Nobody denies that language helps shape our understanding of the world around us. Tropes have become so popular and prevalent in language precisely because they are flexible; they have the capacity to adapt and change as the world around us adapts and changes. Another really important idea in this essay is the fact that tropes are so flexible and so useful that they become standardized to the point that no one has to think about the ratios within the metaphor or how the synechdote draws two things together. If anything, this internalization works only toward the concept that tropes are valuable and persuasive. If they weren't, we would not keep coming back to them over and over again as a species.
Linking something to a physical characteristic is something everyone knows is relatable. Everyone has felt pain, pleasure, longing, sickness, loss, etc. Meeting other people on common ground is absolutely crucial to communication so it only seems logical and natural that people should default to tropes in order to get that done. I believe Daniel's hypertext essay works off of ironies a lot. We come into the essay knowing the reason prisons exist; after all, they are called "correctional institutions" for a reason. We know that dangerous people who make profound mistakes need to be brought to "justice."
There is a reversal present in Daniel's hypertext on that score. We are informed that instead of keeping people safe, prisons perpetuate the danger they are supposed to eradicate. This ode to justice has become inhumane somewhere along the way. Daniel calls attention to the fact that we think of convicts as a mass of people that deserve to be dehumanized and if you are constantly treated as less than, if you are constantly told that you are a criminal, you are going to continue to live up to that expectation. I think it is especially interpretable because people are very familiar with corporations even if they might not be familiar with prison or convicts. I think that comes back to Miller's genre as social action. We have made generics out of these people and generalizing about them has been a social service to us thus far. I don't even think it's too far to suggest the Genre of Prison Life: people expect a prisoner to be from a bad neighborhood, to listen to violent music, to have tattoos, to have the minimum formal education, to be involved with drugs or alcohol etc. And that's a little weird, because all of those qualities are legal to possess. But these ideas have served us so far because they have given people a false sense of security since probably over 90% of the time that you avoided a person listening to violent music or avoided a bad neighborhood you made it out alright. Those other times that you didn't could easily be explained away as accidents or strange exceptions.
Linking something to a physical characteristic is something everyone knows is relatable. Everyone has felt pain, pleasure, longing, sickness, loss, etc. Meeting other people on common ground is absolutely crucial to communication so it only seems logical and natural that people should default to tropes in order to get that done. I believe Daniel's hypertext essay works off of ironies a lot. We come into the essay knowing the reason prisons exist; after all, they are called "correctional institutions" for a reason. We know that dangerous people who make profound mistakes need to be brought to "justice."
There is a reversal present in Daniel's hypertext on that score. We are informed that instead of keeping people safe, prisons perpetuate the danger they are supposed to eradicate. This ode to justice has become inhumane somewhere along the way. Daniel calls attention to the fact that we think of convicts as a mass of people that deserve to be dehumanized and if you are constantly treated as less than, if you are constantly told that you are a criminal, you are going to continue to live up to that expectation. I think it is especially interpretable because people are very familiar with corporations even if they might not be familiar with prison or convicts. I think that comes back to Miller's genre as social action. We have made generics out of these people and generalizing about them has been a social service to us thus far. I don't even think it's too far to suggest the Genre of Prison Life: people expect a prisoner to be from a bad neighborhood, to listen to violent music, to have tattoos, to have the minimum formal education, to be involved with drugs or alcohol etc. And that's a little weird, because all of those qualities are legal to possess. But these ideas have served us so far because they have given people a false sense of security since probably over 90% of the time that you avoided a person listening to violent music or avoided a bad neighborhood you made it out alright. Those other times that you didn't could easily be explained away as accidents or strange exceptions.
I like the idea of the genre of prison life. For me I see a huge association between what Daniel is trying to tell us and Foucault's idea of power through discourse. Those who get to talk about the genre of prison are the ones who have the control. And typically it's people far removed from the genre itself. There seems to be a multi layered irony here. Those who make the decision about these convicts are the ones that are most far removed, and the "correctional" institution is really a complex that cycles criminals in and out of the prison system. Like you said in your post, "If you are told you're a criminal you're going to live up to that expectation." I think that this can be seen as the defining irony of the prison life genre. Those who are being punished for their crimes in hope of remediation, are never allowed to forget what they have done. In turn they cycle back into the very life that the system is supposed to keep them out of. Whether this is due to money or corruption is not my point but I think looking at the trope of Irony that Killingsworth has described in this Genre that you're describing is crucial. I think it's obvious that it dominates how the genre operates and can be seen in every part of it.
ReplyDeleteI like your point about how tropes are flexible because they have the capacity to change adapt to the world around us. The ways in which we use tropes to communicate complex messages with one another is grounded in the ideas that we all have some type of shared reality and can relate. I agree that tropes are so valuable are persuasive in our language because they are so standardized. The standardization of tropes causes us to all have a similar understanding of them, which will make them persuasive because, as you said, "Linking something to a physical characteristic is something everyone knows is relatable". The use tropes is able to help to communicate complex ideas because we believe that we will be able to relate. I also like your idea about the "genre of prison life". I never would have through of it as genre but through your post I can see how the fact that the public has a certain stereotype of inmates or criminals can create a genre in itself.
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