The Author-Function, The Genre Function, and The Rhetoric of Scholarly Webtexts
Section snippets
Digitizing the Author-Function
In seeking to “locate the space left empty by the author's disappearance,” or the “death of the author” posited by Roland Barthes and other structuralist and poststructuralist theorists, Foucault (1994) argues that a work is constituted by the author-function, which refers to the author's name as it exists in relation to his or her works rather than simply to the individual named (p. 345). This link between the author's name and his or her texts plays “a classificatory function” of relating
The Genre Function of Scholarly Webtexts
Although the author-function is still a significant system of constraint for scholarly webtexts, other traditional theoretical systems may be equally useful for describing their mode of being. A small but growing number of scholars have begun considering the way genre, for example, can help us understand digital, multimodal, and new media rhetorics. Rick Carpenter (2009) writes, “[W]e can use genre theory to define texts by what they do and how they are used rather than by what they are, a
Conclusion
In his recent book Lingua fracta, Brooke (2009) argues that we may have jumped the gun with our analytical approaches to new media: “Faced with the opportunity to develop new practices and/or rethink our current practices, too often our response has been to search for terms that can comfortably encompass them all” (p. 130). Instead, Brooke (2009) spends his book redefining and even renaming the classical rhetorical canons given the range of ways users engage with new media. I hope my essay has
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I would like to thank John Schilb. My conversations with him provided the basis for this article, and I am grateful to him for pushing me to think about what systems of constraint I might apply to scholarly webtexts. I would also like to thank Tarez Graban: her guidance and patience as I explored the density of rhetorical genre theory has proven invaluable. Finally, I would like to thank the editors of Computers and Composition and the two anonymous reviewers for their
Christopher Basgier is a Ph.D. candidate in English with a concentration in Composition, Literacy, and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has presented papers at the Thomas R. Watson Conference, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and Computers and Writing. Currently, he is developing a dissertation on the genres and practices students use as they analyze and/or produce visual texts in college courses.
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2013, Computers and CompositionCitation Excerpt :Recent studies still tend to focus on interactions between similar genres, a fact that limits rhetorical possibilities. For example, Basgier (2011) drew on Bawarshi (2000, 2008) and Rick Carpenter (2009) in order to mobilize genre as a way of categorizing and valuing webtexts. Although Basgier attended to “generic relations,” he did so largely in regard to relations between texts within the same genre, their ability to construct identities in particular, and he relied on remediation, the process by which new genres “establish relations with antecedent genres,” including “the print-based scholarly article…as the newer genre remediates the older one” (p. 154).6
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Christopher Basgier is a Ph.D. candidate in English with a concentration in Composition, Literacy, and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has presented papers at the Thomas R. Watson Conference, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, and Computers and Writing. Currently, he is developing a dissertation on the genres and practices students use as they analyze and/or produce visual texts in college courses.