English 375: Rhetorical Genre Theory: Genres in Everyday Life
As humans, we don't just use language to communicate; we use language to influence one another, to define our sense of what is good, real, and possible, and to shape our perceptions of ourselves and others. How do we know where we are, or what we should/can do, or how to make sense of things we encounter? It might surprise you to know that rhetoric and genre are how we use language to do these things.
When people think about genres, they tend to think of them as classification systems--as ways of categorizing things like kinds of music, films, and books. However, genres are much more than that; in important ways, they are connected to ways of being, acting, and relating in the world. Whether we are aware of it or not, we rely on rhetoric and genres to understand, navigate, and communicate our sense of the world, the situations we find ourselves in, and our relationship to objects and each other. In this course, we will take these two taken-for-granted and often misunderstood terms and examine what they can teach us about how we as humans organize and create our social lives, influence our and each other's perceptions, negotiate relations of power and difference, and inter(act) in the world.
We will begin the course with an introduction to rhetorical genre theory and explore its claims that genres are not just ways we organize and create kinds of texts but also ways we organize and create kinds of social actions. We will learn how genres embody, reproduce, and enact cultural ideologies—beliefs, values, and assumptions about what is possible, appropriate, and meaningful. We will also learn how genres can be used to challenge and disrupt ideologies. From there, we will learn how to use genres to study social actions and how to put our knowledge of genre to work to help us participate more effectively and critically in social actions. In short, we will learn how genres work, how to study them, and how to use them to achieve our social and communicative goals.
All course texts will be available electronically via the course Canvas site.