A few key terms
One
productive definition of genre comes
from Miller’s widely-cited 1984 article where she describes genre as a fusion
of “substantive, stylistic, and situational” (p. 152) elements, an idea borrowed
from Jamieson and Campbell. More significantly, genre is “a recurrent,
significant action” (p. 165), or in other words, “a typification of rhetorical
action” (p. 163). This description of the mechanism that generates genre is
made clearer in Bazerman (2004) where he explains typification as a process
where recurrence brings about “standardized forms of utterances that are
recognized as carrying out certain actions in certain circumstances” (p.
316). My favorite definition of genre,
however, comes from Schryer (1993). She
says that “genres can be described as stabilized-for-now or stabilized-enough
sites of social and ideological action” (p. 208). Implicit in this description is the idea that
genres always draw on previous textual experiences that serve as genealogical
antecedents and may always evolve. Thus,
genres trace the outlines of past communicative events to offer a semi-stable
pre-fabricated container for social actions roughly analogous to the social
actions embodies in those past events.
A
good introduction to the key terms in rhetorical genre theory comes from
Bazerman (2004). obviously, but
Bazerman finds speech acts a salient
starting point for his discussion of genre, as is also true in his (1994)
exploration of patents as a genre.
Although in the article on patents Bazerman problematizes speech acts in
relation to genre, the definition of speech acts as “meaningful social actions
accomplished by language” (2004, p. 311) can still serve as a reasonable
starting point. A couple of other terms
defined here in Bazerman (2004) are genre set and genre system. A genre
set is “the collection of types of texts that someone in a particular role
is likely to produce” (318). Devitt’s
(1991) study of the genres used by tax accountants in their work lives would be
a good example of a genre set. A genre system on the other hand is “comprised
of the several genre sets of people working together in an organized way”
(Bazerman, 2004, p. 318). In other
words, by bringing tax codes into the discussion of the genres of tax
accounting, we are talking about a genre set.
The tax code is not produced by the accountants, but it is part of their
activity system. Activity system is the
final key term I want to bring out of Bazerman’s (2004) introduction. In fact, he calls it a “system of activity”
(p. 319). Russell (1997) provides a more
precise definition of the construct of activity
system as “any ongoing, object-directed, historically-conditioned, dialectically-structured,
tool-mediated human interaction: a family, a religious organization, an
advocacy group, a political movement, a course of study, a school, a discipline,
a research laboratory, a profession, and so on” (p. 4-5).
Carolyn Miller and Charles Bazerman discuss some of the key terms and
concepts of genre theory in this youtube video (with French subtitles!).
Annotated bibliography of three of
the articles
Genre as social action
This
1984 article by Carolyn Miller is the classic, when Rhetorical Genre Theory
really started in many ways. Although
the article is old enough that Google scholar offers no statistics on how much
it has been cited, I definitely feel like I have seen this article in almost
every book or article that I have read on genre. Of course, Miller is not really the
beginning. In her article, she draws on productive
work done by Kohrs & Campbell on genre and refers to others whose ideas
played a role in her important formulation of the concept, such as Kenneth
Burke and Lloyd Bitzer. At any rate, it
was Miller who took the definitive step beyond the classificatory and formal
view of genre and described genre as a rhetorically productive term. As she describes in her statement of purpose,
“I will be arguing that a rhetorically sound definition of genre must be
centered not on the substance or the form of discourse but on the action it is
used to accomplish. To do so, I will examine the connection between genre and
recurrent situation and the way in which genre can be said to represent
typified rhetorical action” (p. 151). In
the article she begins by examining previous views of a genre in literature and
rhetoric, then using the concept of rhetorical situation beginning with Bitzer’s
model, she describes how recurrent rhetorical acts become typified to create
genres, and how genres work productively within a theory of meaning.
Speech Acts, Genres, and Activity Systems
To
best appreciate Bazerman’s 2004 article, “Speech Acts, Genres, and Activity
Systems,” it is helpful to consider the context. Bazerman’s contribution is the eleventh and
last in a collection of essays designed to systematically approach introduce “methods
for understanding, studying, and analyzing texts and writing practices”
(Bazerman & Prior, 2004, back cover).
The book is fairly unique in offering a variety of textual
approaches. It includes several
rhetorical approaches, discourse analysis and approaches that straddle
rhetorical and literary theory—such as narrativity and intertextuality. It also considers some less usual approaches,
like how text and talk interact in presentations or collaborative composing
situations and how children learn to write.
Each article in the collection defines key terms, describes the
approach, and explains how one would go about using the approach to perform an
analysis. As someone who has come into
rhetoric and English from a linguistic background, I was thrilled to find a
book that did a good job of drawing together methods of textual analysis that
had emerged within different traditions.
Within the context of this book, therefore, Bazerman’s article is
designed to give an overview of how genre theory compares with, and in some
ways, emerges from speech act theory and how genres are associated with each
other and operate within activity systems.
The article is a reasonable overview of the key terms, and like the
other articles in the collection, it does a reasonable job of describing how
one might pursue an analysis. The
weakness for me was Bazerman’s sample analysis.
I have read quite a few genre analyses, including widely-cited Amy
Devitt’s (1991) study of genres used by tax accountants, and of course, the two
cases included in the recent set of readings, Bazerman’s (1994) study of patents
and patent applications, and Popham’s (2005) look at forms used in medical
offices. Compared to these cases, Bazerman’s
(2004) analysis of school worksheets fails to capture the most salient features
of genres for novices to remember. The
analysis provides some helpful insights on the classroom instruction that he
was observing, but by focusing more on the activity system than the genre, I
think it provides a weaker case study than the others mentioned above, at least
for those less familiar with the concept of genre, as I assume would be the
case for an introductory book such as this.
Forms as
Boundary Genres in Medicine, Science and Business
Popham’s
(2005) article expands the concept of genre and offers an additional productive
path for the concept. Thus, the article
adds great value for those who are already familiar with the core concepts of
genre. From Miller’s (1984) article, we
are already prepared to see genre as offering insights on form, social function,
and to a degree, antecedent traces. Miller
(1994) sheds more light on the latter, showing how each time a genre is used,
it draws on this history and adds to it. Bazerman (1994, 2004) connects genres back to
speech acts and describes their operation within activity systems. All of this is background for Popham’s
article since she brings out the point that a number of genres are designed to
operate at the boundaries of discourse communities to mediate knowledge between
these communities. Popham gives the
example of forms that reconstruct a patient as scientific data for the doctor, forms
translate scientific data (test results, diagnostic observations, measurements
and so forth) into medically actionable information, and forms that translate
diagnostic decisions into billable codes.
Thus, the activity system of the doctor’s office or clinic uses forms to
reconstruct information in ways that it can be used by or seen as a knowledge
that is actionable in different ways by different classes of participants. Popham describes three terms that capture the
ways genres do this: translation, distillation and reflexion. Whereas the first term is more or less what
it sounds like, distillation involves condensing a complex set of information
into a much smaller set of information according to what is relevant on the other
side of the boundary. In other words,
all of the medical data in the chart used by medical caregivers becomes
distilled down into a small set of diagnostic codes associated with billing and
insurance. Reflexion is a more complex
term, but basically it refers to how the genre and the discourse strategies
reconstruct one discipline into terms useful for another discipline. The process is certainly largely unrecognized
by the disciplines themselves, but an example is when the physician’s actions
and the patient’s symptoms are both distilled into an insurance code. In a
sense, business has reconstructed the practice of medicine in a way that
deemphasizes the physician’s agency and authority since it has turned the
clinical visit into little more than a computational process spitting out a
diagnostic code.
Genre and cognitive linguistics
One
thing that caught my attention is a link between Miller’s view of genre (1984,
1994) and cognitive linguistic ideas about classification and semantic
constructs. When I was in my MA program
in linguistics, my favorite class was my semantics course. One concept that
grabbed my attention then and is still a productive concept for me is the idea
of prototypes. Lakoff (1987) builds a
case for rejecting a formalistic Aristotelian classification model in much the
same way that Miller (1984) does in her rejection of mere classification schemes
for genre. The main purpose of the book, in fact, is to develop the prototype theory model as an alternative.
(Image from Wikipedia)
Miller notes that “the semiotic framework
provides a way to characterize the principles used to classify discourse,
according to whether the defining principle is based in rhetorical substance
(semantics), form (syntactics), or the rhetorical action the discourse performs
(pragmatics). A classifying principle based in rhetorical action seems most clearly
to reflect rhetorical practice (especially since, as I will suggest later,
action encompasses both substance and form).” (152) Her reference to semantic framework is not
directly referring to work done in linguistics—though she does mention Halliday
and van Dijk, both of whom share the view that semantic content arises through social
usage, rather than pre-existing in some pure and logical form. In other words, by recommending a focus on
pragmatic considerations rather than formal features for classification and an
open class of items, Miller is very much in line with what linguistics were
also noticing about classification and cognition. Both approaches draw on theories of
expectation that are in harmony with cognitive science and prototype theory. In other words, human beings have
experiences, notice patterns across experiences, and develop mental models
abstracted from those experiences. That
is basically what genre is, and that is how human beings derive lexical meaning
as well. I have long seen genres as
functioning something like prototypes. I
am not the only one who has caught this idea, but it isn’t too widespread. Of course that can mean it isn’t as
productive as I think it is, or it might simply mean that other people have
focused on other aspects of genre. At
any rate, this is a concept that I intend to explore and that I believe may be
productive for me in the future.
Genre and networks
Genre
can be conceptualized in several ways. Bazerman (2004) and Russell (1997)
clearly see it as mediating within an activity system, as does Spinuzzi (2003).
Devitt apparently does not see it this way, though I have to revisit her
comments to recall exactly what distinctions she drew between her views and
theirs. However, within Rhetorical
Genre Theory, within which all of these theorists operate, genre always
involves recurrent social action, and generally functions as a middle term, as
Miller (1994) points out. In other
words, genre can be seen as a node or perhaps a channel. To use computer terminology, perhaps genre
could be seen as a router. Or perhaps it might be better seen as a medium
through which the message travels. Note
that “medium,” here again, is a computer term for a connecting cable, not
medium in the mass communication sense.
In any case, genre has little meaning without an ecological or network
view of communication. Within such a view,
it can serve a powerful role. This is
probably best represented by Miller (1994) when she employs Giddens’
structuration theory to describe the dual operation of genre, activated each
time as a communicative event which in turn reinforces the structure to make it
more salient for later appropriation for similar analogous uses.
References
Bazerman, C. (1994). Systems of
genres and the enactment of social intention. In A. Freedman, & P. Medway
(Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric
(79-101). London: Taylor & Francis.
Bazerman, C. (2004). Speech acts,
genres, and activity systems: How texts organize activity and people. In C.
Bazerman, & P. Prior (Eds.), What
writing does and how it does it (309-339). Mahwah, N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum
Associates.
Bazerman, C., & Prior, P. A.
(2004). What writing does and how it
does it: An introduction to analyzing texts and textual practices. Mahwah,
N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Devitt, A.J. (1991). Intertextuality
in tax accounting: Generic, referential, and functional. In C. Bazerman &
J. Paradis (Eds.), Textual dynamics of the profession (pp. 336-357).
Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Lakoff, G. (1987). Women, fire, and dangerous things: What
categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Miller, C. R. (1984.) Genre as social action. Quarterly
Journal of Speech, 70(2), 151-167.
Retrieved from
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~crmiller/Publications/MillerQJS84.pdf
Miller, C.R. (1994). Rhetorical
community: The cultural basis of genre. In A. Freedman, & P. Medway
(Eds.), Genre and the new rhetoric
(67-78). London: Taylor & Francis.
Popham, S. (2005). Forms as boundary
genres in medicine, science, and business. Journal
of Business and Technical Communication, 19(3), 279-303.
Russell, D. (1997). Rethinking genre
in school and society: An activity theory analysis. Written Communication, 14(4):504-554.http://www.public.iastate.edu/~drrussel/at&genre/at&genre.html
Schryer, C. F. (1993). Records as
genre. Written Communication, 10(2),
200-234. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/85535463?accountid=12967
Spinuzzi, C. (2003). Tracing genres through organizations: A
sociocultural approach to information design. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Best entry yet! You brought a lot to this discussion.
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