intersectioning questions of gender and genre. We'll also begin our reading of The Scarlet Letter, a 19th century romance by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which is just full of duplicity and complexity waiting to be deconstructed. Your thoughts about any/all of this...?

Welcome back from spring break. This week, we'll be finishing up Uncle Tom's Cabin, and dipping again into the Duff's collection of Modern Genre Theory. So what are you thinking (on any one of range of related topics)? For instance:

Darwin famously said, "Crying is a puzzler" (i.e.: he couldn't figure out the adaptive use value of crying...) And if the point of studying the world is to change it, and/or the point of representing the world is to change it....well? What is the use-value of crying? What purpose does crying serve (not to put too fine a point upon it) in Uncle Tom's Cabin?

We're beginning this week with a range of genry theory written by the Russian Formalists, then turning our attention on Thursday to Uncle Tom's Cabin, a 19th century American novel that differs strikingly from the one we've just finshed.

Come to class on Tuesday ready to put "your" theorist into play with those others will be reading...and talk outloud here about what you noticed as you did so, and/or as you encounter the sentimental fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe for the first time.

We begin to dig, this week, into David Duff's collection of essays on Modern Genre Theory. What intrigues you, amid all the claims of his introduction, or in Benedetto Croce's initial crochety piece about the limits of thinking generically? How does any of this theorizing intersect with your experiences in finishing off Moby-Dick?