Writing in Times of Crisis

This chapter focuses on a memoir and a film that narrate the experiences of Kurdish writer Behrouz Boochani in an Australian refugee camp in Papua New Guinea in order to show how genres organically develop out of human engagement with social and historical circumstances. The author discusses the novel and the film as examples of how writers' interactions with the world impose rhetorical orientations and nurture genre formation. This chapter illustrates that, as opposed to the dominant view of rhetoric as a means of persuasion, the essence of rhetoric and genre formation is engagement with what the author calls “phenomenological autoethnography.” The author argues that studying writing in times of crisis makes the phenomenological and autoethnographic foundations of writing visible because in crises rhetoric is unapologetically used to resist injustice and build resistance through “poetic realism,” which consists of fluid genre practices that can help capture the complexities of human experience.

Multilingual Genre Practices in International Relations

Globalisation has produced not only denser, but also linguistically more complex communication networks. Multilingual practices have transformed the academic and professional lives of language learners, and imposed new requirements on LSP teaching. This article foregrounds genres in multilingual globalised contexts. Genres have been recognised as one of the key focuses of LSP. Although previous research highlighted the importance of developing relevant field-specific genre practices, little attention has been paid to the nature of genre repertoires in the field of International Relations (IR). We report on the findings of a qualitative study into genre practices of the IR community. We set out to examine the typical genres of IR in academic and in professional settings. We focus on the languages in which these genres are enacted, and on the transformation of genre practices that occurs as a result of the community members’ trajectories through different academic and professional or institutional contexts. The analysis of genre collections and of the data collected through semi-structured interviews with IR students, professors, and graduates, reveals the rich, diverse, and asymmetrical patterns of genre use in three languages: French, Slovene, and English. The study suggests that the informants’ disciplinary communication has changed considerably over the past twenty years, and that the changes in the genre ecologies require new approaches to teaching about genres. Based on the findings of the study, the paper discusses the challenges of multilingual realities for LSP teachers and genre analysts.

Identity and impoliteness: The expert in the talent show Idol

Premised on the belief that both identity construction and im/politeness assessments relate to norms associated with genre practices, the aim of this paper is to examine the interconnections between identity co-construction and impoliteness in a media genre: the talent show. This aim is innovative in so far as im/politeness has traditionally been related to the notion of face, rather than identity. Our study draws upon a corpus of 160 interactional sequences from the UK and US versions of the talent show Idol. All sequences in the data include music expert Simon Cowell, who has been singled out as playing the role of the malicious judge by both journalists and scholars. However, to our knowledge, no previous study has undertaken a micro-analysis of the linguistic resources deployed by Simon Cowell to construct his expert identity or has examined the role that impoliteness may play therein. This is what we set out to do in this paper. To that end, our analytic framework combines socio-constructivist approaches to identity construction (Anton and Peterson 2003; Joseph 2004; Bucholtz and Hall 2005; De Fina et al. 2006) with a recently revised, discursive approach to im/politeness, i.e., the genre approach (Garcés- Conejos Blitvich 2010, this issue).