It basically pertains, in genre-like models, to the segmentation of a text;
if there is a structural unit, a 'stage' in the activity or text genre's
linear production, then IF you interrupt it, there is the sense that
something is left 'unfinished', and the expectation that you may 'resume'
it and complete the unit. So genre units are completable; you can get to
the end of something, and you can sense that you have not yet gotten to the
end. They are 'interruptable' in this sense; the notion of interrupting
them makes sense.
In traditional mental script sorts of models, I believe, there was a notion
that there were certain minimal units of action, not perhaps unlike the
'operations' level in AT, such that if the execution of such an action was
interrupted, rather than resuming it, you would have to go back and start
it over from the beginning. This is somewhat akin to an automated behavior.
The options come only at the points where one connects one such unit to the
next. So, this is a different idea about interruptibility.
I think that in many ways the notion of an action-genre is quite like that
of a script, except for being a social practice rather than a mental
representation. What the genre notion captures for us, whether for actions
or for the texts that some kinds of action produce, is something about what
is the same from one instance to another. And what is saliently the same by
many cultural criteria is that the wholes seem to be built up out of
identifiable parts (stages, completable sub-units), and the functional and
formal features of the parts recur from one instance to another. I think
that scripts are meant to capture the same sort of perceived saliences and
invariances.
These notions are most useful when there are clear sub-unit stages, when
these stages are interruptible-completable-resumable, when the same sort of
stages recur across instances in more or less the same sequential order,
and when there is relatively little variation in instances that cannot be
accounted for by a small number of alternate fillers for each slot, and the
presence of some optional slots. It certainly also helps if there are very
clear boundaries between sub-units/stages.
The notions break down, or are less useful, in cases where these conditions
are not met, especially when unit boundaries are fuzzy (meaning they fall
in different places for different criteria in the same consistent set of
criteria) and when there is a lot of variation from instance to instance
that is not easily captured by a simple set of structural options. There
are many other kinds of salient similarities among action and text besides
those that can be captured by a genre-like notion, which emphasizes the
syntagmatic and structural features of a form.
JAY.
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JAY L. LEMKE
CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
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