Genre In The New Rhetoric

Aviva Freedman, Peter Medway, Aviva Freedman, Peter Medway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781135747688
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Sociology

Since The Mid-1980s The Notion Of "Genre" Has Been Dramatically Redefined. This redefinition has prompted theorists and scholars alike to analyze the shaping power of language and culture, and the interplay between the individual and the social.; Recent work in genre studies has drawn upon ideas and developments from a wide range of intellectual disciplines including 20th-century rhetoric, literary theory, sociology and philosophy of science, critical discourse analysis, education and cultural studies. In this text, leading theorists reflect and capitalize on the growing interest in genre studies across these allied fields, and examine the powerful implications this reconception of genre has on both research and teaching.

Part I
Introduction

Chapter 1

Locating Genre Studies: Antecedents and Prospects

Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway

The essays in this collection represent a newly emerging field of scholarship in North America: genre studies. For those familiar either with traditional conceptions of genre or with the recent work on genre associated with the Sydney School in Australia, the approach to genre in this volume will require explanation on our part and rethinking on yours. The introduction that follows is intended to offer some of the necessary orienting explanation. We believe the rethinking entailed well worth the effort for teachers, researchers, and students of language in general; current reconceptualizations of genre can enlarge our understanding of how it is and why it is that we produce the kinds of discourse that we do—in our classrooms, in our boardrooms and workshops, and across the range of situations in which the diversity of culture realizes itself within a society.

Traditional definitions of genre focused on textual regularities. In traditional literary studies the genres— sonnet, tragedy, ode, etc.—were defined by conventions of form and content. Descriptions of non-literary genres drew attention to textual features such as the inverted pyramid of a news story, the ‘purpose, methods, procedure, observations, conclusions’ organization of the lab report, the bottomlining and you-attitude¹ of a business letter. Current genre studies (which incidentally tend to concentrate on non-literary texts) probe further; without abandoning earlier conceptions of genres as ‘types’ or ‘kinds’ of discourse, characterized by similarities in content and form, recent analyses focus on tying these linguistic and substantive similarities to regularities in human spheres of activity. In other words, the new term ‘genre’ has been able to connect a recognition of regularities in discourse types with a broader social and cultural understanding of language in use.

This theoretical rethinking has led to or been accompanied by a growing body of empirical studies of school and workplace writing. Since Odell and Goswami’s pioneering 1985 collection, Writing in Nonacademic Settings, researchers have used ‘ethnographic’ research methods drawn from anthropology to study such instances as the writing of professional biologists (Myers 1990); the documents produced by tax accountants (Devitt 1991); the production of the experimental article (Bazerman 1988; Swales 1990); the discourse produced at a central bank (Smart 1992, 1993); the recording and reporting of social workers (Paré 1991); the evolution of the memo and the business report (Yates 1989); the role of text in private enterprise (Doheny-Farina 1991); and writing for the disciplines at university (Herrington 1985; McCarthy 1987; Freedman 1990; Berkenkotter et al. 1991).

All these studies unpack the complex social, cultural, institutional and disciplinary factors at play in the production of specific kinds of writing. For example, Yates (1989) has shown how changes in management philosophy as well as the introduction of new technologies elicited new business genres: the memo and the business report. At the same time, other researchers have pointed to the social consequences of textual creation: how discourse communities use mastery of writing to enrol and initiate new members, as well as to exclude others; and how texts themselves reshape the social and even material environments in which they are produced. For this reason, Bazerman and Paradis call their 1991 collection of essays, Textual Dynamics of the Professions, pointing to the complex interplay between texts and their social contexts.

This work is as relevant to teachers as to researchers with a theoretical interest in the social nature of written discourse. For teachers, too, there is a powerful heuristic advantage to establishing the primacy of rhetorical or socio-cultural purpose, ‘rhetorical’ here being used in the classical sense referring to speech or writing used to achieve some purpose within a social situation. It forces us all to reanalyse and rethink the social, cultural, political purposes of previously taken-for-granted genres, and leads to an archeological unearthing of tacit assumptions, goals and purposes as well as the revealing of unseen players and the unmasking of others.

Genre studies thus opens new perspectives on language use. As a result, we can begin to see how much more is at play in the production and reception of specific genres than we had suspected—the nature of the multiple invisible participants involved in the production of even such familiar school genres as fill-in-the-blank response sheets, multiple-choice exams, or personal reflective journals. Perhaps most significantly, as Miller points out (1984; reprinted in this volume as Chapter 2), understanding genre as social action enables us to understand what is being learned when we (or our students) learn new genres: ‘we learn—what ends we may have… We learn to understand better the situations in which we find ourselves… For the student, genres serve as keys to understanding how to participate in the actions of a community.’

For teachers, consequently, a failure to understand genre as social action ‘turns what should be a practical art of achieving social ends into a productive art of making texts that fit certain formal requirements’. This is the main importance of the reconceived genre studies for teachers. Put positively rather than negatively, they enlarge our sense as teachers of the ends we may have, and allow us to see our work in the teaching of writing as contributing to an emancipatory social agenda.

Overview of the Introduction

We have organized this introduction in three sections. We hope that the first, The Discursive Context’, will be helpful primarily for those less familiar with genre studies in general and the North American tradition in particular. In this section, we set out some of the theoretic notions that have been appropriated by genre studies, especially those concepts and approaches whose understanding is assumed rather than explicated in the essays that follow.

In the second section, ‘The Next Stage’, we assess the state of the art of genre studies in North America, presenting some of the political implications of the ‘paradigm’ that has evolved, and pointing as well to its blind spots and to the possibilities for new directions in a second stage of genre studies. The directions taken so far reflect the specific intellectual and also social origins of the field and are not the only ones conceivable. Besides offering our thoughts on ways forward we discuss how the North American genre studies differ from the work of the Australian Sydney School which represents one existing alternative approach.

In the third section we present an overview of the essays in this collection.

The Discursive Context

Here we lay out some of the central concepts and theoretic approaches that underlie current North American thinking about genre. First we briefly describe four twentieth-century perspectives on human knowing and language use that have been drawn on in genre studies: the ‘rhetorical turn’ in disciplinary studies; social constructionism; rhetorical versions of rationality in the field of argumentation; and speech act theory. Next we discuss the work of two scholars who have in different ways shaped current thinking about genre by describing and theorizing patterns of regularities in discourse from a social perspective: Mikhail Bakhtin and John Swales. Finally we discuss recent research studies investigating academic and non-academic discourse which use the socio-rhetorical perspective of current genre studies.

The ‘Rhetorical Turn’

Beginning in the mid-century with the brilliant and prescient work of Kenneth Burke, rhetoric has increasingly taken centre stage amongst ways of understanding human behaviour. If twentieth-century humanists and social scientists have tended to define and differentiate human beings by their ability to use language, more recently it is the rhetorical dimensions of that capacity that have captured our attention.

Thus, while along with Langer and Cassirer, Burke insists on the primacy of our symbol-making capacity, he alone stresses the degree to which symbol-making is inextricably bound up with persuasion. Even before Kuhn, he pointed to ‘language’s symbolic action’ as ‘exercised about the necessary suasive nature of even the most unemotional scientific nomenclatures’ (1950:45). However, it required the authority of Kuhn, with his status as a scientist and philosopher of science, to allow for the widespread acknowledgement of the degree to which theories even in the pure sciences are established rhetorically and communally. Sociologists of science have developed these insights and have painstakingly explicated the ways in which scientists construct the knowledge of their fields in response to rhetorical constraints (examples include Latour and Woolgar 1979; Mulkay 1979; Knorr-Cetina 1981). The recent spate of works on the rhetoric of the social and pure sciences elaborate on these insights (see for example, McCloskey 1985; Gross 1990; Simon 1990).

The teaching of composition, too, was affected by this rhetorical turn. From our current vantage point in time, the possibility of a disjuncture between rhetoric and composition seems absurd especially since composition undoubtedly derived from the ancient study of rhetoric. By the mid-twentieth century, however, at least in North America, the teaching of composition had degenerated into an impoverished discipline that bore little trace of its origin. As described by Young (1976), composition instruction involved little more than attention to editing and rules of usage.

By the 1970s composition scholars, alert to the new developments in rhetoric, began to reinfuse the field of composition with classical concepts such as ‘invention’, ‘audience’, ‘occasion’, and ‘kairos’, and these notions began to extend and shape thinking, research and teaching. Particularly attractive was the ability of these concepts to provide a systematic basis for a process pedagogy which could help students with the decisions and strategies necessary in the course of writing, rather than simply commenting, as current-traditional practice did, on faults in the written product, with appeal to a few very general maxims. As a result, students were encouraged to think as much about the demands of the occasion of their writing as about the textual characteristics of some general, unspecified or universal ‘good writing’.

It is not surprising that such rhetorical notions soon informed considerations of ‘genre’ as well, especially from the perspective of its composition. At the same time, the larger recognition of the rhetorical dimensions of knowledge-making and the primacy of the rhetorical impulse in human communication (and all linguistic and semiotic processes) have profoundly shaped current thinking about the nature and role of genres.

Social Constructionism

By the 1980s, a different but related set of notions began to take hold in the field of composition studies; imported primarily from philosophy (psychology and sociology have their own versions), social constructionism has begun to shape research, thinking and pedagogy. The figures most commonly associated with social constructionism in composition studies are the philosopher Richard Rorty and his follower in composition studies, Kenneth Bruffee.

At the beginning of his essay, ‘Solidarity or Objectivity’, Rorty (1991) sketches two principal ways by which humans ‘try to give sense to their lives’. One is to ‘describe oneself as standing in immediate relation to a nonhuman reality’—whether this be through religion or science or traditional philosophy. The second is ‘by telling the story of [one’s] contribution to a community’ (p. 21). Rorty argues that attempts of the first kind require a belief in some external set of universals on the basis of which we can spin our theories; these ‘foundational’ beliefs, however, have themselves been shown to be unverifiable. Therefore we would do best to turn instead to the second way of making sense of our lives, by focusing on communal constructions of meaning and pragmatic evaluations of the good and the true: ‘truth is…what is good for us to believe’ (p. 22). In this view, knowledge is something that is socially constructed in response to communal needs, goals and contexts. The social constructionist alternative to foundationalist assumptions is that

there is only agreement, a consensus arrived at for the time being by communities of knowledgeable peers. Concepts, ideas, theories, the world, reality, and facts are all language constructs generated by knowledge communities and used by them to maintain community coherence. (Bruffee 1986:777)

Further, as cultural anthropology has shown, it is not just knowledge that is so shaped. To quote Clifford Geertz (1983) in Local Knowledge, ‘cognition, emotion, motivation, perception, imagination, memory… whatever’ are ‘directly social affairs’ (p. 153). These emphases on the community and the socio-cultural, the acknowledgement and indeed celebration of the shaping power of the social, provide some of the groundwork on which social and contextual redefinitions of genre are based. The difference that philosophical social constructionism can make to views of writing is potentially radical; the composing of texts traditionally regarded as containers of knowledge comes to be seen, far more dynamically, as part of the social process by which that knowledge, ‘the world, reality, and facts’ are made. It is in the writing of students, as well as scientists and managers, that Bruffee’s ‘language constructs’ come into being in the first place and receive regular reactivation thereafter.

Rhetorical Versions of Rationality

Equally important, but somewhat different in emphasis, is the work of the philosopher, Stephen Toulmin. Beginning with The Uses of Argument, Toulmin (1958) has reconceived the notion of ‘argument’ and has rejected the conventional notion of ‘rationality’ as an abstract analytic category, applicable across all disciplines and forums. Instead, he has developed a notion of ‘the reasonable’, in which what counts as appropriate and convincing varies according to historical, disciplinary and/or social context. Toulmin and his colleagues, Rieke and Janik (1979), have developed a descriptive framework for specifying the potential elements in any argument, and have described the instantiation of these elements in ways that differ according to the forum: claims (theses), grounds (evidence), warrants (approved ways of connecting claims to evidence), for example, differ in fundamental ways according to the context and the players. As in current genre studies, Toulmin places great emphasis on context: ‘every text has to be understood in relation to a situation’ (interviewed in Olson 1993:290). Further, behind the notion of situation and especially recurrent situation is the Wittgensteinian concept of ‘life-form...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Genre Theory
• Part III Research into Public and Professional Genres
• Part IV Applications in Education
• Notes on Contributors