Close-Reading and Genre
The central question guiding you in reading with this method is: In what ways does the text diverge from the generic expectations (projections) the text solicits from its readers?
Generic expectations are a function of form
For Kenneth Burke, form is an "arousing and fulfillment of desires. A work has form in so far as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence" (Counter-Statement 124).
Thus, exploring how a text participates in, or applies a given genre or genres, requires one to examine the form--the generic patterns--of a given text and how it affects the reader.
Thus, exploring how a text participates in, or applies a given genre or genres, requires one to examine the form--the generic patterns--of a given text and how it affects the reader.
Conventional form
A convention is a formal structure understood as acceptable by a group of people, and any such convention is determined by generic expectations. A given convention is simply what people who belong within a given genre do in a certain situation.
There are three aspects to genre that must be attended to when examining conventional form:
The recurrent situation(s) that requires the conventions of a generic form (for instance, unjust suffering calls for the "hiphop" genre)
Substantive and stylistic features (drums, piano, strings, bass, and rap with repeating rhythm about having suffered unjustly)
And a principle that organizes the substantive and stylistic features in a way that responds to the situational requirement (that is, rapping in a way that defies the forces that enacted injustice).
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Syllogistic progressive form
Syllogistic progression is the unfolding of the steps of an argument, such that the conclusion follows as a matter of necessity once the premises are laid out for the reader.
Arthur Schopenhauer in the text to the right, "On Rhetoric," expresses the power of this employment of form in writing or speech, wherein we are to "Let the premisses come first, and the conclusion follow."
This form is especially effective when peripety results from the syllogistic progression, that is, a reversal of the audience's expectations arises by necessity. In his chapter "Cinema of the Mind," Robert Olen Butler calls this effect of form the rub: "the unexpected thing that nevertheless feels just right" (84).
An excellent example of this use of syllogistic progression is at work in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 2, where Brutus justifies the assassination of Julius Caesar, but then Anthony turn's the audience back the other way.
Mamet also discusses syllogistic form in his chapter "Countercultural Architecture and Dramatic Structure." There he writes that the job of the storyteller
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"is to tell the story through the juxtaposition of uninflected images--because that is the essential nature of the medium. It operates best through that juxtaposition, because that's the nature of human perception: to perceive two events, determine a progression, and want to know what happens next" (60). |
Qualitative progressive form
A quantity is obvious and measurable; qualities are inferred and felt, and thus evoke moods. A given mood, once it is present, allows us to enter another mood, or state of mind, that might follow. A commonplace literary trope that employs qualitative progression is "foreshadowing." However, rather than seeing a single instance of foreshadowing, looking out for qualitative progressive form means locating a multitude of instances within the text that repeat with a difference (where the difference is a development or progression from the prior instance).
Reveal what is the same and what is different, and also infer what this does to the reader/audience. |
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Repetitive form
Repetitive form "is the consistent maintaining of a principle under new guises." This is also understood as a motif.
For instance, in the film The Matrix, a motif is announced during the four times Trinity addresses Neo concerning what the Oracle told her. Each time Trinity speaks about what the Oracle told her she leaves out the conclusive statement until the last act's climax. During the last instance the audience expects (even demands) that she say what she has withheld up until that moment. At the same time, one could also see present within this particular set of textual elements both syllogistic and qualitative progressions. |
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Minor or incidental forms: Tropes and Figures
Burke lists specific figural forms, such as "metaphor, paradox, disclosure, reversal, contraction, expansion, bathos, apostrophe, series, chiasmus" (127), which are gathered together under the heading of tropes and figures of speech and thought. These are minor or incidental forms that participate in the synthetic, figural register.
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