894 Case study #3: Adding genre theory

Why these theories

 The academic interview genre is similar to published interviews familiar in magazine journalism, but with some additional features generated by its situatedness within academia and the situated identities of its participants within a discipline or disciplines.  For this reason, an ecological or network approach works well for theorizing the genre.  Likewise, using such a heavily situated genre as an object of study sheds light on the situatedness of genre in general and adds insights on how theories that bring in ideas from networking, complex systems or ecology can be productive as rhetorical theory.  For the purpose of the current analysis, I use as a foundation a previous analysis of cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) as adapted by Spinuzzi (2003).  That analysis compared CHAT with activity theory (AT), a precursor theory to CHAT that is also productively used in writing studies (see, for example, Russell, 1997).  Because my previous analysis concluded that Spinuzzi’s version of CHAT captured most of what was best about AT—though perhaps with a few modifications—I will be referring almost exclusively to Spinuzzi’s version of CHAT here.  The most important purpose of the present analysis, however, is use ideas from the genre theory of Carolyn Miller (1984, 1994) and Charles Bazerman (1994, 2004) to generate a more fine-grained analysis of the place of genre within an activity system.

Interview as literary genre

            Research on the academic interview as a genre has not been too extensive, as I noted in my previous case study.  Ironically, most of the discussion has been done in the field of literature rather than rhetoric or discourse analysis.  For example, as I noted in my previous case study, Chakraborty (2010) discusses how Gayatri Spivak’s interviews brought together “the scholarship with the persona” (p. 623) and how public intellectuals can “use the interview as a modus vivendi to produce intimate interlocution with their chosen constituency” (p. 627).  Chakraborty draws conclusions for the genre as a whole but she is more interested in what Spivak’s interviews say about Spivak. Two other literary scholars, however, do look at interviews as genre. One, David Neal Miller (1984) describes how Isaac Bashevis Singer has played with the generic expectations of the interview, bringing it closer to a fictional genre.  Some of Singer’s techniques include controlling the trajectory of the interview, offering playful and not always consistent answers, and reviewing the manuscripts before publication. Miller notes that “the geniality and formal accessibility of Singer's interviews belie the radical reorientation of generic expectations that they undertake to produce” (p. 198).  A third literary scholar, Ted Lyon (1994) came to a similar conclusion about the way that Borges approached interviews, illustrating techniques that Borges uses to make the interview artistic, and arguing that “Borges turned the interview into a literary genre, a game, a personal art form that he often controlled more directly than the interviewer” (p. 75).  In his article, Lyon also reviews several other scholars who have looked at the interview as a literary genre, before moving on to consider the extent to which interviews work as a literary genre that draws on both written and spoken style, has a rambling, serendipitous quality to it, and hence, represents a blurring of generic form.  To what extent, does an interview of a famous author in a literary publication share generic features with the interview of a scholar in an academic journal?  Both Singer and Borges were known as storytellers and prolific interviewees.  Perhaps it is not surprising that they used the interview as a creative literary genre. Still, it is useful to consider the extent to which any public figure reflexively uses an interview as a promotional vehicle and performative event.  

The academic interview and its activity system

On the other hand, the typical academic interview appears to have a tighter set of generic expectations attached to it than the Singer and Borges interviews do.  To see that this is the case, we will revisit the academic interview within its activity system while adding genre theory to the CHAT analysis.  Next, we will consider instances of academic interviews as artifacts of the genre, looking for ways that traces of the network show up as rhetorical moves within the genre.  Finally, we will look at what genre theory accomplishes—or neglects—in terms of building productive theory.

Perhaps the best source for grasping the network nature of genre theory is Miller’s (1994) article on the cultural basis of genre, building on her seminal (1984) article on genre as social action.  The most clear-cut identification of the nodes comes from her identification of the “rules and resources of a genre,” namely, “reproducible speaker” and “addressee” as roles, “social typifications of recurrent social needs or exigences,” “topical structures” and “ways of indexing an event to material conditions.”  All of these are embedded within each instantiation of a genre as it is situated “in space-time” (p. 71).  It does not seem to stretch the case too much to correlate most, if not all, of these with nodes that we have already identified within the CHAT model offered by Spinuzzi.  The “collaborators” node (in other models of activity theory “subject”) correlates with the “reproducible speaker” and the “addressee” might be associated with the “object,” though we might also see object as “social action,” or in the terms of Miller (1994), “social typifications of recurrent social needs or exigences.”  The “topical structures” correlate with Spinuzzi’s “domain knowledge” (also known as “rules” in some versions of CHAT) and “ways of indexing an event to material conditions” could be analogous to the “instruments” in Spinuzzi’s model, which are also material objects, or the human and cultural context that he calls “community” and “division of labor.”  However, it may be problematic to associate “ways of indexing” with so many nodes in Spinuzzi’s model.  However, the concept does seem a little undertheorized in Miller’s (1994) article.   The “addressee role” as a node also seems to map slightly differently between genre theory and Spinuzzian CHAT.  Even though it is not a perfect fit, our attempt to correlate genre theory to the activity system does offer us two insights, however.  First, it shows us that there are important points of overlap between CHAT and genre theory.  This is not surprising considering the fact that activity systems are frequently discussed in tandem with genre (Russell, 1997; Bazerman, 2004; Spinuzzi, 2003).  Although these theorists don’t use the same version of the activity system, all argue that genre is best seen at work within an activity system.  The second point to note here is simply that genre theory also can be mapped in network terms.  By employing some of the familiar terms from the already mapped CHAT network, we can see that this is the case.

            Not all nodes have equal agency within the network, either in CHAT or in genre theory.  In genre theory, a human agent, the speaker, employs the genre to accomplish something.  This gives this node the strongest agency.  The genre itself facilitates reproducibility, highlighting features of the situation, thematically and textually, and making them more salient, more likely to be reproduced in future situations.  In this sense genre itself has agency, and thus, too, the nodes of structures, social typifications, and situational anchors, though to a more minor degree compared with the speaker.  Each of these nodes shares agency in that together they shape the message that employs the genre as a vehicle. A node that offers little agency, interestingly, is the role of addressee.  The genre theory model does not theorize interaction with an audience as impacting back on the network, though this might be implicit since genre theory is working within the framework of rhetoric, and many contemporary models of rhetoric see collaboration or interaction between speaker and audience.

            Within Spinuzzi’s model of CHAT there is a strong sense of directionality within the network.  Reading activity system diagram from left to right, as Americans are programmed to do, we find the subject in the most salient, or initiating, location.  This holds true for genre theory.  Since the speaker has strong agency, he or she is the initiator within the network.  What is moving within the network in genre theory is a packaged message, or perhaps more accurately, intention.  Bazerman (1994) corroborates this point.  Genres “identify a repertoire of actions that may be taken in a set of circumstances” and to that extent, “identify the possible intentions one may have” (1994, p. 82). CHAT captures this point even more clearly in the way that the activity system is diagrammed.  An arrow leads from the diagram to the right, labeled “outcomes.”  We also know that the collaborators with a division of labor within a larger community structured by rules are using mediating instruments to accomplish some goal or “object,” the intention flows through the network towards the outcomes. 

            Neither the genre theory model nor the CHAT model makes a strong distinction between communication as rhetorical work and any type of productive task that a group intends to accomplish.  For example, or where a speech is made or a paper is written, the rhetorical work emerges more clearly than when the collaborators in the activity system are engaged in building a bonfire or repairing a car, tasks that presumably are not done in silence but where the communication event is a less conspicuous part of the process.  In a case where information is recorded in a database, as in the accident logging system that Spinuzzi (2003) examines, the genre is seen as the instrument.  In an explicitly rhetorical event, like a political speech, this also makes sense.  But in all of these tasks, whether those with more stereotypically rhetorical goals or more physical ones, other tools or objects may come into play.  Thus, when genre appears in the instruments or tools position in the network, we lose sight of these other material objects.  For that reason, I place genre in a central, mediating position for my purposes.  This move also owes a debt to several other theories, such as actor-network theory, a move that I will justify more fully in the synthesis paper to come.

Academic genre as cultural artifact

            At this point, we shift our discussion to a fuller theorizing of the academic interview genre from a genre theory perspective.    When we bring Spinuzzian CHAT together with genre theory, we begin to see network mapped on two levels.  First, we have the activity system itself as a network—or if we want to go beyond the activity system at the focus of an analysis, as for example Spinuzzi’s (2003) activity system clustered around the accident logging system—we can see that activity systems impinge upon each other, opening up into a complex network of shifting and evolving activity systems.  To take a quick example, engineers do not only reengineer intersections using accident statistics but also accomplish other goals with other sets of collaborators, employing other rules, using different instruments.  In other words, they participate in other activity systems.  For our purposes, we will be arguing that a single activity system or an ecology of activity systems represents one level of mapping.  The other level of mapping occurs within the genre as an artifact.  Each text within a genre leaves traces of the activity system that produced it.  Spinuzzi (2003) makes this point in his discussion of genre, calling genre “a sort of social memory that its practitioners accept without their explicit recognition that they are doing so” (p. 43).  Miller (1994) quotes Anthony Giddens’ characterization of social structure as existing in “memory traces” that guide agent’s actions (p. 70), and later in her article, notes that “as bearers of culture, these artifacts literally incorporate knowledge—knowledge of the aesthetics, economics, politics, religious beliefs and all the various dimensions of what we know as human culture” (p. 69, emphasis in the original). In other words, genres carry within themselves the traces of the activity system that employs them, and thus, also map within themselves the network nodes and connections that we have discussed.  This is precisely what we add by shifting our focus away from genre within the activity system to genre as an artifact, and what we can better see by going back to genre theorists such as Miller (1984, 1994) and Bazerman (1994, 2004). 

            To better see this, we now move to an informal analysis of a small corpus of academic interviews.  I looked at two interviews of Bazerman (Crawford & Smout, 1995; Florida State, n.d.), one of Latour (Tresch, 2013), and one of Deleuze (Deleuze & McMuhan, 1998).  In addition, I revisited an interview of Spinuzzi that I referred to in a previous case study (McNely, 2013).  Although this is a small sample, I made an attempt to represent both intra-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary interviews, printed and online journals, and in the Florida State case, an unpublished interview that was nevertheless distributed online.  For each case, I noted the types of information included in the interview in an attempt to determine what types of information are typically included in an academic interview.  All five mentioned scholars who influenced their ideas, such as mentors or individuals whose works they had read.  This appears to be almost obligatory for the academic interview.  Four out of five, for example, included a strong narrative element in terms of how the scholar got into the field or got involved with the area of research that he was known for.  All four also included personal asides as part of this narrative, like, for example, the fact that Latour’s daughter was born in Africa while he was doing fieldwork there (Tresch, 2013, p. 305).   Four out of five also made comments about their disciplinary identity and disciplinary or cross-disciplinary elements within their scholarship.  Bazerman and Spinuzzi both made arguments about what is, or should be, included in the discipline of rhetoric.  Latour and Deleuze did not do so, for several possible reasons.  They were being interviewed in a cross-disciplinary context.  They are not easy to pin to a single discipline.  The disciplines that they have worked in are less reflexive and perhaps more secure about their disciplinary status than rhetoric and writing studies is.  Some other topics that two or more interviews touched on include comments on current projects, comments on best-known work or works, explanation of core ideas within their scholarship, and future prospects, either for the field or related to their research program.  Three discussed methodology, but because of the centrality of this discussion in several interviews and its importance for accounting for the uptake of innovative scholarship, I would expect it to emerge as important in a larger sample.  I did not track the order that the ideas occurred because my goal was not to find a conventional order—if such even exists for interviews.  Rather I wanted to determine the extent to which elements of the activity system show up as points of reference within the interview.

            In fact, we can see that they do.  Again, using Spinuzzi’s model of CHAT, we can see elements of community, if community is taken as discipline or research program.  Most scholars situate themselves within or across disciplines within the interview.  A number tell the story of how they entered the discipline.  Reference to influences also connect to community.  In other words, a key goal of the interview seems to be to situate the scholar and his or her scholarship within the field and to promote his or her ideas.  Moving back to genre theory, there is also the addressed, namely, other members of the disciplinary community or the larger academic community.  The discussion of methodology brings us traces of the “instrument” node, and in some cases, “domain knowledge.”  Discussion of a scholar’s projects, whether previous work or current work, one could argue also connects to the “tools” or “instruments” node, in the sense that it is a tool for actively promoting the scholar’s ideas. 

The collaborators themselves—that is to say, the interviewer and interviewee, we might point out, are explicitly present in the interviewee, and in the typical Q & A format, remain highly conspicuous.  The personal asides highlight the human side of the scholar, and we might argue, fulfill another role of the academic interview, the desire of followers and fans to feel closer to an admired figure.  This is no doubt the primary goal of interviews in popular magazines, but it is not absent from the academic interview. 

The academic interview represents a speech event that takes place at a specific point in time—usually identified—and occurs at a specific location, usually one where the interviewer and interviewee are co-present, and often identified in the introduction to the published interview.  In the case of the Spinuzzi interview, for example, both participants were at a conference whereas both Bazerman interviews took place on college campuses where Bazerman made a presentation.  Tresch (2013) merely notes that his interview of Latour is an edited transcript of “a conversation held in Paris on 16 March 2012” (p. 303).  It is interesting that the academic interview so clearly anchors the event in space and time.  The time of the interview, particularly, serves as an anchor for the treatment of time within the interview.  The narrative part of the interview represents the past, bringing the reader up to the present moment of the interview.  Mention of mentors and other important influences also often appear within this narrative, though wherever they appear they help to situate the scholar by filling in details of the past.  Discussion of current projects, methodological preferences and core concepts are foregrounded in the present.  Finally, interviews not uncommonly end with a reference to ongoing or future projects or trends for the future, either within a field or research program, or society at large. 

As a genre, the academic interview draws on a recurrent situation—a scholar becomes known for a publication, a scholarly program, a breakthrough, and draws the interest of the academic community.  Each interview, however, represents a single event that occurs at a specific time and place and focuses on a scholar at a specific moment in time.  The same scholar interviewed twice does not tell the exact same story.  In fact, the interview itself can subtly change the scholarly landscape and lead to a different story.  This means that as content or meaning travel through the network, the network changes.  As Miller (1994) points out, genres are “cultural constructs that reflexively help construct their culture” (p. 69).  The network is constantly evolving, and each time the genre is employed, it emerges from an evolving activity system, which in turn may be affected by the message as well as all the traces of the culture encoded in the genre. 

As we can see, genre theory reinforces much of what is present in CHAT, as defined in Spinuzzi (2003) and presented both in this analysis and the previous case study.  On the other hand, since it is rhetorically-based, genre theory offers a stronger emphasis on the audience than CHAT does.  Genre theory also leads to a finer-grained analysis of genre as an artifact that that mirrors both the activity system and the cultural values encoded within the activity system.  On the other hand, neither model has much to say about the larger culture of which the activity system is a part.  They do not account for the complex interaction with other activity systems.  Both need add-ons to highlight power relations or provide a critical lens.  The activity system framework can, however, serve as a heuristic to call attention to a number of the elements operating within an organization or discourse community that play a role in a speech event, and genre theory further focuses our attention on some of these elements. 

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.

Chakraborty, M. N. (2010). Everybody’s Afraid of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Reading interviews with the public intellectual and postcolonial critic. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 35(3), 621-645.

Crawford, T. H., & Smout, K. D. (1995). An Interview with Charles Bazerman. Composition Studies/freshman English News, 23(1), 21-36.

Deleuze, G., & McMuhan, M. (1998). The brain is the screen: Interview with Gilles Deleuze on "The Time-Image". Discourse, 20(3), 47-55.

Florida State University. (n.d.). Interview with Charles Bazerman. Retrieved from http://www.english.fsu.edu/rhetcomp/transcripts/bazerman.pdf

Lyon, T. (1994). Jorge Luis Borges and the interview as literary genre. Latin American Literary Review, 22(44), 74-89.

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.

Miller, D. N. (1984). Isaac Bashevis Singer: The interview as fictional genre. Contemporary Literature, 25(2), 187-204.

McNely, B. (2013). “That lightbulb feeling”: An Interview with Clay Spinuzzi .Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society 3(1). Retrieved from
http://www.presenttensejournal.org/volume-3/that-light-bulb-feeling-an-interview-with-clay-spinuzzi/

Russell, David. (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

Spinuzzi, C. (2003). Tracing genres through organizations: A sociocultural approach to information design. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Tresch, J. (2013). Another turn after ANT: An interview with Bruno Latour. Social Studies of Science, 43(2), 302-313.