Keywords

blog, blogs, pedagogy, Bakhtin, collective intelligence, genre, genre theory, online genres, online composition

Abstract

This thesis investigates the rhetorical features of blogs that lend them dialogic strength as an online genre through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin's theories of speech genres, utterances, and dialogism. As a relatively new online genre, blogs stem from previous genres (in print and online as well as verbal), but their emergence as a popular form of expression in our current culture demands attention to how blogs also offer us different rhetorical opportunities to meet our changing social exigencies as online subjects in the 21st century. This thesis was inspired by questions about how blogs redefine the rhetorical situation to alter our textual roles as readers, writers, and respondents in the new generic circumstances we encounter--and reproduce--online. Applying the framework of Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture and Pierre Levy's Collective Intelligence, this thesis analyzes how blogs enable us as online subjects to add our utterances to our textual collective intelligence, which benefits from our personal experience and the epistemic conversations of blogs as online texts. In addition, it is also an inquiry into how the rhetorical circumstances of blogs as textual sites of collective intelligence can create a reciprocal learning environment in the writing classroom. I ultimately examine blogs through the lenses of alternative pedagogy--informed by David Wallace and Helen Rothschild Ewald's Mutuality in the Rhetoric and Composition Classroom and Xin Liu Gale's Teachers, Discourses, and Authority in the Postmodern Composition Classroom--to suggest the potential consequences of a writing education that includes how we are currently writing--and being written by--our culture's online generic practice of blogs.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2008

Advisor

Bell, Kathleen

Degree

Master of Arts (M.A.)

College

College of Arts and Humanities

Department

English

Degree Program

English

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0002402

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0002402

Language

English

Release Date

December 2008

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Masters Thesis (Open Access)

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