PREPARATION FOR 1/22 (FAHNESTOCK/SECOR AND KILLINGSWORTH/PALMER)

Hello, Everyone:

Thanks for your collaborative construction of the sci/tech discourse grid during yesterday's class (1/17). I have made my contributions to the grid and uploaded it to Blackboard, where you'll see the Google Docs link is also still active. Next week, we will use stasis theory to help us consider close interactions between logic, language, arrangement, and style -- especially when sci/tech genres begin to "go public."  

Here are some discussion questions that may help you read in advance of Tuesday's class:

1. In Fahnestock and Secor's article, what do the stasis patterns in scientific discourse and literary criticism have in common with each other? What do you think is the most important difference between them (sci discourse and lit crit)? 
2. How do Fahnestock/Secor build their theory? Whose ideas do they inherit and take up, what do they keep the same, and what do they change?
3. Selecting any one of the stasis levels they identify, do you think that stasis functions the same way as in Grant-Davie's article (the section on Exigence)? Could you see that stasis in the sci/tech genre that your group examined during yesterday's class?
4. In describing various "transformations" of scientific discourse across the public sphere, Killingsworth and Palmer present a theory that is based on a principal distinction between "news" and "common interest." Let's explore that distinction for all of its worth, including the reasons why it is still valuable for building discourse theory even in a highly mediated society such as ours, while also keeping in mind its limitations -- i.e., specific instances or examples where we see the distinction being challenged.
5. Does Killingsworth and Palmer's discussion of "community formation" (through case studies of different genres) in any way complicate -- or clarify -- the distinctions between Fahnestock and Secor's stasis levels?
6. In the final section of Killingsworth and Palmer's chapter, they analyze Time magazine to propose various ways that Time -- and similar news publications -- can represent a kind of "public environmentalism." Which example in that section do you think best explains the shift from "news" to "public" involvement, and why? What happens in the language of that example?

-Prof. Graban