Thesis Proposal (first edition)
Monday, January 30
2:04 AM
Here's the proposal I presented to the class a few weeks ago. I'm currently working on a revised draft, but since I've only had an advisor since Wednesday there's not much to add.
Narrative and rhetorical success on the "lifelog"There is little — short of the label itself — connecting the millions of weblogs. Walker's short definition of the blog as "a frequently updated website consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first" describes most (successful) instances of the weblog, but as with most definitions of "blog," it's clear that several genres have been grouped together under the same term. In response, theorists have attempted to classified blogs into categories, starting from a basic (and as many concede, problematic) diary-focused vs. link-focused distinction and working their way toward more complicated taxonomies. Every blogosphere survey invariably discovers that diary weblogs are by far the most common form of weblog, and yet, with few exceptions, the study of these weblogs has remained at the statistical level.
In contrast to this statistical approach, Miller and Shepherd call for a rhetorical approach, one "more interested in expectations, motivations, and terms of success" within a genre. While such an approach is common, perhaps even dominant among blog theorists, they usually focus on a few novel blogs or some abstracted "ideal" blog — emphasizing obvious elements, such as hypertext links, to separate blogs from ancestors like the diary or the epistolary novel. This mode of analysis is useful, but generalizing about blogs is risky given the many genres available, and authors are sometimes tempted to create normative definitions which exclude many websites generally considered blogs, as when Walker refuses the term to weblogs without links. In most cases, weblogs are too different to analyze as a group without implicitly privileging a certain genre.
As noted above, diary weblogs have yet to be subjected to a genre-specific rhetorical analysis. Unlike the link-based blogs so often studied, these "lifelogs" succeed within their genre largely on the basis of their post content — it should come as no surprise that the finalists for the "best writing of a weblog" Weblog Awards category come exclusively from this genre. It's these blogs which I propose to study, in the hope of determining what marks them as especially successful instances of the diary-weblog genre. With an eye toward Weez's definition of the blog as "first-person narrative in real time," I'll pay special attention to the way all of these bloggers position themselves as compelling subjects. Ultimately, I plan to find out how much rhetorical unity there is among the best-written weblogs in the hope of understanding not only them, but also the genre they purportedly represent.
Alles Wird Gut
