Classified by Genre: Rhetorical Genrefication in Cinema

This dissertation argues for a rethinking and expansion of film genre theory. As the variety of media exhibition platforms expands and as discourse about films permeates a greater number of communication media, the use of generic terms has never been more multiform or observable. Fundamental problems in the very conception of film genre have yet to be addressed adequately, and film genre study has carried on despite its untenable theoretical footing. Synthesizing pragmatic genre theory, constructivist film theory, Bourdieusian fan studies, and rhetorical genre studies, the dissertation aims to work through the radical implications of pragmatic genre theory and account for genres role in interpretation, evaluation, and rhetorical framing as part of broader, recurring social activities. This model rejects textualist and realist foundations for film genre; only pragmatic genre use can serve as a foundation for understanding film genres. From this perspective, the concept of genre is reconstructed according to its interpretive and rhetorical functions rather than a priori assumptions about the text or transtextual structures. Genres are not independent structures or relations among texts but performative speech acts about textual relationships and are functions of the rhetorical conditions of their use. This use is not only denotative, but connotative, as well, insofar as certain genre labels evoke aesthetic or moral judgments for certain users. This dissertation proposes the concept of meta-genres, or the sum total of textual and extra-textual attributes plus the evaluative valances a given user associates with a generic label. Meta-genres help guide interpretation and serve as a shorthand for evaluative judgments about certain kinds of films, and are thus central to the kinds of taste politics negotiated through film texts. The rhetorical conditions of genre use can be typified, and this dissertation adapts concepts and methods from the field of rhetorical genre studies to show that the film genre use is most readily observable through its uptake rhetorical genres. These rhetorical genres, in turn, index the social groups and recurring situations that they are called upon to meet. By studying examples like academic writing, popular press reviews, filmmaker interviews, internet message board comments, and digital media recommendation systems, one can identify how specific deployments of generic terms serve as a nexus of text, user, group, and social activities, and can develop a methodology for studying genre as use relative to those dimensions

The biology of heavy metal : evolutionary links between science and culture

The modern landscape of heavy metal can be seen as a splintered and interconnected mass of seemingly disparate styles and sub-styles. Literature that examines the history and culture of this music is increasingly common, but musicological study into the nature of developments within metal music are rare. In this thesis, I define the ways that metal changes and expands over time, using a Darwinian evolutionary framework to explore the variety that is central to metal music today. I devoted particular focus to imagery within this study, and through the analysis of the conventional and outlying themes of 10 distinct subgenres, I identified lines of influence and inspiration between them in order to understand the evolutionary nature of developments within the genre. In order to effectively determine the conventions that govern the ideas of genre within metal, I chose a very large sample size, consisting of 1000 bands across 10 separate metal subgenres. Through the examination of text (lyrics, titles), images (album covers, video) and personal presentation (dress code, live performance), I define the central themes of each subgenre, and pair these with knowledge of the musical developments within the genre to accurately portray evolutionary changes that pervade metal as a whole. I also question the acceptance of transgressive themes within the genre, and apply anecdotal evidence and research into the standards of other artistic media to provide reasons for the relative artistic freedom of metal musicians. Through this study, I have observed evidence of all three Darwinian evolutionary principles - variety, inheritance and changes in local conditions - in action within the metal genre, which suggests that metal music evolves in a similar way to other large open systems

DOCODE 3.0 (DOcument COpy DEtector): A system for plagiarism detection by applying an information fusion process from multiple documental data sources

Plagiarism refers to the act of presenting external words, thoughts, or ideas as one’s own, without providing references to the sources from which they were taken. The exponential growth of different digital document sources available on the Web has facilitated the spread of this practice, making the accurate detection of it a crucial task for educational institutions. In this article, we present DOCODE 3.0, a Web system for educational institutions that performs automatic analysis of large quantities of digital documents in relation to their degree of originality. Since plagiarism is a complex problem, frequently tackled at different levels, our system applies algorithms in order to perform an information fusion process from multi data source to all these levels. These algorithms have been successfully tested in the scientific community in solving tasks like the identification of plagiarized passages and the retrieval of source candidates from the Web, among other multi data sources as digital libraries, and have proven to be very effective. We integrate these algorithms into a multi-tier, robust and scalable JEE architecture, allowing many different types of clients with different requirements to consume our services. For users, DOCODE produces a number of visualizations and reports from the different outputs to let teachers and professors gain insights on the originality of the documents they review, allowing them to discover, understand and handle possible plagiarism cases and making it easier and much faster to analyze a vast number of documents. Our experience here is so far focused on the Chilean situation and the Spanish language, offering solutions to Chilean educational institutions in any of their preferred Virtual Learning Environments. However, DOCODE can easily be adapted to increase language coverage

Autoethnographic and qualitative research on popular music: Exploring the blues, jazz, grime, John Cage, live performance, SoundCloud and the masculinities of metal

This special edition of Riffs focuses on autoethnography and qualitative research in relation to popular music. The journal publication is twinned with a forthcoming book entitled: Popular Music Ethnographies: practice, place, identity. The intention of these studies is to uphold the principle that ‘music is good to think with’ (Chambers 1981: 38). Riffs was founded in 2015 to promote experimental writing on popular music, with a strong DiY ethos and space to offer flexibility and diversity of outputs through challenging interdisciplinary boundaries. At the same time there is a degree of similarity with specialist popular music magazines including Mojo, fRoots (1979-2019), Rolling Stone, Record Collector, Prog, Mixmag, and Uncut, through a focus on visuals and creative images. This suggests that there has been an increased growth at the ‘popular’ end of biographical and autoethnography within popular music. Critically, popular music autoethnographies work across and within disciplinary boundaries of anthropology, social anthropology, cultural studies, sociology, and popular music studies

Online opera: an applied collision of opera and web creativity

This practice-based research explores the collision of opera and web creativity through the development and evaluation of a new 'online opera' called "The Village" (2015). Contrasting existing offerings that position the web as a means of disseminating more familiar representations of opera, "The Village" draws on concepts of participatory culture, digital storytelling and co-creativity to advance a culturally novel apprehension of online opera that treats the web as a unique creative space. This interpretation is intrinsically digital, unable to be realised through conventional forms of theatrical presentation, and transformative in its approach to the core elements of opera. "The Village" in additional serves as a vehicle to investigate how the phenomenon of 'liveness' - that is, a feeling of 'now-ness' experienced in live performance - may be reimagined in the context of an entirely mediated opera. A range of theoretical perspectives are drawn on to establish a set of liveness devices that attempt to evoke in visitors to "The Village" a sense of contemporaneity and shared experience. These include temporal alignment between virtual and real-world events and the facilitation of social interaction through a narrative mechanism called the 'Digital Chorus', amongst others. Evaluative activities critique the effectiveness of such devices, and offer means in which they may be modified to better construct 'the live'

Multisensory processing, affect and multimodal manipulation: A cognitive-semiotic empirical study of travel documentaries

Multisensory processing represents the mirror image of multimodal meaning-making, in that interpreting multimodal discourse predominantly requires multisensory processing, even when different modes rely on the same sensory channels (Khateb et al., 2002), for example images and text in a book (Gibbons, 2012, p. 40). Remley (2017) makes a similar point when discussing the neuroscience of multimodal persuasive messages, when he asserts that “[t]he term ‘multisensory integration’ is the biological equivalent of the term ‘multimodal’ in rhetoric” (p. 9). An understanding of multisensory processing can therefore be (and presumably is) exploited at the stage of text-production as a resource for manipulative multimodal discourses, with all the ideological consequences that entails. The concept of manipulation has been a matter of discussion in critical discourse studies (CDS) and pragmatics for more than a decade. Agreement on how to define and analyse the latter has yet to be reached, although most scholars seem to agree that Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995) can provide a useful entry point thanks to its theorisation of variable contexts and individual cognitive environments (de Saussure, 2005; Maillat, 2013; Maillat and Oswald, 2009; Oswald, 2014). Moreover, the concept of epistemic vigilance (Sperber et al., 2010) has been used to investigate the cognitive barriers that need to be bypassed in order for manipulation to work (Hart, 2013; Mazzarella, 2015). Finally, Sorlin (2017: 133) recently highlighted the need to focus not only on the cognitive aspects influencing manipulation, but also on “the psychological aspect of manipulation that often consists in exploiting the target's weaknesses”, thus pointing towards the dimension of affect as a further explanatory force. This paper begins with an overview of the concepts of manipulation and epistemic vigilance, before discussing insights from the field of multisensory processing in the neurosciences. Then, drawing on some principles from Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995) and looking at some data from travel documentary programmes and their viewers, examples are offered of how manipulation is attempted and achieved through this specific multimodal genre in individual case studies. The focus of the analysis will be on bottom-up (i.e. text-driven) processes and the interpretation/reaction of an audience. The research draws on a novel methodological approach (Castaldi, 2021) that integrates Audience Research (e.g., Schrøder et al., 2003) and Social Semiotics (e.g. Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996, 2001; van Leeuwen, 1999; Machin and Mayr, 2012) in order to analyse media interactions in their individuality. Results suggest that the affective dimension, predominantly attended to through sonic and visual modes, plays a key role for multimodal manipulation to successfully occur

Functions of genre in metal and hardcore music

This thesis addresses various functions of genre in metal/hardcore music as a lens through which to study popular music in the twenty-first century. The thesis proposes that issues of genre are fundamental to understandings of popular music for all participants.Predominant in metal/hardcore discourse, genre serves as an organising principle in historiographies that exert significant influence upon contemporary perceptions of metal and hardcore. I propose generic symbiosis as a new way to conceptualise the relationship between metal and hardcore, addressing issues of consequentiality arising from extant frameworks. Exploring intra- and intergeneric connections, I observe the relationship between small- and largescale phenomena that allows a relatively specific group of performance techniques and compositional devices to connote numerous metal/hardcore genres (and vice versa). Within this interconnected model of genre, subgenres provide a middle ground of generic adaptation by providing a focus on specific small-scale phenomena.Genre may be understood as a general, amorphous concept in flux, while style affords specificity, and their relationship is analogous to that between type and token (where style tokens the genre type). Structured rhizomatically, scenes provide the literal and metaphorical space for such tokening, connecting physical instantiations to abstract notions. The internal rhetorical tensions of mainstream versus underground, and progression versus tradition, are demonstrated to function as a creative apparatus for participants. A manifestation of generic symbiosis, this apparatus provides the mechanism for generic adaptation as participants negotiate these tensions. Through a case study of twenty-first century metalcore, I observe the process of generic codification, outlining how a combination of specific elements of style, emerging from particular scenes, came to demarcate a genre. I show how adaptations within a single genre engender change in numerous other areas of metal/hardcore music culture, underscoring the interconnectivity of genre in popular music

#Présidentielle2017 : a critical discourse analysis of the 2017 French presidential campaign on Twitter

In the context of the 2017 French presidential election, this dissertation examines political discourse on Twitter from a socio-semiotic perspective. Specifically, it focuses on campaign tweets as a unique genre of discourse that plays a pivotal role in the dissemination and amplification of political discourse. This study uses an innovative framework which combines two approaches to discourse analysis: Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). CDA and SFL are socially-oriented approaches to discourse which share a dialectical view of text-in-context whereby discourse shapes and is shaped by the social and cultural context in which it occurs (Fairclough, 2003; Hasan, 2014). I draw on Norman Fairclough’s concept of ‘order of discourse’, which refers to a unique configuration of genres, discourses and styles constitutive of a social practice or structure (Fairclough, 1993). I suggest that digital campaigning constitutes a growing social practice with its own order of discourse, and I examine how the 2017 presidential candidates mobilized particular discursive mechanisms to realize a variety of discourses (ideologies) and styles (identities). In addition, I analyze how they exploited the generic affordances and constraints of tweets to their advantage. To this end, I collected a total of 208 tweets from six main actors of the 2017 election: outgoing president François Hollande and candidates Emmanuel Macron, Marine Le Pen, François Fillon, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Benoît Hamon. All tweets were posted in reaction to three events of significance for the election. This dissertation provides an in-depth, multifunctional analysis that focuses on ideational, interpersonal and textual ways of meaning-making: (1) transitivity and social actor representation, (2) modality and engagement and (3) texture and generic structure. I argue that the 2017 election was above all characterized by an effort of the candidates to distance themselves from the political class. I suggest that this antiestablishment sentiment was realized by two ‘styles of politics’: the populist style and the centrist style. Finally, I argue that the structural constraints of tweets amplify these populist appeals through the combination of decontextualization and semantic condensation.French and Italia

Genre - text - interpretation: Multidisciplinary perspectives on folklore and beyond

"This book presents current discussions on the concept of genre. It introduces innovative, multidisciplinary approaches to contemporary and historical genres, their roles in cultural discourse, how they change, and their relations to each other. The reader is guided into the discussion surrounding this key concept and its history through a general introduction, followed by eighteen chapters that represent a variety of discursive practices as well as analytic methods from several scholarly traditions. This volume will have wide appeal to several academic audiences within the humanities, both in Finland and abroad, and will especially be of interest to scholars of folklore, language and cultural expression.