Re: genre

p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
Sat, 15 Nov 1997 07:15:04 -0500

>
> I was trying to find a good distinction between a genres and
>Schank and Abelson's "scripts." Both have essential, prohibited, and
>optional elements. Both have specific goals and structures. One idea I
>came across was that genres are typically non-interactive (e.g.,
>non-interruptible). Maybe some of you genre experts out there could
>give me a hand.
>
> David
My sense is that current genre theories would argue that all communicative
interaction that is sensible is generic activity, not necessarily *a*
genre, but oriented to genres (e.g., see Bakhtin, Hanks, Bazerman,
Berkenkotter & Huckin). And certainly, current genre theories do include
interactive communication. And everything is interruptible. If you wanted
to distinguish between scripts and genres, I'd say that scripts are event
structures and genres are communicative structures, with the understanding
that all genres then would be partially constituted by scripts and that
most scripts would include generic activity. Some interactions (e.g.,
routine service encounters, fist fights) might have scripts without
verbal-linguistic interaction necessarily being involved.

As Jerry Balzano notes, a question to ask about both notions is whether
you're thinking of them as things in people's heads. Certainly, you could
take a notion like script and argue that it is socially and artifactually
distributed.

I also wonder why you would want to use Schank and Abelson's 1970's notion
of script. In the 80s, Schank and other cognitive psychologists (e.g., van
Dijk, Kintsch) concluded that the 70s notion of scripts as mental
structures (semantic memory) instantiated in particular situations simply
did not work. They suggested instead that a script must be situationally
generated out of loosely associated, episodic memory and on-line cognitive
models and goals (and here is where they could have moved to distributed
cognition, I think). Genres also used to be thought of as stable mental
models instantiated in use, whereas at this point most genre theory seems
to see them as situationally and socially generated practices, drawing on
repeated concrete experiences within something like a sociocultural habitus
or a lifeworld.

Paul Prior
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign