|
|
|
Genre-ENRhetorical genres: Rhetoric has been more interested in the relationship between the text and its producer (Devitt, 2000, p. 699). For rhetorical theorists at this period, genres were founded in the pragmatic action they accomplished: “how we do things with language.” Rhetoricians had a tendency to consider individual texts as examples of generic expectations rather than as texts with individual qualities (p. 711). The role of similarity-difference between texts, explored principally by Beebee, was presented as essential to any understanding of genre. A genre is not recognizable, he claimed, except through its difference with surrounding genres, and this led Beebee to support the idea that all texts are heterogeneous (cited in Devitt, p. 700). This textual heterogeneity did not become a theme in composition and communication studies until much later, partly inspired by Bakhtinian thought. Modes: These genres were introduced by J. Kinneavy in the 1970s, and have had a considerable influence on the United States views of teaching and studying college writing. Kinneavy echoed Jakobson, proposing that text modes can be determined by identifying the speaker, the audience, the text-message, and a world to which the text refers. But the purpose or aim of the text determines its type: “the aim of a discourse is primary; it acts on other features; it determines the acceptable forms of evidence and of development” (Kinneavy, 1971, p. 21). When the speaker’s aim is towards himself, the discourse is expressive; when towards an audience, the discourse is persuasive; when towards the subject matter, the discourse is referential; when towards the media, it is aesthetic. Genres and activity theory: This perspective has roots in reader-response literary theory that explores the interaction among reader, writer, context, and text. In the social-community models presented here, students’ texts are considered “an acquired response to discursive preferences of a given community in order to create and communicate knowledge” (Russell, 1997). This “activity theory” in which genres are born entirely outside of any set of formally shared characteristics and strictly within the expectations shared by a particular group, a “collective,” represents one extreme of the community versions of discourse. Genres serve, in this model, as mediator of actions between individuals and as temporary stabilizer of the structures of exchange. The conventions of the exchange are born out of the needs of the group and the discursive activity in play. Russell (1997) proposes the notion of generic routines, patterns of communication that, successful a first time, are used again by speakers in a future situation seen as recurrent. Participants in a given situation do not recognize a genre by its features but by the discursive actions it operationalizes. For composition theorists, the reciprocal interaction of genre-context created a different perspective:
Each domain has its own systems of genres that interact with each other (Slevin, 2001). This activity theory raised other questions, including: do we master genres or are we mastered by them? How are genres ideological representations? How do we appropriate genres if we do not belong to the domain in question? |