Where's that Confounded Bridge? Performance, Intratextuality, and Genre-Awareness Transfer

Abstract

This chapter contends that transfer of genre awareness can be improved in composition classrooms through understanding the rhetorics of popular music. Drawing on scholarship on transfer and genre theory, the authors present original study results and pedagogical recommendations based on their experiences leading upper-division student writers in the analysis and performance of musical texts. The chapter maintains a conceit based on the performative rhetorics of James Brown and Led Zeppelin. In addition to making the often-abstract rhetoric of transference and genre more accessible to students, the authors’ approach suggests the relevance of multimodal and interdisciplinary performative strategies in the theory and practice of transference and genre awareness.