| This dissertation, Texturation in Everyday Life: American Field Guides to Birds and Their Use, focuses on the pastime of bird watching and the rhetoric of its attendant genre, the field guide. The dissertation begins by explaining how, in the nineteenth century, the discourses of natural history and sentimentalism were leveraged for political purposes to create both the first American field guides to birds and the organized pastime of bird watching. The dissertation then explains how twentieth-century developments in information design and print technology enabled the development of field guides that were increasingly visual. Twentieth-century guides foreground, above all else, classificatory (not sentimental) encounters with birds, and the second half of this dissertation explores to what extent twentieth-century field guides interact with emotional and aesthetic discourses in circulation among birdwatchers. Drawing upon a field study and supplemental online questionnaire, the final two chapters report on data that reveal how birdwatchers "make do" with field guides---adopting scientific discourses while maintaining non-scientific ones long absent in the genre. With a textually mediated pastime such as this one, an evolving genre can make room for users to insert themselves even more successfully into social fields of practice in ways that are at once textually dictated and improvisatory. While much scholarship on genre and discourse has focused on institutional settings and texts, this dissertation broadens the scope of this work by considering how genre and discourse function in everyday life. |
