Tuesday, June 7, 2005

Genre Theory II

For yesterday's genre theory session we looked at the first chapter from Amy Devitt's book, Writing Genres, and the first and third chapters from Paul Prior's book, Writing/Disciplinarity (both of which have searchable copy at Google Print).  Devitt gracefully works genre into an interactive model between individuals (at a basic level); social structures, genre, and groups (at an intermediary level) and context of culture, context of genre and context of situation (at an ultimate level).  It's meant to simplify a complex set of relationships, I think, and as a model it does well to give a graphic alternative to some fairly heady stuff.  But I'm still a bit murky on the role genre plays in scaling between the lived, everyday activity (often communicative, often recurrent--as in, not another grocery list) and the higher/broader orders.  Genre, given to patterns of activity, would ask of us to point to evidence of the relationship between the broader abstract levels and the more ornate, idiosyncratic actions of individuals.  Forgive me though; I'm the one who's murky (shall I explain in a supplem-entry?).  Better to read Devitt first-hand than to take this as a solid handle on her project.

But I will say this:  Devitt presents genre as something that, in places, met up nicely with frame or framing. One in the same?  At another point, I was thinking that genre--if defined by its actants (ordinary folk rather than some higher elite)--challenges us with a problem of naming.  Who names genres?  Is the genre named suddenly afforded the possibility of recurring?  In other words, is an un-named recurrent activity outside the realm of genre or, as Prior thoughtfully tabs it, genrification?  Note that my fondness for genrification is purely spell-check serendipity: it's sub: gentrification.  Mm-hmm.  Something to it?  

Still confounding: I'm stuck on a question of the role genre plays in producing a situation.  Devitt suggests near the end of the chapter that the which-came-first paradox (the chicken or the text) between situation and genre is mixed with (though not solved by) a double-action.  Genre and situation are co-constitutive, "so tightly interwoven as to be interlocked" (22).  Following this logic, genre doesn't respond to a situation, nor does it enter only after the fact.  So it's neither deterministically a priori nor a clear consequence.  In another sense, "[g]enres are already always existing" (28).  Clear?  It's just that it seems a difficult move to go from the tight interlock between situation and genre and also to go for the always already.  At moments like these, I tend to defer to a less optimistic view of genre; I want to defer to a stance that prefers vocabulary of diffusion and pattern.  I'm not settled on the degree to which these distinctions are semantic, which leads me to question the extent to which knowledge of genre as genre shapes activity.  But then as I turn to working on something for prospective publication, does genre help (as Devitt says it does)?  Most definitely.

I found Paul Prior's first chapter, "Resituating the Discourse Community," especially point-on in its working through a sequence of Saussure, Ricouer and Bakhtin to present a range of thinking from structuralism to sociohistoricism as they, in turn (a turn taken up in the beginning of c. 3), apply to "discourse community."  In sociohistoric orientations we find more resistance to systematic, mechanistic treatments of form; and while this is useful for interrogating the genre-as-bucket metaphor, it also aligns Prior with much of the development of theories of genre in Miller, Bawarshi and Devitt.  In mentioning "indexical socialization," Prior cites Ochs (1988)--just something to look up later.  Genre as indexical socialization?  Perhaps not, but the idea that disiplinarity revolves around a kind of indexical socialization is interesting, even if it draws on a slightly different notion of activity patterns than genre theory looks at. 

Prior's work also gives us a nice synthesis of several Friends of Activity Theory; in a section subtitled "From Conduits to Communities to Persons: A Structuralist Network," he draws on Vygotsky, Wertsch, Bruner, Lave & Wenger to suggest the complicated nexus between the social and the cognitive, between which agency and multiplicity intercede.  Slowly and through heavily cited prose, he sets up a way of talking about "disciplines as open networks"; eventually, he says straight-out that he prefers the concept of "disciplinarity" to "discipline" because "disciplinarity evokes a process rather than a place or object" (26).  Perhaps more useful, however, is Prior's presentation of the possibilities in regarding disciplinary formations in network terms--preferring a more relational, networked model for disciplinarity to the more common "discourse community" frame. 

Posted by Derek Mueller at June 7, 2005 7:06 PM to Genre