Chuck
On Tue, 27 Jan 1998, Anthony Pare wrote:
> Eugene:
>
> "Genre" seems an elastic term, shared by various disciplines, and
> capable of offering both micro and macro perspectives on discourse. In
> fact, Pete Medway suggested at the recent Genre conference that there
> was a conceptual advantage in what he called the term's "capaciousness."
> In my own work, which has focussed on workplace writing and been much
> influenced by Carolyn Miller and Charles Bazerman, among others, I have
> thought of genre as a repeated rhetorical strategy that is designed
> (often over a long time) to produce the knowledge a community of
> practice needs to meet its objectives. In a sense, genres are the small
> gears or wheels in the larger workings of institutional discourse. At
> the heart of a genre is a text that community members would recognize as
> a reiteration or repetition of a particular type of text (in the
> workplace, such texts are often identified by acronym, abbreviation, or
> nickname), but current conceptions of the term genre go beyond the
> regular features of the text to recognize "similarity" in the
> socially-construed exigence to which the text responds and in the social
> action the text is meant to produce. One of the dangers of genre -- both
> for those participating in them and for those studying them -- is that
> appearances of similarity may well mask differences.
>
> Anthony Pare pare who-is-at education.mcgill.ca
>
>