Apologies done right

This blog has previously discussed apologies if for no other reason then because they are an extremely fascinating genre. As mentioned here (with further references; in particular to the best genre blog ever to exist) a true apology has four features.

• sincere, genuine
• no "but"s (as in, "I'm sorry, but here's my excuse")
• specific about your own actions
• commitment not to repeat the offending action

Simple as that may sound, it often fails. Probably, but I am speculating, because the first point, which is on the surface of it the most flimsy of the four, gets in the way of the other three. It is very hard to look like you assume blame unconditionally if you don't mean it; and it is equally hard to commit to not repeating an offense if you're actually not convinced you've done something wrong. However, sometimes, just sometimes, it's done right. Here is an example of what to do if you've put your foot in it (or, as we'd say in Danish, "stepped in the spinach planting" ("trådt i spinatbeddet")).

Friday March 12th, 2021, an MBA education at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU)—usually the epitome of respectability—published an advertisement article in order to convince private enterprises that they needed the expertise of the MBA-education to handle Metoo properly. Now, I have no idea how the text came about but it managed to make female employees—not sexual harassment against them—into the Metroo-problem they would teach their prospective MBA-students how to handle. Personally, I'd rather take sensitivity classes from a rhinoceros. My wife stumbled upon it and pushed it into my hands. So, trying to ally up a bit, I called out the SDU in a Danish-language thread on twitter.

    Now, I don't carry a lot of weight on Danish twitter, but this one had the potential to do some damage anyway, if the ball started rolling. The twitter account doesn't need to be that heavy for the impact to be. It was picked up quickly, and it could have grown into a major crisis at a considerable speed. However, someone at SDU had a watchful eye out (also, I did tag them like three or four times in the thread), and it was a question of mere hours before this reply appeared:

It translates like this:

Dear everyone. We support #Metoo. The advertisement was not an expression of SDU's values or politics. It is discriminatory. We hereby offer an unconditional apology. We are going to give the internal processes at @SAMF_SDU (The faculty of Social Sciences. SA) a serious quality check. Thank you for reacting to the advertisement.

The Dean of the Faculty was equally quick. Here's his reply. Shorter, but no less to the point.

Translation:

Sometimes you just have to surrender unconditionally*. SORRY, SORRY SORRY. There's really not much more to say. We must do a lot better...

Much as I did not admire the original advertisement, I do admire this reaction. The reply from the central, and more formal, account is centralized and quite formal. It speaks on behalf of the university and it apologizes with a description of how the advertisement violated the central values of the university. Knowing how heavy institutions universities are, I'd suggest this reply has taken some work to establish and ensuring the necessary approval. It performs every point of the apology right. It is sincere and devoid of states the transgression with clarity "it was discriminatory", and it promises systemic improvement on the relevant point as would be expected of the systemic level of a university as represented by the official twitter-account of the university.

The Dean is the leader directly responsible for the advertisement, even if chances are he only ever read the advertisement after seeing the criticism. Therefore, the statement has to be more personal to do the work involved. And lo and behold, it IS more personal. You can almost taste the abject exasperation at the situation. The specificity is a little less defined than in the more official tweet, but the double emphasis (triple word + upper case) plus the declaration of unconditional surrender more than makes up for it. Moreover, there's still not a trace of an "if" or a "but", and the promise of improvement is very strong and once again with a double marker: the statement itself, and the three "to be continued" full-stops at the end of the tweet.

Knowing a bit about how deans work, I know what kind of trouble I would have been in during my days as middle management at the University of Copenhagen if my actions had forced the dean into making such a statement publicly. In this situation that knowledge, I admit it, affords me a certain grim satisfaction.

The apology is a rich, and somehow magical, genre. I sometimes say that it can transform transgression to community. In the case of institutional apologies like those in question they do additional work. The first is damage control. By absolutely refusing to defend the statement, the university and the faculty secures that the fallout is kept at a minimum and that responsibility for the statement is limited to the institution which made it in the first place.

    Moreover, as many other institutional crises, this one offers a chance for an improved practice, but only if it is taken seriously. In heavy institutions like universities you often only learn through blunderers. You find yourself having put your foot in it, and this gets you asking what "it" is. So, the commitment to not repeat the offending action is also an opportunity to improve on an existing institutional practice. Thus, stupid as the original action was, the University of Southern Denmark may actually find itself a better institution for it. Uptake, as always, is almost everything.

* The Danish reads "lægge sig fuldstændig fladt ned" which literally translates as "lie down completely flat." It's an idiom, but its literal meaning adds to the sense of surrender in the expression.

Threats, not-threats, genre, and the Strange Case of the Suspended Bretwalda

We always understand genres, Anne Freadman has usefully explained, as alike, but different from, other genres. Adding to this, a central feature of genre use is its dialogicity (from Mikhail Bakhtin, obviously): uses of genre arise as responses to, or uptakes of, previous genre use, and in turn try to secure what kind (genre) of response it will get; in almost all cases without ever being able to fully secure it beforehand. There's always the free action of the next agent to contend with.

The strange paths of academic life have led me to play a small part in the study of threats as carried out by Forensic Linguistics; and alongside good colleagues, Marie Bojsen-Møller, Tanya Karoli Christensen and Amy J. Devitt, I have even published a research article about threats and genre. 

Forensic Linguistics addresses criminal threats, a highly pertinent subject—which is, alas, of increasing importance. However, there's another side to threats which is not as important to Forensic Linguistics but interesting and relevant in other contexts. Many of these other kinds of threats are legal, and some of them are even useful—or fun. But I get ahead of myself.

Threats, research states (the references are in the article above), consist of three elements. 

• Futurity
• Sender's responsibility
• Recipient's harm

As in "I (sender) shall (futurity) do (responsibility) this bad thing (harm) to you (recipient)". The purpose of the threat is intimidation. There may be other purposes, but this one is overriding. A threat is usually made illegal by the character of the harm it threatens to cause. If someone threatens you with public rebuke, it may be unpleasant, but it's not usually illegal; if they threaten you with a beating, it's illegal, because the beating is.

As a genre researcher originating from the field of literature I've been interested in how rhetorical genres are recontextualized and used as elements in fictions. This goes for threats too. Fictive threats confirm to other threat except for one thing: They don't exist; or rather they exist as parts of a fiction and as such the proposed harm is also fictive. Thus, they don't really intimidate anyone outside the fiction, or at least they are not meant to, and reporting them to various authorities is a failure of genre. Let us call them not-threats for the sake of the distinction and recalling Freadman's distinct idea of the not-statement which, to be meaningful, must imply a similarity as well as a difference. Thus, it is meaningful to say that a refrigerator is not a deep freezer, but it is almost never meaningful to say that it is not a rhinoceros—true as the statement may be, it conveys very little information. 

One more (well-known) piece of information about threats: They are prevalent on social media; very often as part of a pattern of abuse and harassment, and thus usually reportable per Terms & Services on the various SoMe platforms. Also making threats will usually get you kicked off the site—unless, of course, you happen to be a patently useless American president—because then you need to actually attempt (AND fail) to overthrow Western democracy in order to get shut down.

All of this brings me to Blate. This is his portrait.

A really good-looking helmet, would you not say? And also an account on twitter—or a series of accounts as you shall see.

I don't actually know who the operator of the accounts is, and it really doesn't matter. Blate, in his various instantiations, is a person on twitter pretending to be not a secret agent but a Bretwalda, that is an old Saxon king from around the 8th century. Aside from some sharp, but fairly centrist, political commentary, Blate engages in behavior fitting of a fairly badly informed and definitely not very civilized Saxon lord. He fights Danes, in fact many of my interactions with him are about precisely this. Sometimes he resists Danish occupation of English territory, The Danelaw, or anachronistically shells Copenhagen (as in 1807). He also lumps Swedes, Norwegians and Finns as "Danes" while he is at it and calls his (equally fictive) housecarls "TO THE SHIELDWALL" when he sees a "Danish" flag; even if it's white with a light blue cross. Also, he has a long standing battle with another twitter account concerning the right order of jam and cream on a scone. They are approaching 500 almost consecutive days of battle as I write this. The nickname "Blate", btw, is derived from one of his earlier forms where his twitter handle was @BlatantLie. 

Not recognizing him as a role-playing account is a failure of genre. 

Enter threats. Or rather not-threats. Befitting a warfaring, somewhat uncivilized, Bretwalda he frequently threatens to behead people. Now, given that he is a fictive character acting as Saxon lord, this is hardly very intimidating. And his twitter-correspondents all expect to be challenged to a duel to the death by axe or by scone. Formally speaking, the statements fit the threat as genre; as in "I Bretwalda (sender) shall (futurity) do (responsibility) the beheading thing by scone or battle-axe (harm) to you (recipient)". However, the point isn't intimidation (or rather: the intimidation is fictive), so all his correspondents invite his threats on purpose and take them up as lovely occasions for witticism. These are not-threats. Taking them as threats is a failure of genre.

And yet, SoMe being what it is, sometimes it happens. Somebody, possibly many people, stop by and report the not-threats as threats to twitter. The uptake transforms the not-threat to a threat, even though no one was ever threatened, much less intimidated. And the Bretwalda, just being an long-dead Saxon lord and not a criminal American president, gets suspended. This, of course, is a failure of Twitter's safety team in interpreting the full communicative action and context, the full genre use, of the not-threats, but given just how many reports they have to handle I can see how it happens. 

And Blate comes back. Always with his beautiful helmet and his quirky demeanor to do battle against the Danes and for jam before cream on a scone. Until the next time someone fails to recognize the distinction and interplay between two genres that are alike yet so so different. The threat and the not-threat.

Sacred Eating as Genre. An appreciation

My esteemed colleague Dr Meredith J. C. Warren has published a fascinating book on a genre called "hierophagy". Here, for your enjoyment and (hopefully) your enlightenment is a post on the book and its use of genre. It is written from an interdisciplinary genre research perspective.

The reference in—sort of—APA 6th:

Warren, M. J. C. (2019). Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature (Vol. 14). Atlanta: SBL Press.

And the cover. Not too sexy, but you know this is how these things look:

Let me add, that I really like Dr. Warren a lot. She is both a brilliant scholar and a very nice and energetic human being. I am a better researcher and a better person for knowing her. So, do not expect anything particularly belligerent. Today, I am not in the business of harsh criticism, but in the business of being extremely interested and making remarks to a piece of very fine scholarship. In other words, this is as much fun as academia gets, and I am here to enjoy it, not stomp upon it. I like having academic fun. I am just that kind of guy.

What is "hierophagy"? The book defines it as "specialized, sacred eating" (1). The book chooses it's topic from "Ancient Mediterranean Literature" with a clear focus in the Bible but also with a number of texts from the surrounding historical landscape. The basic idea is that somebody in a text consumes some item of food with an otherworldly origin (note that, apparently a book can be food; at least it can be eaten in a sacred way). The hierophagic eating transforms the eater and establishes a connection between the eater and the otherworldly realm. Persephone consumes food from Hades and is bound to the realm; John eats a scroll and has divine visions.

So, what is the genre angle?

Well, the hierophagic meal is itself a genre. It's a recurrent form of action with a particular social purpose. If you will, a "situation based fusion of form and substance". At this point, obviously, the genre crowd hears the voice of Carolyn Miller reverberating in the background. So here she is—in the foreground—with Chuck Bazerman. Don´t they look just lovely?

But I digress.

 The book is not a full-on piece of genre research; we'll get back to that, but it does rest on two moves already made in genre research, and it does so very well.

The first is, as hinted, Carolyn Miller's "Genre as Social Action" (1984). If you are somehow and do not know Miller, you can find the article here. It is the most quoted piece of genre research ever, methinks, unless you count Aristotle's Rhetoric. Also, there is a little piece on Miller and her influence on my blog here.

Anway, Miller describes how genres are forms of action. They serve rhetorical purposes in our social life, we use them in situations to achieve aims that are achievable through discourse. We do things with genre. This understanding has been foundational for modern genre research. It has been expanded, nuanced, developed, and sometimes twisted, but it has never been fully replaced, and is as alive today as it has ever been—and that's very much alive. 

Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature takes up the hierophagic meals as a genre in this Millerian sense, as it sees these meals as social actions. They are ways things are done in the social world. In the terms of genre research this, incidentally, is an uptake. A concept from Anne Freadman that Dr. Warren would enjoy immensely, I believe. I don't think it's online, but it is discussed in two central pieces by Freadman:

Freadman, A. (1994). Anyone for Tennis? In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the New Rhetoric (pp. 43-66). London: Taylor & Francis
Freadman, A. (2002). Uptake. In R. Coe, L. Lingard, & T. Teslenko (Eds.), The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre (pp. 39-53). Cresskill Hampton Press Inc.

Anyway, Miller only gets Dr. Warren halfways there, because her book discusses "Ancient Mediterranean literature" (emphasis added), not ancient Mediterranean society more broadly, and Miller's concept is directed at an actual sociality. Real people doing real people stuff. Enter stage (right) a lesser researcher; yours truly, who has the honor of playing second violin to Miller's primarius. (Oh, and being second violin to Miller is extremely honorable.Nothing modest here; I'll take that chair any day).

A few years back I made an aesthetic take on Miller by superimposing her concept of genre as social action on narrative literature and thus describing "Genre as Fictional Action".  The study—less groundbreaking than Miller, but you can be less groundbreaking than Miller and still be the s....!—can be found here. It is a lot of fun, if you ask me. The basic idea then is, that you can analyse genre use in a literary work in the same way that you can analyse genre use IRL by looking at the genres themselves, the way they are used, and the—intradiegetic—social situation in which they appear as attempted actions. 24/

This enables Dr Warren to make a central move in her own readings: she does not need to address the IRL-role of hierophagy as a genre; she just has to see the way it works within the literary text she addresses with no commitment to a sociality beyond the texts.

I shall not enter into the text readings in Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature. I might be able to add a thing or two from a perspective of literary analysis, but they are basically the scholarly realm of other researchers. Instead, I shall address two questions that are very much genre questions, and where I may have something more useful to add.

1) The position on the book vis-a-vis what I sometimes call genre research proper.
2) The hierophagic meal as an embedded genre.

1) By "genre research proper" I mean the field of research that either works with genre as its primary topic, or systematically uses existing genre research as an approach to other topics with a clear view to influence our general understanding of genre through its studies.

 The book is, obviously, much closer to the second approach, but it stops short of engaging with developing theory within the genre research field, among other things because it's field of reference is too slim to make a contribution like that. In case you are wondering: No, this is not a criticism of the book, it's an attempt to locate it in relation to genre research. In fact, the book has its own field or fields, as is evidenced by its rich bibliography from the study of ancient Mediterranean literature. It's first and most important contribution lies here. It's use of genre research is ancillary to this purpose. In that perspective, adding in a truckload of other genre researchers, some a lot better than me, would defeat the purpose by obscuring where the contribution lies.

Should we, nonetheless, choose to see it as a contribution to genre research proper, which is not an unreasonable uptake (there's Anne Freadman again lurking at the edge of the thread) even given what has been said above, we might say that it contributes to a return of aesthetics in genre research. Aesthetics has been well-nigh dormant in genre research proper for decades, but has been slowly resurrected these last years and might get to play a more prominent role in years to come. At least, I'll quote it in that function in future work.

2) By "embedded genre" I understand a genre that is contained within the framework of another genre; a pie chart in a report, a joke in a lecture, a threat in a novel. It is under-theorized in current genre research, and Bakhtin's description of primary and secondary genres has been given too much weight, including in my own "Genre and interpretation" (here). (I have a full-scale research article about it loitering in my drawer, but there are some revisions still missing before submission, so it might be a while).

In the context of Dr. Warren's book, it's worth noting that hierophagy as she describes it is systematically an embedded genre. It is not an overarching genre for a whole work, but is a genre that works as an element in other genres. So, it must always be seen in the context of the larger work, in which it appears. And it has this micro-genre kind of function: it is used as a building block in a larger whole. This does not make it any less interesting—personally I wrote a complete book chapter on the riddle in Grundtvig. Even if it only ever appears as an embedded genre in Grundtvig's writing, it is highly consequential. But it is worth noting because, among other reasons, the biblical form criticism also focuses on this kind of genre; even if it is wholly unaware of a organized field of genre research—often for purely chronological reasons: the form critics largely came first. So the questions become:

1) Does hierophagy exist on a "higher" level; is there such a thing as a work of hierophagy? 

2) Does the book's treatment of the embedded genre improve our understanding of the workings of genre in ancient literature compared with form criticism? 

3) What can the book teach us about the working of embedded genres generally, even if it does not use the term? 

I believe at least question is sort-of answered in the book, but I'll leave the answers to Dr. Warren herself. 

Anyway, a highly interesting book. I very much recommend it to you. Go buy, go read!

NB: This thread was originally a thread on Twitter. You can see the thread here.

NB NB: You can buy the book here.

The "self-own" as retroactive genre

The screengrabbed tweet below is a clean example of a genre that is sometimes called a "self-own". 

(Screenshot by Twitter user David Harrison @davidlharrison)

The tweet itself has suffered a fate which is known as being "ratioed" on Twitter. Being "ratioed" means that the number of comments to a tweet strongly outpaces the number of likes and retweets. It's not a good thing, because it invariably means that the tweet has been met with a storm of negative replies (a positive respondent would also like and sometimes retweet the tweet.)  As I am writing this, the tweet has risen to 1,300 likes and 305 retweets, which is quite good, but also to a staggering 6,700 comments—which is downright awful. 

The replies are merciless. They point out that the Hotel Imperial in Vienna is a Mariott Hotel, and thus American owned. They point out that Austria's government up till recently was closely allied with the far right. They point out that the Austrian government cannot be held responsible for the state of elevators in Austrian hotels, because they are privately owned, since Austria is nowhere near a socialist country. They point to the staircases. Also, there is incivility going on. Loads and loads of often highly original incivility. it's all very entertaining—and very well deserved.

Without speaking of it as a genre, Merriam-Webster's listing of "Words We're Watching" includes this beautiful description of the self-own: 

On social media, people will often try to put themselves in positions where they look smarter than the person with whom they are arguing, only to have it blow up in their faces. They might, for example, inadvertently highlight evidence that contradicts their point, or simply present themselves in a way that comes off as more pathetic than the person they are trying to upstage. It is during such instances that we become witness to the glorious phenomenon of the self-own. (here) 

One could almost think that the description was written for Luntz' tweet; and it's a very good genre summary. The genre label "self-own", thus, describes a social action that backfires badly and in which a person tries to do one thing, usually something not very pleasant, only to experience a well-deserved backfire. The person has tried to "dominate" (the word is, again, from Merriam-Webster's description) someone or something, but finds that the only person being dominated is himself or herself.

Now, it's fairly clear that the genre of the self-own is not one, most people would actually attempt. In Rhetorical Genre Studies, a movement I seem to belong to without having ever actually applied for membership, we usually see genres as recurrent forms of discursive action. You need something done, and the genre is your way to do it. 

All this is well and good in most cases, but there are interesting exceptions. The self-own is one such exception. It is a retrospective genre label, one that is attached to an utterance after the fact; once it becomes clear that the utterance has actually turned into a self-own.

One of the key concepts in contemporary genre theory is Anne Freadman's rightfully famous concept "uptake", it describes genre use as based on an inherent "bi-directionality". The fundamental idea is that the genre identity of a given utterance is never completely fixed, but can be modified by later genre uses. The self-own demonstrates this by being a genre that can well-nigh only be applied after the original genre use. As Freadman describes it, a genre use invites certain uptakes, but cannot fully secure them. The genre identity of any given utterance is thus subject to a negotiation—and at times an interpretive power struggle. 

The self-own is by its very definition an agonistic genre, as it not only retroactively defines the utterance in a negative light, but portrays the person making the utterance as a someone who has brought the backlash on herself or himself, and who deserves the backlash to the full. Frank Luntz is a case in point.

There is however, at least one way—and dare I say: a very sensible one—in which a genre user can use the existence of the self own pro-actively. It has to do with securing and inviting uptakes. The Luntz tweet invited the uptake that turned it into a self-own, even if that uptake was unwanted. In the process it failed to secure the positive, affirming uptake it was aiming for. However, it remains fully possible to stop and think before speaking. And one thought might be: "does this utterance invite uptakes that would turn it into a a self-own". This line of thinking is highly recommended as it can lead to all kinds of good things—genre wise, discursive, socially, and otherwise. 

But, of course, if you are the kind of person liable to post bigoted stupidities, hoping for reflection and discursive pre-meditation may be too big a genre ask. 

Genres, a tentative definition

Genres are flexible and versatile cultural categories structuring human understanding and communication. On the one hand, they are strongly regulative, but on the other hand, they allow considerable freedom on the part of both the utterer and the recipient. Genres combine to form larger patterns through social and organizational structuring into genre sets, systems, hierarchies, and chains, and through creative uptakes on the part of individual genre users. 

Auto Direct Messages on Twitter. A rant.

There is something inherently contradictory about the auto-generated welcome messages sent out to new followers by some Twitter-accounts. 

A typical one may go like this:

Thanks for following me! I am an educator, a consultant and an activist. I am also the founder of the Democracy School, a theater director and an artist. I speak English and German.

 

And then a link to a homepage.

Being annoyed, but also somewhat curious, I have tried several times to reply approximately like this:

Aaaaah then tell a genre researcher this. Custom messages to new followers annoy me horribly, I have even unfollowed people on that account. I like your twitter-account and I am not going to unfollow over this. But as a researcher I do wonder: What is the social or communicative purpose of the custom message, and what does it achieve. Would you enlighten me with your reflections on this.

 

2. apr.Sendt

As a reply to this inquiry, I get nothing. Zilch, nada, rien, an utter and complete blank.

I think the worst auto-welcome, I ever got, was this one from a reasonably established comedian:

FYI I'm pretty Shameless. If you haven't used Uber yet, we both get a $20 credit if you use code [...] or download Uber from here

 

And then some Uber-code. 

Well, did I follow you to assist with your Uber-bill? I don´t think so. I am quite a staunch supporter of the orderly Danish work market, and thus highly skeptical of a thing like Uber. My reply:

Thanks for the offer. In Denmark, however, Uber's activities are - rightfully I believe - seen as a right wing attack on the worker's rights safeguards protecting the salary and working conditions of ordinary citizens in Denmark. So, I am not taking you up on your offer. I hope for your understanding, and I can see how things might look different from an American perspective with so many fewer safeguards in place.

 

15. nov. 2016Sendt

This, too, went unanswered. I cannot imagine why.

Here is a genre use I simply don´t get. Or at least I don´t get the handling of it. 

I get it, if an account holder is too big or too important to reply to direct messsages. That's fair. I follow J.K. Rowlings on Twitter, but I don´t expect her to reply to a direct message from me. However, she doesn´t send out direct messages either. 

What offends me is, I think, a violation of the basic norms of the letter as a genre. The direct messages-function in Twitter is clearly personal; it is hidden from view, allows for much more extended communications than the 140-character long public tweets, and letters requires active effort to send to people. (Even if that effort is establishing an auto-message.) It is a variation on a mailbox or a chat-function. As such, it invites personal interchange. 

Now, as other genres the letter attributes certain roles to the participants. If you initiate a communication by sending a letter, you are inviting a certain uptake: a reply. And you are, in turn, expected to read it and answer back, should the situation, or your co-correspondent, so require. As the original sender you are, thus, in one sense an applicant asking for the receiver to participate in an exchange. 

So, the violation is that the sender of the direct message ignores the uptake, s/he has invited, and treats the communication as a one-way street. This implies a quite different hierachy: 

The sender is an interesting person, thus allowed to send messages to strangers with only the flimsiest invitation (a click to follow on Twitter). The receiver, however, is nothing of the sort. S/he is so insignificant that even given the obvious invitation to reply inherent in the letter, taking up this invitation in an actual reply does not merit the attention of the sender who, thus, diminshes the receiver to the point of complete insignificance. 

This convoluted hierachy is actually accentuated by the genre's norms, as the supposed equality of communication in the letter, highlights the lack of equality in the actual use of the genre. 

This is obviously failed communication, and a poor use of the genre. All it communicates is condencension: I am interesting, you are not. By consequence, instead of making a favorable impression, this is what you actually get:

However:

I did get one automated welcome message that I liked. A parody account, @QueenCerseiReal, mixing current US politics with a Game of Thrones-world, sent me an auto welcome in character:

Thank you for working with me to Make Westeros Great Again! Retweet and share to help boost the signal and drown out the lying maesters with their FAKE NEWS. #MWGA

 

To me that was part of the act, and for once I perceived it as a nice way to greet me. Thus, I did not dishonor it by returning my somewhat insolent inquiry. What's more, when the person behind the account, whom I still don´t know, found me ranting on Twitter over the messages s/he inquired personally in a direct message whether the auto message had been out of line.

I denied this, but I also took the renewed letter as an invitation to ask about the use of the automated messages and got a very thoughtful reply. Here in a series of direct messages with my short replies omitted:

These aren't technical terms but I think of it as hard and soft engagement - hard engagement in that it's one more click from your account to mine, meaning my stuff is theoretically more likely to show up in your feed because you opened the message and, possibly, responded.

 

So my tweets might be more likely to show up in the "while you were out" etc.

 

Soft engagement in that it's a direct appeal, in character and on message, so if you found me through a recommendation you're more likely to take an actual look at my profile/posting history

 

So with my podcast auto DM, there is a direct call to action - "here is a podcast, here is how to find it"

 

With this it's "in case you followed this when you were drunk, here is a reminder that it exists"

 

Unsurprisingly, the person who answers, even initiates further communication, is also the person who proves capable of reflection. And, as mentioned, this was a parody account, not even somebody marketing themselves.

Thus, the genre had an actual role to play. It just took a role player to know how to play the game of genre well enough to get an actual communication and leave a good impression.

The post was inspired by this article, as well as some twitter exchanges - and a lot of annoyance.

Rhetorical genre studies for literary PhDs

A very learned friend just now asked me a pertient question of cross-disciplinary research communication. She asked:

If you were giving a reading on our rhetorical view of genres for literary doctoral students, what would you consider giving them?

That is indeed a very good question. There is no standard text and no standard curriculum to work from. So what would my curriculum look like. Leaving aside any of my own texts that might apply, this is my suggestion for a minimal reading list:

Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). The Problem of Speech Genres (V. W. McGee, Trans.). In C. Emerson & M. Holquist (Eds.), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (pp. 60-102). Austin: University of Texas Press.

Bazerman, C. (2002). What Activty Systems Are Literary Genres Part of? Readerly/Writerly Texts, 10(1 & 2), 97-106.

Devitt, A. (2000). Integrating Rhetorical and Literary Theories of Genre. College English, 6, 698-718.

Devitt, A. (2009). Re-fusing form in genre study. In J. Giltrow & D. Stein (Eds.), Genres in the Internet (pp. 27–47). Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

Freadman, A. (2002). Uptake. In R. Coe, L. Lingard, & T. Teslenko (Eds.), The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre (pp. 39-53). Cresskill Hampton Press Inc.

Miller, C. (1984). Genre as Social Action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70(2), 151-167.

Miller, C. (2017). "Where do Genres Come From". In C. Miller & A. R. Kelly (Eds.), Emerging Genres in New Media Environments (pp. 1-34). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Paré, A. (2002). Genre and Identity: Individuals, Institutions, and Ideology. In R. Coe, L. Lingard, & T. Teslenko (Eds.), The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre (pp. 57-71). Cresskill: Hampton Press Inc.

The list is made specifically with literary PhDs in mind. There are three main considerations involved:

1. I want my students to read texts central to the RGS-tradition
2. I want to connect to knowledge they already have
3. I want them to find their reading relevant and to stay interested

So why these texts? Here are a few of the reasons for each.

Bakhtin's text is the only text in the batch with a claim to literary studies. And his name is known to literary scholars. So it's a good way to connect the two fields. There are, of course, reasons why this text has had a long history in RGS. It is immensely inspiring and full of starting points for discussions of central points in RGS; genre use, genre variance, interlocking of genre, the lingustic basis for genre etc etc. 

Bazerman would definitely be represented by another text if I were to just teach RGS, and not RGS to literary PhDs. He, or at least one of his peers, (Russel or Andersen come to mind), should be here to represent the sociologically oriented side of RGS. I choose this one for the literary PhDs, because it deals with literary subject matter, is a quick read, and will annoy them constructively.

Devitt is the RGS researcher who has engaged most prominently with literary studies. Again: other texts might be more viable if I were to just teach RGS, but for literary PhDs I choose these two. The first, because it brilliantly represents the potential for dialogue between literary studies and RGS. (And also displays an actual interest in literature.) The second, challenges some of the basic assumptions in RGS, in a progressive and constructive way. This will accomodate some of the more critical views that a literary PhD would be likely to hold in approaching RGS, and thus open up the conversation

Freadman is quite a headache. You can´t do contemporary RGS without her concept of "uptake". And to do RGS proper you´d want to have PhDs read "Anyone for Tennis?". But getting a grip on "uptake" is hard enough, without having to actually grasp that text. The 2002-article is, of course, less of a heavyweight in terms of influence and originality, but it is much more accessible.

Miller, yeah you have to do Miller. It's just not RGS without "Genre as Social Action". So, grap those recurrent situations for a rhetorically sound definition of humble de facto genre. Then, send a loving thought to Campbell and Jamieson, and go do some social action. The 2017 text is interesting, not just because it's excellent, but also because I have had several literary colleagues recommend it to me already, so has already struc a bell with some literary reseachers. Moreover, I personally like it because Miller returns a little bit to one of my own favorite books on genre, Alastair Fowler's ultra-literary Kinds of Literature which IMHO is long overdue for a renaissance.

Finally, Paré's text. It is one of a batch of texts that work with the dangers inherent in the ideological nature of genre; the way genres control how we think and how we can act, even if this does not reflect reality, or our own best interests. There are several other options on this point, but I like this one, not just because it is a pleasant read, but also because it is very very sharp. 

So that would be my bid. Other suggestions are welcome.