RE: Genre

Charles Bazerman (bazerman who-is-at humanitas.ucsb.edu)
Tue, 27 Jan 1998 10:56:49 -0800 (PST)

Eugene,
I agree with all that Anthony has said, but would like to add that
in recent years I have begun thinking about genre as a means for mutually
recognizing a space wherein communicative action can take place, a kind of
context cue, to use Gumperz's term. Genre only helps people get a sense of
the kind of thing that is going on and the things that might be
appropriately said and done, but while it may shape and constrain and
locate activity, it does not fully determine or define the specifics that
are enacted within that space. The name on the door of a room does not
let you know in detail about what will be said and done in that room. At
the same time, knowing the name of the room and the larger institutions
and buildings it is part of helps you inhabit the room with greater
attention, richness, and spontaneity arising from familiarity.

Chuck

On Tue, 27 Jan 1998, Anthony Pare wrote:

> Eugene:
>
> "Genre" seems an elastic term, shared by various disciplines, and
> capable of offering both micro and macro perspectives on discourse. In
> fact, Pete Medway suggested at the recent Genre conference that there
> was a conceptual advantage in what he called the term's "capaciousness."
> In my own work, which has focussed on workplace writing and been much
> influenced by Carolyn Miller and Charles Bazerman, among others, I have
> thought of genre as a repeated rhetorical strategy that is designed
> (often over a long time) to produce the knowledge a community of
> practice needs to meet its objectives. In a sense, genres are the small
> gears or wheels in the larger workings of institutional discourse. At
> the heart of a genre is a text that community members would recognize as
> a reiteration or repetition of a particular type of text (in the
> workplace, such texts are often identified by acronym, abbreviation, or
> nickname), but current conceptions of the term genre go beyond the
> regular features of the text to recognize "similarity" in the
> socially-construed exigence to which the text responds and in the social
> action the text is meant to produce. One of the dangers of genre -- both
> for those participating in them and for those studying them -- is that
> appearances of similarity may well mask differences.
>
> Anthony Pare pare who-is-at education.mcgill.ca
>
>