Following Carolyn Miller’s (1984) definition of genre as social action, subsequent work in the field of rhetorical genre theory has focused on two aspects of her account. The first is the claim that “a genre is a rhetorical means for mediating private intention and social exigence” (Miller, 1984, p. 163). The site of this mediation is now referred to as the subject—a term that is imported from psychoanalysis and critical social theory. I am concerned that the theoretical freight carried by this term—with its claim to address the “big questions” of subjectivity—diverts us from our focus on “how the genre works as rhetorical action” (Miller, 1984, p. 159). I shall replace the subject with the agent, moving then to argue that bringing uptake to bear on agency helps shift the debate to a more strictly rhetorical terrain. The second aspect that has been focused on is exigence: the “social motive” of rhetorical action, “an objectified social need” lying at “the core of situation” (Miller, 1984, pp. 158, 157). I consider an ambiguity at the heart of this concept of exigence between the work it does in accounting for punctual rhetorical action—the genre in actu—and its work in generalizing over some genre in virtu. Because of this, I move to replace exigence with alternative ways of conceiving the site of rhetorical action. Throughout, I accept broadly the framework of Rhetorical Genre Studies. While I seek to solve the problems through a rigorous reliance on rhetoric, I move beyond this frame when I discuss the restrictions on a theory of genre imposed by an exclusive assumption of verbal or discursive acts.
The article presents a hypothesis that seeks to explain the present difficulties of modern languages as playing out the consequences of the demise of philology and the rise of linguistics in its place. While the founding gesture of the latter as a distinct discipline was to exclude cultural and social considerations, the former is an account of the cultural memory of the language. With the demise of philology, modern languages have lost their disciplinary unity, and hence the principle upon which to construct coherent curricula. As a result, they have lost their intellectual authority. The article proposes a revisionist analysis of the philological tradition, divesting it of its essentialist assumptions, and focusing on its methodological principles. It argues that memory (and with it, the emerging field of memory studies) be adopted as a central term in an account of culture fitted to the teaching of modern languages to foreign learners in a world in which memories, just as much as languages, are what we do not predictably share. It makes some suggestions as to how to shape curricula on these principles, insisting that in order to make good on our belief that culture informs language, those curricula should focus selectively and systematically on the discursive arts. Storytelling, from personal to collective, from explicit to implied in political debate, should take a central place in our students' learning; as a result, 'story listening' should be central in their intercultural encounters.
This paper focuses on Colette's writing for the periodical press, particularly her writing on fashion, and sets out to discuss it in terms of its capacity to effect the high purposes of satire. Its method of reading is contextualizing, rather than immanent -it brings it into relation with a number of issues on which it bears: the history of fashion, the history of the body, generational change, the visual determinants of the fashions of the early twentieth century. Although humour is prominent, Colette is not content merely to make jokes. Ancient satire, which derives from the rhetoric of praise and blame, is the source of literary and art criticism, and Colette borrows both its modes and its vocation to elevate fashion writing to the level of cultural critique. Moralistic, it teaches something about social mores by making fun of them. Hence, Colette makes us laugh at the fact that fashion affects not only clothes, but bodies; style fashions the body and hence the self.In comparison with the fiction, Colette's journalistic output has attracted relatively little interest among scholars of her work. Notable exceptions are David H. Walker's book on the fait divers, and Diana Holmes's introductory study. 1 There are also those whose focus is the women's press or women journalists in the early part of the twentieth century, 2 but this quasi-sociological approach is unlikely in the nature of the case to yield readings of the texts. A recent -notable -example of the literary disinterest to which I allude can be found in Julia Kristeva's recent work on Colette: following several paragraphs to Colette's work at Le Matin, Kristeva sums up the relation of Colette's journalistic work to her literary art: 'Cet art percutant de la saisie du de´tail s'e´panouit aussi et tout particulie`rement dans ses portraits, chroniques et autres notules journalistiques ou the´aˆtrales, qui proposent non pas un jugement politique ou esthe´tique, mais une captation a`la fois dramatique et ge´ne´reuse de l'autre.' 3 This passage occurs in the biographical chapter of Kristeva's study; the only other substantial mention of the journalism consists in the incorrect claim that Colette 'invented' the interview.
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