Xmca-ers attending the conference were Chuck Bazerman, Carol
Berkenkotter, myself, Patrick Diaz, Russell Hunt, Peter Medway,
Anthony Pare, & David Russell. Those who were able to contribute
notes/thoughts are cited below. The others I hope will add
their own impressions where they see sig. omissions or differences
with their own views.
I've organized the report into a few "general impressions" and
more specific "comments on presentations"
General impressions --
RUSS (the full text of Russ's comments is available at his
website:
http://www.stthomasu.ca/hunt/sfu/genrerfl.htm)
For me the central idea -- the one that kept coming up as I listened to
presentations and talked with people over lunches and dinners -- was
introduced in the opening talk by Anne Freadman: uptake. This notion
draws from, and invokes, speech act theory, a take on language which has
been a good deal less salient in recent years than it once was.
Freadman was clear that she's at least as concerned with the limitations
of speech act theory as with its relevance to a concern with
understanding the role of genre in our semiotic co-construction of
social reality. But she also reminded all of us, right off the top,
that we need to think of genre as a verb, rather than a noun, as an act
rather than a thing, and that this way of looking at language was one of
the principal contributions of Austin and Grice and Searle....
CHUCK:
Almost uniformly throughout the conference genre was perceived as
a form of activity rather than a set of textual conventions. There was as
well substantial attention to the ways genred utterances were embedded in
activity systems. Both activity theory and structurationist theories were
regularly invoked. In the discussion following Patrick Dias' plenary
paper explicating activity theory, it became evident that there were a
number of very knowledgable activity theorists in the audience. There was
some discussion of the relationship of activity theory to other
situational, utterance based approaches and whether there was a danger of
some terms coming to dominate over other equally useful terms.
....
ANTHONY:
It's difficult to identify the chief impressions left on me by the
Symposium. Like many contemporary conversations (xmca being a prime
example, in my experience), there was plenty of cross-disciplinary
exploration going on, with rhetoricians, literary critics, linguists,
educators, and others seeking common ground, defining terms, elaborating
conceptions. There were moments when "genre" seemed to mean everything,
followed by moments when it lost meaning altogether. Is there such a
thing as "genre theory," or is "genre" simply a helpful unit of
analysis, a useful lens for researchers? How does it fit into AT? What
are its educational applications/implications? Are rhetorical, literary,
and linguistic notions of "genre" the same/different? Do they overlap?
Interested xmcaers might want to check at
http://www.sfu.ca/english/genre.htm for the Symposium program (and other
stuff).
Judith Diamondstone (732) 932-7496 Ext. 352
Graduate School of Education
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
10 Seminary Place
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1183