Disorganized Musings

The last couple of days, when I’ve done any work at all, I’ve mostly just worked on the Computers and Composition article that I’m supposed to be revising.  I’ve gotten through most of the articles that the reviewers suggested I read, and I do think that I have a much better sense of the conversations out there surrounding authorship and genre.  The next step, I think, will be to figure out exactly how to work those conversations into the mix.  My thinking is that it might work best to spend something like a paragraph glossing each conversation, and perhaps the places where they intersect (i.e. in Carpenter’s most recent piece on interface and genre).  I will need to read some of the older work by Landow, Lanham, and Joyce, too.  I’m imagining that those guys mostly talk about authorship and media, but I really don’t know enough about them at the moment to speak to it.

If I had to gloss the conversation about authorship, I would first and foremost say that it often draws on Foucault, and therefore it’s often concerned with issues of textual ownership, intellectual property, and the like.  After all, for Foucault, the author-function is more about property and power than it is about writing.  I’ll have to look back at my article, but several of these (the inciters, Hess) talk about citation as a major concern and as a rhetorical move.  I’m pretty sure I talk about citation and naming and the like in my article, so those might be good places to work in some of these sources. 

In terms of genre, I’m a bit less sure.  I understand and am in total agreement with Carpenter’s argument about using genre theory to understand interface as the boundary between genre systems or activity systems.  But that’s not exactly my project.  He’s basically asking about the affinities and overlaps between academic literacy and pop culture literacy.  I suppose I’m asking something similar, but really I’m concerned with a single genre that is at least trying to situate it squarely within an academic activity system, although as the work of Cheryl Ball and others shows, it’s not exactly been a smooth transition.  There’s still a lot of resistance.  Regardless, though, I think I can use his ideas as a jumping off point, to say, now that there is a “born-digital” academic genre that has started to become relatively stabilized, how can we use genre to understand it?  Another way I might use him is to discuss the “relations” idea from Bawarshi’s genre function.  If, as Carpenter says, students—or, by extension, authors more generally—are points of articulation for multiple genre systems, then that certainly constitutes another kind of relation, one I hadn’t quite thought of but that makes a lot of sense. 

I seem to be moving more toward the possibility of lacing these writers into the discussion rather than just blocking them into a single paragraph/section.  I suppose either way it could work, but it might feel more natural to have them laced in throughout.  As I go, I might also need to think about what I want to do with this conclusion, since it seems not to work.  I haven’t looked at it in a bit, but apparently the move to pedagogy at the end doesn’t quite work since I don’t really talk about pedagogy during the entire piece.  Moreover, I settle pretty easily on genre as the better explanatory concept.  I’ll need to review that, though, because it may be that different concepts are going to be better for explaining different ideas.  Authorship may in fact be better in the long run for discussing issues of intellectual property and the like.  However, you may still be able to subsume that under genre, as part of the social action that genre performs in some cases—after all, there are plenty of genres that aren’t inherently endowed with an author-function.  Take, for example, Bawarshi’s discussion of the Patient Medical History Form (PMHF), which has a writer (actually, multiple writers, since one composes the form and another fills it out), but not necessarily an author, or not an author-function.  There is no issue of ownership with that text, or, rather, the issue of ownership functions very differently there than in, say, an academic article or a novel.  No one expects monetary reward for the PMHF.  There are no copyrights or contracts associated with its production.  In terms of distribution, it’s instead governed by HIPAA, I believe, and it is used and appropriated in a number of different ways.

Regardless, the point is that maybe in the conclusion I don’t necessarily want to dismiss the author-function, although I don’t think I do that anyway.  We’ll see how it turns out.