(Meets with CMCL S727, Section 1121)  The concept of genre has played a
central role in a number of social-scientific and humanistic disciplines.
This course will be devoted to a critical examination of genre theory and
its applications in folklore, media studies, literary studies, and
linguistic anthropology. The course will be conducted as a seminar, with
the first part of the semester organized around discussion of assigned
readings and the latter part devoted to presentations by seminar members.
Each member of the seminar will carry out an original research project
centering on the analysis of a corpus of primary data in terms relevant to
genre theory. This project will constitute the basis of the seminar
presentation and the final paper (ca. 25-30 pages in length).