The best introduction to Bakhtin as he is at his mostprovocative and lucid form. The next book to read for those interestedin the man would be the Rabelais and the Dostoevsky book.
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays presents six short works from Bakhtin's Esthetics of Creative Discourse, published in Moscow in 1979. This is the last of Bakhtin's extant manuscripts published in the Soviet Union. All but one of these essays (the one on the Bildungsroman) were written in Bakhtin's later years and thus they bear the stamp of a thinker who has accumulated a huge storehouse of factual material, to which he has devoted a lifetime of analysis, reflection, and reconsideration.
Though science fiction and fantasy have existed as literary genres for well over a century, a working definition of the terms has yet to be determined. Ursula K. Le Guin, who emerged as a popular science fiction and fantasy writer in the 1960s, has not only witnessed, but also experienced first-hand the shifts and transformations of these increasingly popular genres. Delve into her fantastical worlds and investigate several of her famous works in this study ideal for high school and undergraduate students.
Genre and Television proposes a new understanding of television genres as cultural categories, offering a set of in-depth historical and critical examinations to explore five key aspects of television genre: history, industry, audience, text, and genre mixing. Drawing on well-known television programs from dragnet to The Simpsons, this book provides a new model of genre historiography and illustrates how genres are at work within nearly every facet of television-from policy decisions to production techniques to audience practices. Ultimately, the book argues that through analyzing how television genre operates as a cultural practice, we can better comprehend how television actively shapes our social world.
In Writing Genres, Amy J. Devitt examines genre from social, linguistic, professional, and historical perspectives and explores genre's educational uses, making this volume the most comprehensive view of genre theory today.
Beginning by defining genre as a typified rhetorical action occurring at the nexus of situation, culture, and other genres, Devitt argues that genre highlights variations in texts necessary for creativity, a treatment that opposes the traditional view of genre as constraining and homogenizing. In step with contemporary genre scholarship, Writing Genres does not limit itself just to literary genres or to ideas of genres as formal conventions. Devitt succeeds in providing a theoretical definition of genre as rhetorical, dynamic, and flexible, as well as ideological and constraining. This theoretical approach sees genres as types of rhetorical actions that people perform and encounter everyday in academic, professional, and social interactions. As such, jokes, sweepstakes letters, junk mail, mystery novels, academic research papers, small talk, lectures, and travel brochures are all complex genres of their own. Genres such as these have the power to ease communication or to dec! eive, to enable someone to speak or to discourage someone from saying something different.
Featuring 583 essays
that vary in length from 500 to 2,000 words and have been written by critics,
professors of popular culture, and experts on various genres of current music,
Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Popular Musicians since 1990 is a companion
to the six-volume Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians: Centennial
Edition (2000). While the Centennial Edition focused on classical music, there
is extensive coverage in the new set of contemporary rock, pop, country,
hip-hop and R & B. Popular musicians from other genres are also treated,
among them Danny Elfman, the Chieftains, Yo-Yo Ma, Wynton Marsalis, and Stephen
Sondheim.
The writing style is refreshing in its accessibility to a broad range of
readers.
