Eating Genre for Breakfast: The Cereal Box Experience

 

Soares explores how cereal companies, masters of multi-modality and context, use tools such as the practical (if not dystopian) planograms as well as the cereal box itself to zero in on potential customers. He shows how cereal companies target not only customers’ children but also their own childhoods, effectively placing genres on the breakfast table in the “Cereal Box Experience.”

Tracing the Tracks of Greeting Cards: Genre History Versus Trajectory

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Jarema investigates the history of greeting cards from their origins to their current state to determine whether greeting cards have always served as a relationship rescuer or if there’s something more to their history. By exploring the origins of greeting cards and how they have progressed through time, Jarema identifies the important differences between genre “history” and “trajectory.”

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The Art of Sexting: Queer Theory and Identity Politics

 

Longfellow uses queer theory to trace his foray into the genre of sexting. Pulling from antecedent genres such as romance novels, erotica, and film, he sends explicit text messages to his girlfriend and then analyzes both the texts and her responses. All of this is in an effort to subvert traditional understandings of sexuality, power, and identity. 

What You Can, Can’t, and Can’t Not: How to Decipher What Writing “Rules” Apply and When

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O’Ryan breaks down the writing rules that we have always known and explains what the “real rules” are and aren’t. In order to find out what rules apply when and where, writers must dive into the conventions of language, style, and genre. Every writing situation is different. Should the rules be different, too?

The Trend of the Pen: A Study of the Writing Attitudes and Habits of ISU Freshmen

 

Jiracek reports on a survey she conducted of ISU freshmen writers to explore the transition from high school writing to college writing. The results show threads of similarity among freshmen composers/writers. The information gained by conducting this survey, along with Jiracek’s reflections on her own process of creating it, reveal how freshmen can work with their attitudes towards writing to help the transition go smoothly.

The Memoir as Inquiry to Self Discovery

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Maggio asks readers to revisit their memories of life-changing moments, breaking down the rigid walls of confusion that separate them from their past. Maggio suggests that, by writing in genres that allow for creativity, we can relive the past and discover who we are and where we have come from, adjusting our future actions in light of our past tendencies.

Screenplay Writing: The Art of Writing Films

 

Stark describes his  journey of discovering screenplay writing and how it has affected him. He also explains some beginner’s tips on how to write a screenplay and how to do so with an original style. His goal is to present screenplay writing as a genre option, especially for people who love movies, like Stark.

Bust a Rhyme: A New Poetics of Food Journaling

 

Browne explores her initial experiences learning to write food journals for weight loss and discovers a way to repurpose the genre for disordered eating recovery through subversion. Using poetry and a generous helping of radical politics, Browne then conducts a writing experiment intended to challenge prescriptive and limiting genre conventions.

Zombie Apocalypse: A Genre Studies Guide to Survival

 

​After being confronted with both the possibility of an impending zombie apocalypse and the realization of his lack of knowledge of zombie culture, Levato turns to genre theory in an attempt to unpack the zombie, as a genre, with the hope of understanding the complexities of this cultural object in order to survive the coming of the zombie hordes.

Pricked: Extreme Embroidery, or the Sampler’s Extraordinary Journey across Cultures 

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Gradea explores how American visual artist Andrea Dezso appropriated the genre of the Transylvanian sampler, modified it, and recontextualized it to allow for its visibility in the high-culture milieu of the North American art world. Dezso’s samplers take age-old beliefs and superstitions from the domestic sphere of rural Eastern Europe into the public space and the digital techno-sphere.Through her transformation of the sampler genre, Dezso emphasizes the genre’s hybridity.

Writing Pains: Exploring the Writing Activity of a “Slacker”

 

​Eagon utilizes her personal struggle writing a film analysis to illustrate the ups and downs of her writing process and her negative feelings towards the act. By describing the literate activities she practices and the frustration she encounters as a result, Eagon debunks the rather romanticized idea that writing is inspired and instead reveals it to be a slow and stressful experience.

Stefan Becker: The Grassroots Writing Research Journal Interview

 

​Over the course of an eventful afternoon, the GWRJ’s intrepid correspondent Aaron Mulnower sits down with Stefan Becker, legendary writer of liner notes—that genre of writing which appears as part of the packaging of musical albums and can take the form of anything from biography to lyrics to musician credits—in an attempt to get to the heart of the great man’s writing philosophy.