Activity Theory
Here are a few links that might be of interest:
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Here are a few links that might be of interest:
Beth, I think you might be interested in Time for the last post from the Financial Times. The interdependence of kairos and satire plays some part in it:
And if Gawker was a kind of guilty pleasure people enjoyed after the horror of 9/11 had lingered just a little too long, it is a pleasure that has begun testing readers’ limits. A posting in August noted that a woman had been knocked down and killed crossing the street in front of an Urban Outfitters store: “You know we’re completely in favor of anything that suggests NYC is edgy,� wrote Gawker. “But we’d argue things have gone too far when shopping for ironic T-shirts becomes a potentially fatal extreme sport.�
The woman turned out to be an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor, which lead The New York Times to accuse Gawker of turning “everyday heartbreak� and “heinous� crimes into “inflection points for irony�.
Much as the outpouring of humour in New York in the 1920s that gave rise to the Algonquin Round Table was a temporary post-traumatic cultural reaction to the shock of the Great War, the Gawker spirit is wearing a little thin in light of a seemingly endless bloody insurgency in Iraq, a mesmerising failure of government to deal with the massive catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina, and revelations of corruption on Capitol Hill. “Satire,� said Choire Sicha, “is the most useless cultural effluvia one could possibly produce out of the cultural situation in America right now.�
Regarding my response from last week: I really don't have much to add that is not already in the paper, or that I didn't touch upon in my presentation. Additionally, the last section in my paper, in which I talk about ideology and hegemony, was largely answered in this week's readings, though I'm still not clear how duality of structure is in conversation with the ideas brought up this week by Pare and Schryer. Both last week and this week's response papers are largely asking the question, "How does the study of filmic genres, and parody in particular, fit into rhetorical/linsguistic genre theory?"
As we discussed in class, it sometimes seems impossible to keep up on or participate in electronic discussions. Using a feed-reader can help with the uptake part. As for as the output part, well, if anyone discovers the secret to that please let me know.
I use: bloglines because it is free and I can track things across multiple computers easily. You can enter in feed URL's directly on the web interface, but I would recommend installing their bookmarklet so you can just subscribe with a click. I used to use the notifier that alerts you when new postings are made, but now I just keep a tab open in Safari or Firefox and refresh it when I have the chance to read.
Just in case you haven't discovered them, a couple of useful feeds for Rhetoric people are CCC Online, where an archive of previously published articles is being established, and Kairosnews, which often has CFPs and some job listings. There are many more, of course. If people are interested, we can always swap useful links here too.