On Sat, 13 Jul 1996, Mike Cole wrote:
> I am wondering about the polymorphous nature of the term "forms
> of symbolic material" in relation to this defintion of genre.
>
> What does one call the different "kinds of form" and how do we
> identify them? I am thinking here of another term, trope. Isn't
> a trop a kind of form of symbolic material too?
>From my perspective, which I have to warn is different than some of the
other members of this list interested in genre, genre is only a
psycho-social recognition category--forms are what people recognize them
to be, coming out of their experience, history, related typifications,
interests, and so on. There is no fixed set of things that identify the
available genres for deployment or interpretation. A single document or
utterance may be recognizable as of several kinds. An utterance may be
produced by one person to be of one kind or kinds of thing and may be
perceived by various audiences as of different kind or kinds. There are
many social mechanisms to increase salience and alignment and stability of
kinds (such
as simply circulating the name of a kind, perhaps with criteria, perhaps
without, perhaps with consequent discussion whether utterances are
instances of this or that kind), and salience and alignment are also
increased by other sharings of experiences and interests and structured
or bounded activity that increaase the amount of commonality people bring
to a situation. (This particular grouping of issues i discuss in the
essay "Whose moment? The Kairotics of intersubjectivity" in my volume
CONSTRUCTING EXPERIENCE).
Also genres do not exist at any particular level on a
heirarchy--fiction/poetry/essay are no more or less useful distincrtions
of kind for people engaged in particular activities as completed form
G5S3/third carbon of form B845 is for another group of people or
pre-convention punditry news story/ post convention reunification op-ed
commentary.
Further, though genres are often recognizable through distinctive
textual features that then align participants to a certain type of
tecxtual experience (14 lines, verse and rhyme schemes for English or
Italian sonnets) some time it is not highly distinctive textual features
that are the most salient definers of what kind of thing something is
--how, for example, do we distinguish among the various kinds of things
that appear on an op-ed page? Recognition of speech acts and activity,
reconstructing the action sphere and the position of the author with
respect to the action sphere, etc. are more central I suspect to that
recognition of kinds.
The latter example also clearly points out how knowledge,
analytical practice, social positioning, and other variables influence
each person's constellation of recognizable kinds and means of
identification.
>
> I am wondering, too, how genre and voice are related, as well
> as "social language" which Jim Wertsch has adopted from Bakhtin
> as another kind of form.
>
The simple answer to this, which I find only partly illuminating, is
that genre points to the characterization of the activity of individual
utterances or groups of utterances, while register points to larger
patterns of language use among groups of people or in particular
settings. One can, of course, start drawing in individual cases some
relation between genres and appropriate registers (e.g. the typical lexis
and syntax of botanic taxonomy catalogues), but this gets murky and
complicated the more cases one looks at. Nonetheless, together they both
help to characterize sets of language practices. I take social language
to include both general characterizations of the language stock and the
kinds of utterances made typically within particular social
configurations. Although social language is not a term I have used, the
closest I have come to discussing similar issues is in "Systems of Genre
and the Enactment of Social Intentions" in Freedman and MEdway, eds.
GENRE AND THE NEW RHETORIC, Taylor and Francis, 1994.
While some would associate voice directly with register, I would
associate it more with typical activities, stances, and positions within
activity spheres and the kinds of language and genres deployed in pursuit
of those activities associated with a person's social identity in that
sphere. Thus voice, I would see as more of a typified recognition of
the kind of communicative presence of a social being or actor within a
setting (for example, think of the typification we associate with the
voice of the tobacco lobby in congressional electoral politics).
> These questions may be too complicated to answer in this forum,
> but if you have someplace where these issues are dealt with, I
> would appreciate a reference.
Because Jim Martin is more interested in systemizing the language
resources than I am (while I am more interested in understanding the
social dynamics that shape utterances and are enacted within utterances
and the social and psychological mechanisms by which we make sense of those
events and locate ourselves within them), he has addressed these
questions of systemization of language terms in ENGLISH TEXT and elsewhere.
However, his answers come from the assumptions of his task that language
terms can be made systematic within a system of description that centers
on language terms. Indeed the questions you raise arise from precisely
those same set of assumptions that are the legacy of the past century of
language studies.
Rather I have been exploring the multidimensionality of genre,
most recently in three review essays of the interdisciplinary literature
on genre (all in press or under consideration): "Social Forms as
Habitats for Action" (directed toward a lit theory audience); "The Life
of Genre, The Life of the Classroom" (directed to a writing teacher
audience); and "Genre and Social Science" (directed to rhetorical theory
audience). In all three I point to the literatures in linguistics,
applied linguistics,
sociology, anthroplogyu, rhetoric, teaching of writing, and some other
forms of cultural and historical inquiry.
I have also been trying to find ways to make clear that although
genres and other typifications of social life are most salient to us as
participants trying to orient themselves to social activities, and from
an analytic perspective an important mechanism for social participation,
it is the activities and relations and modes of being that are emergent
that are the more fundamental objects for analysis.
Chuck Bazerman