Prophecy is a poorly understood genre, commonly understood as literature primarily focused on mantic visions of future events. A more nuanced understanding of literary prophecy recognizes the limits of this view, as well as the diversity of genres within many prophetic texts. These two views present one problem: forced readings of prophecy as a kind of reverse history on the one end and the problem of generic diversity on the other, resist an easy scheme of classification for prophetic literature. This study elucidates some of the problematic assumptions of primarily Biblical prophecy, and suggests that contemporary genre theory"“which views genre it terms of function more than a mere scheme of literary kinds"“can offer a unified conception of prophecy. From this, I suggest that prophecy can be defined as goal-oriented literary rhetoric intended to re-orient the reader or hearer into face-to-face aesthetic proximity with the Divine. The definition is defended utilizing a reading of the Denkschrift section of Isaiah, focusing primarily on chapter 5. The implications of this definition and the reading that follows are then explored through the lens of contemporary hermeneutics, where the theophanic encounter implicit in a reading of prophetic text is explored, and the proximity of second-person orientation is re-introduced to suggest that Biblical prophecy is intended to create a lived experience of the Covenant, where fidelity to the Covenant amounts to a face-to-face encounter with God.

This study establishes a comprehensive methodology for analyzing children's website content, based on both linguistic and rhetorical data, by employing defensible criteria to evaluate both qualitative and quantitative data. By employing genre theory as a prism for examining form, substance, and rhetorical action within children's websites, this study applies that methodology to a purposeful sample of five children's websites. Results of the analysis document the complex multimodal and multilinear nature of the websites studied and identify a possible new genre, the pop culture carousel website.

Since the late seventies, the violence, speed and spectacle associated with the genres of war films, Westerns and the spectacular melodramas of early cinema have developed into a distinct genre of its own – the action film. With the development of the stylistic language at the core of this generic universe came derogatory generalisations and a tendency to categorise simplistically. To overcome these simplifications, this thesis explores the shifts in generic language to distinguish its subtleties and complexities of logic. Overwhelmingly the genre is considered masculine, but the purpose of this thesis is to explore the logic of this masculinity and analyse the effect of the feminine upon it. Beginning with overviews of the theoretical attempts to grasp the concept of genre that focus primarily on the limitations of the view of their having distinct boundaries, the theory that genre theory has failed is investigated. Leaving this view of boundaries through an exploration of symbolic universes that have translucent boundaries, the filmic movement of genre passes back and forth through the theoretical frameworks. The intention is not to analyse the overall concept of genre, but to focus on the symbolic universe and the language intrinsic to action films. The rules of action cannot be simply transposed onto other generic categories but stand-alone. Genre theory does not fail if approached from a perspective of discourse analysis focusing on the development of symbolic universes. Using Jacques Lacan’s theory of the four discourses, and focusing primarily on the oppositions of the Master’s and the Analyst’s discourse, the question moves from the listing of conventions as the markers of the boundaries of genre, to exploring why the combination of certain conventions and signifiers coming together created the genre. Through Lacanian discourse analysis it becomes apparent that the generally acknowledged logic of masculine and feminine are limited. The masculine is the ‘norm’ that appears to need no explanation, but the feminine has transgressed the norm and shown the construction of fantasy inherent in the genre. This has led to post-action films that are ambiguous both in their generic structure and symbolic language.

In this thesis, I ask about the descriptive purchase on discursive events of some accounts of speech as action. To do so, I turn to speech act theory, which I read at first restrictively, and later more broadly, moving from John Langshaw Austin to John Rogers Searle to Judith Butler, appealing along the way to Charles Sanders Peirce, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean-François Lyotard and Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. In so doing, I construe speech act theory as a genre (or set of genres) of theoretico-critical inquiry. By genre I mean a set of differentiated, recurrent forms of practice which have their own functions or ends, their own means, protocols and postulates: their own speaking positions and objects of representation or inquiry. For my purposes, then, speech act theory denotes a capacious genre of inquiry turning on the topic of speech as action. I take this topic to raise a range of rhetorical issues concerning the pragmatic question of discursive linking. To talk of discursive linking, I suggest, is minimally to presuppose notions of semiosis, of rhetorical situation or occasion and of rhetorical agency, with its attendant postulates of intention and responsibility. I thus read speech act theory rhetorically, as an open set of engagements with the question of how we do things with words: how utterances come to count as action, and how utterance action is described as having determinate consequences and effects. I begin in chapter 1 by reading Austin for his two tensively related, if not countervailing, descriptive tendencies: those of illocution and perlocution. In chapter 2, I attend to Searle as an exemplary development of an illocutionary inquiry, before examining Butler’s work on hate speech and performativity as a type of perlocutionary inquiry in chapter 3. Illocution and perlocution, I suggest, comprise distinct engagements with the questions of speech as action and discursive linking. Although postulates of semiosis and situation, and figures of responsibility, intention and agency are put to work in both illocutionary and perlocutionary inquiries, in each they work differently. This differential work, I argue, marks the differing capacities of illocutionary and perlocutionary inquiries adequately to describe a discursive event. Different construals of speech as action tell different tales of uptake or linking, enabling and constraining different accounts of discursive events. With this in mind, I turn by way of an extended example in chapter 4 to the caso Belsunce, a high-profile homicide case begun in Argentina in 2002. I do so to suggest that a focus on utterance actions as semio-discursive events relates the perlocutionary concerns discussed in chapters 1 – 3 to postulates of cultural memory-work, kairos and rhetorical community. Taken together, this range of concerns helps us to describe the mediatic uptake of the Belsunce case as a particular, complex semio-discursive event. But a description of a discursive event is of course itself a sign, something which, as Peirce notes, ‘stands to somebody for something in some respect or capacity’ and which strives, in turn, to determine subsequent interpretant effects. In this respect, the critical description of discursive events is itself an instance of speech as action which cannot but continue to raise hermeneutic, rhetorical and semiotic questions of discursive upshot or uptake.

Thesis(M.A.)--Auburn University, 2006. / Abstract. Includes bibliographic references.

In this study, I examine the ways in which undergraduate students acquire the discourses of their chosen major. In particular, I focus on the complementary contributions of faculty members and academic librarians in students' acquisition of disciplinary discourses. Grounded in genre theory and Gee's (1996) notion of primary and secondary discourses, the study highlights the complex processes that students undergo to acquire and internalize the discourse of an academic discipline. Using a qualitative case-study approach, I consider the interrelated experiences of five undergraduate students, three faculty members, and two librarians at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. Data sources include students' written assignments gathered from their major coursework throughout their college careers; interviews with student participants, faculty members, and librarians; observational notes and transcripts of lectures in courses taught by professors from four courses; and course artifacts, including course syllabi and assignment sheets from the four courses. Data from this study highlight the complex matrix of influences undergraduate students experience as they acquire the specialized language of an academic discipline. My data provide insight into the ways in which some students are positioned to take up disciplinary discourses with ease while other students struggle to develop the same level of acquisition and academic fluency. I bring to light the instructional and institutional practices that facilitate student learning and document those instances where instructional opportunities were missed and where unwarranted assumptions compromised student learning. I conclude this study with series of recommendations, most notably, a greater participation by academic librarians in order to enhance the acquisition of disciplinary discourses for undergraduate students. Further, my data suggest that collaborative opportunities between and among faculty members and academic librarians are likely to enhance the effective teaching of disciplinary discourses. Because of librarians' role as simultaneous insiders and outsiders to the academic disciplines, they are uniquely well-positioned to assist students in acquiring the disciplinary discourses. This dissertation suggests that by making visible the cultural expectations and practices of academia, faculty members and librarians can collaborate to assist undergraduate students gain entry into the academic discourse community.

The purpose of this study was to determine how faculty members' previous writing experiences in a variety of activity systems shaped their current understanding of writing, as well as to analyze the ways in which this understanding manifests itself in the courses they teach.  Using a survey, interviews, genre analysis, and class observations, I aimed to gain an understanding of the ways that faculty members across disciplines transferred and/or recontextualized their own disciplinary writing knowledge.  Previous research on faculty writing knowledge is often limited to participants at universities with long-standing, formalized WAC programs.  Through nine case-study analyses of faculty across disciplines, this study expands the scope of previous research by focusing on a more diverse set of faculty to contribute to our knowledge of how faculty members negotiate their own understanding of writing with their goals for student writing.  The participants' ability to transfer writing knowledge was largely determined by the way they understood their own processes of learning to write. Those who understood learning to writing from a social interactive perspective transferred rhetorical knowledge among activity systems, while faculty who understood learning to write from a text-based ideology relied on their knowledge of form, grammar and/or mechanics.  Participants who shared a writer-based understanding, on the other hand, were resistant to the notion that writing can be taught.  Though not entirely inclusive, these unique understandings of how writers develop manifest themselves in the ways disciplinary faculty include writing in their courses. This study demonstrates the nuanced and complex reasons for faculty choices in relation to student writing and encourages WAC/WID writing scholars to consider the complexities of faculty understandings of writing knowledge. / Ph. D.

Chaucer scholars have long recognized the generic complexity of Troilus and Criseyde, but they have tended to read it primarily as a tragedy or romance or as a text whose genre is sui generis. The following essay attempts to read Troilus and Criseyde as an epic and to articulate how such a generic lens would reorient readings of the text. To do so, fresh definition is given to the term “epic,” and insights from genre theory are drawn upon. Ultimately, Troilus and Criseyde is an epic poem because it invests within the composite hero of two lovers the fact that societal stability depends in part on romantic involvement.

No description available.

This dissertation attempts to answer two questions. First, what is the social function of the letter of James? Second, how does James design the structure of the text to align with its communicative goal? This study presumes the letter of James as a member of ancient wisdom literature. Contrary to common (mis)understandings, ancient wisdom literature shows a general tendency in its composition. A legitimate sage collects and evokes old sayings and proverbs. Then, the wisdom is reinterpreted and contemporized for the current situation. Through this process, the sage helps his readers develop a sense of right and wrong, develop moral reasoning skills, and cultivate virtues. I will argue that this pattern, moral formation, is present in the unfolding of James’s letter to his diasporic readers. Regarding the structure of the letter of James, after Dibelius, many attempts have been made to present the letter as a cohesive text with a literary structure, which is unified by a single global theme. In this framework, most of what have been proposed as a structure of the letter is more or less topic (or theme)-based. Unfortunately, however, neither a rigorous definition of topic nor a method for determining it has been clearly stated. The limits of the topic-based approach become problematic when applied to the structure of James whereby diverse topics are scattered here and there throughout the text. Attempts to draw intricate lines between these units through topical or thematic similarities make the structure of James very complicated (e.g., inclusio or chiasm). This study attempts to break this methodological impasse by employing Ruqaiya Hasan’s genre theory developed in a systemic functional framework. James’s letter is delimited in terms of function, not topic or theme. In search for the function of each segment, I explore textual (semantic chain and cohesive harmony), ideational (transitivity, verbal aspect, and voice), and interpersonal meanings (grammatical person and speech functions).