Like you, I too am still struggling with ways of conceptualizing "genre,"
so I want to respond to some of the points you made thinking aloud.
>>I agree that genre knowledge is an abstraction "generated on-line" but I also
>> think that it works to run the show, even as it is being generated, in its
>>>>formulative,emergent, changeable sketch-of-a-script state.
I certainly didn't meant to suggest that genre is just a by-product of
discourse, but if genre is situated, generated, flexible, context sensitive
and so on, then I don't see how *it* could run the show (unless you're
thinking of something more like a conductor of an orchestra). I'd agree
that genre is influential, but as one element in heterogenous streams of
joint activity....
>> When I get the feel of being a presenter, I am deploying (by way of the
>>feelings/knowings) my knowledge of a presentation genre.
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.
>>You say that genre is "situated, negotiated, perspectival, & a matter
>>of family resemblance." Well, it is more or less negotiable, depending
>>on the activity.
By "negotiated" (or dialogic or co-constructed or joint), I simply mean
that some kind of joint action is involved, not necessarily or even usually
that such action is egalitarian or consensual or fair. So, when I say genre
is negotiated, I don't mean that it is "negotiable", though that's one
possibilty. (I recognize that terms like negotiated, joint, and dialogic
are often used in a positive and normative sense; your response helped
remind me that I should be clearer how I am using them).
>>The multivoicedness of classrooms,
>>courtrooms, prisons, etc. is stratified in ways that can't be undone by
>>individual protagonists. How do we describe the constraints on
>>multivoicedness, negotiation, reciprocity?
I think that individual protagonists do affect (I'm not sure what you mean
by undoing) the multivoicedness of classrooms, courtrooms, etc. I'm not
sure that these sites are *that rigid* in the stratification of discourses
in the first place. Even supreme court justices and constitutional lawyers
seem quite able to generate multiple, often contradictory interpretations
in that fairly centripetal domain. I'd also argue that if you take
Bakhtin's dialogic perspective--that the utterance is constituted in a
historical chain of utterances (including inner speech as well as outer),
then multivoicedness is often hidden but formative in certain highly
centripetal discourses (e.g., personal experience and evaluations from
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.
>First, do you object to anything in Halliday's text-level/
>situation-level grammar? When you reject terms like
>"realization" and "instantiation" are you rejecting
>wholesale the notion of predetermined terms for participation?
>As I understand it, Halliday's work on register seems consonant
>with an activity-based natural history of genres. If you disagree,
>can you say more about why?
Knowing very little about systemic-functional linguistics, I too will look
forward to Chuck's post-Labor Day uncanning of worms. Having suggested that
studies of speech/discourse communities typically involve lots of
structuralist (abstract-objectivist) assumptions, I should add that I find
many of those studies very useful and valuable--even if I don't personally
agree with their whole theoretical and analytic approach. 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.
Paul Prior
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign