I agree with so much of Chuck Bazerman's last message that I just want to
second it. In trying to understand how to articulate genre as, in Chuck's
words, "a psycho-social recognition category" in relation to Bakhtin's
understanding of genre as situated utterance, I found that I was struggling
with my ways of conceptualizing genre knowledge. Thinking about the analogy
to script knowledge was helpful.
In the early 1980s, some key cognitive psychologists (van Dijk, Kintsch,
Schank) walked away from their 1970 theories of scripts and schemata. The
gist of the problem was that, even in the relatively well-structured worlds
of AI (Artificial Intelligence), they could not devise abstract semantic
packets of knowledge that were context-sensitive and flexible enough to
account for the kinds of understanding and action that people display. All
three concluded that knowledge structures must be more particular and
episodic and that abstractions were being generated on-line as products
(i.e., they were not running the show from the outset). Kintsch described
this as a shift to script generation as opposed to script instantiation.
In an analogous fashion, I think it is useful to think about the knowledge
people use to situationally generate genres rather than to assume that that
knowledge is fully present in the mind and is just being deployed in
activity. If we see genre as situated, negotiated, perspectival, and a
matter of family resemblance, then we should not expect classifications of
linguistic-rhetorical form to describe and determine the phenomena of
genre. And if we see human cognition as distribued and heterogeneous
(bricoluer-like), then it seems that the phenomena of genre are
fundamentally matters of texts in multiperspectival functional systems of
mediated activity.
I also agree with Chuck that Bakhtin's notion of voices points toward
particular historical persons, fictional persons, and typified persons (the
voice of my mother and grandmother, of the kids in my neigborhood, of a
series of TV news anchors I've seen on TV, of the Irish cop--as experience
in particular movies and my embodied interactions, of Bakhtin's texts as I
have read them, of Woody the Woodpecker and Elmer Fudd as I watched them on
TV).
Going back to Mike's and Phil's questions about the relation of genre to
voice, genre as "a text" (spoken or written), as some perceivedly bounded
whole, may and usually does contain multiple voices (or you might prefer
codes, registers, social langauges). Bakhtin's choice of the novel is a
good example of a genre that is typically configured by its incorporation
of multiple voices. For that matter, a genre may (and often does )
incorporate other genres (there are letters in novels, conversational
dialogue in ethnographic reports). Erving Goffman's argument on footings
(Forms of Talk, 1981) is useful here as he suggests that, when we embed
others' words in our talk, that we're also embedding something of the
social interaction frameworks, the activities, that those words came from.
Finally, I also wanted to comment on the question of social language that
Mike raised. In Dialogic Imagination (pp. 262-63), there is a listing
that Wertsch partially quotes in Voices in the Mind as "examples of social
languages" (p. 57-8). The whole quote reads in translation (and I cannot
read the original):
"The internal stratification of any single national language into social
dialects, characteristic group behavior, professional jargons, generic
languages, langauges of generations and age groups, tendentious languages,
langauges of the authorities, of various circles and of passing fashions,
that serve the specific sociopolitical purposes of the day, even the hour
(each day has its own slogan, its own vocabulary, its own emphases)--this
internal stratification present in every language at any given moment of
its historical existence is the indispensible prerequisite for the novel as
a genre."
My sense is that this listing is intended to be evocative of sociohistoric
stratification rather than a descriptive typology. In other words, I don't
think Bakhtin was proposing "social languages" as a technical term in his
theory. In my reading, Bakhtin ends up with utterance, voices, and speech
genres (genres of utterance) as the central technical expressions of his
theory of language.
The notion of social langauges seems to be at a level comparable to current
notions of speech communities or discourse communities. One of the problems
I see is that these notions typically reinscribe structuralism (or
abstract-objectivism) in smaller social units than the nation and in
relation to rules of use as well as form (kind of mini-langues with
increased scope for rules). I think where Bakhtin was heading was to a
notion of langauge as something other than words plus rules (the
metaphorical dictionary and grammar book, even with style and etiquette
manuals added in for commuicative competence), to a notion of language as
what we get from other people's mouths (and their written texts), from our
experience of others' embodied ways of being in the world and their many
artifacts.
btw, one of my colleagues has written an excellent review of genre theory
from a sociohistoric perspective in an out-of-the-way journal. If anyone is
interested, the citation is:
Kamberelis, George. (1995?). Genre as Institutionally Informed Social
Practice. Journal of Contemporary Legal Issues, 6, 117-171.
Paul Prior
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign