Sandra Campagna - Böcker

This volume explores genres in Web-mediated communication in a discourse-analytical perspective, focusing in particular on genre change and evolution under the pressure of technological renewal, the availability of new affordances, and the consequent emergence of new generic conventions that challenge traditional genre theory. The chapters are organised in an ideal progression from websites and more ‘traditional’ Web applications to Web 2.0 communicative platforms, characterised as they are by user participation and user-generated content, focusing in the final section on blogging and microblogging as the applications that are most representative of the properties of the new platforms. In all chapters the starting point is an awareness of the need to renew or adapt existing analytical tools to make them applicable to the new objects of investigation.

The title of this volume intentionally echoes that of a landmark issue of Textus on «Languaging» in and across Human Groups, edited by Giuseppina Cortese and Dell Hymes in 2001, since the notion of ‘languaging’ seems to capture most effectively the essence and the continuity in the life and work of Giuseppina Cortese, to whom the book is dedicated. It brings together contributions by a number of distinguished scholars that shed new light on current developments in this dynamic area of discourse analysis, especially taking into account recent research and emerging insights on speech communities and communities of practice. The sections in the volume are designed as main threads of a new investigation into ‘languaging’. The first, entitled Languaging Awareness, deals with recent findings in applied linguistics, exploring key topics in language acquisition, language learning and teaching and the changing role of the media. The second section, Languaging Identity, prioritizes the theme of the construction of identity in text and talk within a linguistic and languaging framework. The third section, Languaging Community, explores the notion of community, of the lifeworld and the textworld emanating from a variety of domains, closely inspecting contemporary events and showing, on a continuum with Cortese’s approach, how memory of the past gives depth of meaning to a discourse analysis that is geared to linguistic and textual awareness.