CI 565

Spring 2026

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Topics Research and Writing
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Credit: 4 hours.

Same as ENGL 582. See ENGL 582.

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CRN Type Section Time Day Location Instructor Section Details
43361
Lecture-Discussion
T
11:00AM -1:30PM
T
107A English Building
McKinney, C
Part of Term:
1
Date Range:
01/20/26-05/06/26
Section Info:
SP22 Genre Theories and Histories Course Description: Genre theory has been around for a long time (maybe forever), and it has found a home in a lot of disciplines (literature, linguistics, rhetoric, film, psychology, computer science, and so on). This course considers how theorists from several different fields have approached the study of kinds, classes, and sorts. If genres aren’t simply sets of texts similar in form and content, what are they? What does it mean to think of a genre as rhetorical and social, cognitive and coercive? How do genres orchestrate not just cultural productions but cultural expectations and relations? Where do genres come from for that matter? This seminar will be particularly interested in theories of genre that take root in historical perspectives, tracing the development of a single genre—the religious treatise, the architecture notebook, the resume, the dissertation, the anthropological monograph, the pastoral poem, the animal autobiography—over time. How do generic patterns (in form, content, situation, exigence, audience, action) take and then shift shape? What prompts a genre to change and how much can it do so before it becomes a different genre? How do genre histories enrich genre theories?
Restriction(s):
Restricted to Graduate - Urbana-Champaign.
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