| Abstract | This article turns to genre theory’s recent explorations of uptake , broadly defined as the ways genres interact, as a resource forsketching a pedagogy of shuttling between genres. Using uptake, I intend to reconceptualize multimodal compositions as a meansof participating in rhetorical ecologies that consist of transactions between genres instead of thinking of remixes as an end inthemselves. In this article, I first define the concept of uptake in detail and discuss its use in rhetorical genre studies. After furtherillustrating uptake through an analysis of transactions between YouTube parodies and the 2005 German language film Downfall, Idiscuss existing scholarship in multimodal composition that draws on genre but not the idea of uptake in order to lay a foundation fora pedagogy that highlights the links, feedbacks, and rules that coordinate genres. My aim in the last section is to sketch possibilitiesfor how teachers and students can deploy the concept of uptake as a rhetorical tool to strengthen their awareness of genre andmultimodality. In doing this, I hope to reposition multimodal projects as beginnings or midpoints that lead to students’ emersioninto public discourse rather than culminations or end goals in themselves. Integrating studies of uptake into writing curricula in thisway will help students to make sophisticated rhetorical decisions in the age of media convergence.
|
