I hope you do say more about the tensions you see following from the idea
of genre generation as opposed to genre instantiation and from voices as
embodied/virtual rather than as abstract systems of discourse.
My initial reaction is that I don't see sociohistorical relations getting
written out. There are still widespread centripetal forces (whether the
medieval church, bodies of oral literature, MTV, or the nuclear family)
that are in play and shape the historical becoming of persons in activity.
For example, as mediational means with histories (and hence perspectives)
embedded in them, Bakhtin's utterances and genres of utterance always carry
at least some and often considerable centripetal force (though what is
centripetal at one level or in one context may be centrifugal elsewhere).
So I wasn't trying to raise the question of whether we look for
sociohistorical relations, but where we look for them. I was suggesting
that we should look for those relations in embodied forms of life/ways of
being in the world rather than in abstract systems of knowledge. In terms
of determinism, I see this perspective as one that rejects unified origins
for human activity (whether they be in abstract macrosocial structures or
in isolated individual cognitive structures) in favor of multiple laminated
origins that arise from the complexities of dispersed, heterogeneous,
historical activity.
In any case, I'd be interested in hearing more about your concerns and what
triggered them.
>
>I like Chuck Bazerman's and Paul Prior's discussion of genre as
>script-like in the generative sense and discussion of voice as
>the echo, so to speak, of actual voices. Ana also emphasizes
>the dialogism of Bakhtin' notion of utterance.
>What I am a bit concerned about, however, is that the constraining
>sociohistorical relations are getting written out of the theory; the
>sociolinguistic "facts"/probabilities of occurrence and
>dominance of certain types of voice, etc. I can appreciate a move
>away from determinism, but I sense a tension developing here between
>productive foci of genre theory. That's good - A productive
>tension and not a dichotomizing one. I'll say more later....
>
>Judy
Paul Prior
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign