Emerging Genres

crmiller's picture
Institution: 
NC State University
Department: 
English
Level of Instruction: 
Graduate
Categories: 
Genre Theory
Brief Description of Course Content and Objectives for Students: 

A special topics course addressed to master’s students in English, Technical Communication, and Communication, and doctoral students in Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media, as well as Design. Aims to develop a multidisciplinary theoretical understanding of genre theory, to examine a wide variety of genres, and to discern and analyze new genres as well as old genres when they were emerging, with an eye on the balance between stability and change and on the relationships between genre, identity, and power.


Course description

Genres are ways of acting together, recurrent interactions that enable social coordination. Genres both constrain and enable, they regulate and potentiate; they link together in systems and ecologies that help constitute our social identities, institutions, and cultures. Genre has been an active area in rhetorical studies in the past 20 years. But genre is a concept that cuts across disciplines and media: literary studies, the visual arts, music, film and media studies, linguistics, information science, technical communication.

The new media have created new opportunities for symbolic action and thus the potential for many new genres. But new genres raise the question of how genres change. How do they balance stability with innovation? How do we develop shared recognitions and identifications in unprecedented situations? How are emerging genres related to older ones? Can the same theories that were developed for print genres account for visual and digital genres?

This special topics course is addressed to master’s students in English, Technical Communication, and Communication, and to doctoral students in CRDM and Design (master’s students should register for ENG 583 and doctoral students for ENG 798).

We will read widely, to develop a multidisciplinary understanding of genre theory and to begin answering some of the questions raised above. We will also examine a wide variety of genres, to discern and analyze new genres as well as old genres when they were emerging, with an eye on the balance between stability and change and on the relationships between genre, identity, and power.

Moodle website

Course objectives

  • Develop a multidisciplinary understanding of genres and genre theory
  • Examine the historical development of one or more genres in detail
  • Develop a critical vocabulary for describing and analyzing genres and genre change
  • Propose and design a new genre
  • Contribute to the development of an academically useful web resource on emerging genres

Requirements & grading

Final grades will be based on your registration category and the quality of your work, as shown here:

 

assignment
master's
students
doctoral
students

Short paper #1: genre identification

20%

20%

Short paper #2: genre history

20%

20%

Independent project, abstract, presentation

25%

35%

Disciplinary report (team)

15%

10%

Coding project (team)

10%

5%

Participation

10%

10%

TOTAL

100%

100%

Note that the distribution of credit for master's and doctoral students is somewhat different. In addition, my expectations on each assignment are more rigorous for doctoral students than for master's students. Details about each assignment are provided on the Assignments page and will be linked from each due date on the course schedule.

Comments

crmiller's picture
Submitted by crmiller on

The table for the grade distribution didn't paste in correctly--I guess Drupal didn't like the Moodle html. Also, I'm not sure the link to the Moodle site will work--not sure I can make it available to guests on a continuing basis.