Susan Delagrange's Wunderkammer and Amy Devitt's Genre

Susan Delagrange's "Wunderkammer, Cornell, and the Visual Canon of Arrangement" is à prime example of à hybrid-genre. Susan combines the two genres known as digital media and traditional writing. Upon clicking the link from the blog site, the viewer is introduced to cabinet doors that lead to rows of tiles. When one clicks on one of these tiles, they are exposed to slides that showcases ideas and their explanations. All thirteen of these tiles, include àn image on the left and writing in à box on the right. The images are there to help the view better visualize what the author of this project is trying to explain. Including images along with the explanation makes it less likely that the reader will misunderstand the what is being described.

In Amy Devitt’s article “Generalizing About Genre: New Conceptions of an Old Concept,” the reader is told that “genres develop, then, because they respond appropriately to situations that writers encounter repeatedly” (576). It is quite possible that Susan created this visual project because she needed à new way of attracting and keeping the attention of her viewers. I think that she may have tried using just the traditional writing style essay or giving à speech and realized that people were either not paying attention or were not able to visualize her words. By combining traditional writing with digital media, she is better able to connect with people.

But is also important to note that “writers and readers may, of course, mix genres and situations and may use genres badly” (578). The mixing of these two genres worked well here, but could have gone wrong. Now, what I mean by this is that the reader could have interpreted this entire project incorrectly thus, creating room for confusion and defeating the author’s purpose of the visual.

Gunther Kress states that “genres are dynamic, responding to the dynamics of other parts of social systems…. hence new genres emerge over time” (579). We currently leave in àn era where technology is booming. People are now more likely to pay attention to something if there are images attached to whatever is being said which would mean that with images or videos, these same people are more likely to understand the material being presented to them. In order for an author to successfully get their point points across to their viewers, they would have combine two or more genres like Susan did here.

Work Cited:

Delagrange, Susan. "Wunderkammer, Cornell, and the Visual Canon of Arrangement." Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 13(2). 2009. Retrieved March 7, 2018 from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/13.2/topoi/delagrange/index.html.

Devitt, Amy J. "Generalizing about Genre: New Conceptions of an Old Concept." College Composition and Communication 44.4 (Dec.1993): 573-86