First, I am once again contrite. I can't seem to muffle
the stridency of my messages on this topic - it
reflects the urgency I feel to understand more about genre
theory than I do. I am persisting, with my editor on-line...
Paul wrote:
>everyday life/discourse may be highly influential in determining a
>disciplinary utterance, but explicit traces of the everyday may not be
>*expressed* in the utterance--and dialogic discourse continues in silence).
>So I don't think you can judge what voices and meanings and values are
>active and influential in an interaction just from the words
>uttered/written in that situation.
I agree that words on the page don't tell us about the
voices, meanings, and values that were at stake in the making of the text.
That's what makes analysis by way of texts so dependent on other texts -
on building up a sociohistorical context. It probably isn't enough to
pick up a full-enough record of the everyday, but it is probably all
we have available in most cases. Would you agree with that (i.e., that
it is possible to do responsible analysis on texts given adequate
intertexts)?
>I would argue
>that if an approach assumes that mental lexicons and systems of rules
>govern the production and reception of language, that those lexicons and
>rules are the shared property of social groups, and/or that you can get
>everything you need to know about a text (spoken or written) from that
>text, then that approach is not fully taking up Bakhtin's call for a study
>of dialogic utterance.
I am struggling with Halliday, but the intro to the second edition
of _An Introduction to Functional Grammar_ is addressed to
strugglers like me. Halliday's lexicogrammar assumes that the
lexicogrammatical system evolved in the course of situated
language use, and it attempts to account as fully as possible
for the regularities/meaning potential of a system that is obviously
inexhaustible. It seems to me to be a theory of language USE that
is definitely compatible with activity theory. The meanings are
in our situated doings.
>This is one of those tensions I feel with genre. I would guess that
>presenting different papers at different conferences, your style and mode
>of presentation will vary some, that the way you presented two years ago
>and the way you present now (or four years from now) will vary, that your
>various versions of presentations aren't identical to anyone else's, and
>that other people may present in fashions quite different from your
>presentations without whole audiences being shocked or distressed. One
>thing I like about Bakhtin's comments on genre was his repeated emphasis
>that genres are highly plastic, complex, and numerous, that we can only
>speak in situated utterances though those utterances are cast in generic
>forms.
I completely agree with what you like about B. But what do you make
of those generic forms - do you agree that they are relatively
suitable to the purposes & interests of different groups?
As for the tension, the trick about genres is that they account
for texts that are the same and different. That's the whole trick,
isn't it?
[BTW, if I gave the impression of a honed presentational style,
I misled - it is very much in-the-making.]
Judy
....................
Judy Diamondstone diamonju who-is-at rci.rutgers.edu
Graduate School of Education Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place New Brunswick, NJ 08903
Eternity is in love with the productions of time. - W. Blake