Genre. Mary Jo Reiff

between literary and non-literary genres in ways that acknowledge how all genres reflect and shape texts and social actions. As John Frow offers, “Genre theory is, or should be, about the ways in which different structures of meaning and truth are produced in and by the various kinds of writing, talking, painting, filming, and acting by which the universe of discourse is structured” (10). Mikhail Bakhtin has been an especially important figure in describing the complex relations between genres: literary and everyday genres, written and spoken. We will revisit Bakhtin’s work on speech genres in Chapter 6, when we examine rhetorical approaches to genre. Here, we will focus on what we will describe as two axes of genre relations in Bakhtin’s work, horizontal and vertical. Horizontal relations describe the dialogic nature of genres, as one genre becomes a response to another within a sphere of communication. For example, a call for papers leads to proposals which lead to letters of acceptance or rejection, and so on. Vertical relations involve what Bakhtin calls primary and secondary genres (“Problem” 61-62). For Bakhtin, primary genres take form in “unmediated speech communion,” meaning that they maintain an “immediate relation to actual reality and to the real utterances of others” (62). Examples of primary genres include rejoinders in everyday dialogue and private letters (62). Secondary genres (which for Bakhtin include “novels, dramas, all kinds of scientific research, major genres of commentary”) are more complex: “During the process of their formation, [secondary genres] absorb and digest various primary (simple) genres. . . . These primary genres are altered and assume a special character when they enter into complex ones” (62). When we answer the phone with “hello” during an actual phone conversation, for instance, we are using a primary genre, but if that rejoinder and the phone conversation that ensues were recorded and included as part of a cross examination in a trial, then the primary genre becomes recontextualized and altered as part of the secondary genre of cross examination.

      The vertical relation in which secondary genres absorb and alter primary genres (as well as other secondary genres) offers insight into how literary and everyday genres interact to form and transform social practices and actions. For one thing, it suggests that literary genres, which are secondary genres, are not pure but are rather made up of other genres, including everyday, vernacular genres such as phone conversations, tax forms, contracts, prayers, and so on. For Bakhtin, the novel offers the clearest example of such a herteroglosia of genres. The novel recontextualizes multiple genres into its symbolic world. According to Bakhtin, “Each of these genres possesses its own verbal and semantic forms for assimilating various aspects of reality. The novel, indeed, utilizes these genres precisely because of their capacity, as well worked-out forms, to assimilate reality in words” (Dialogic 320-21). In so doing, the novel can be understood as re-assimilating realities within realities, so that the realities represented by the various genres the novel incorporates become recontextualized within its own reality. The novel uses the various genre realities to construct its own reality. This process of genre transformation works in two directions. On the one hand, once a literary genre absorbs other genres, say legal genres, it transforms them, so that these genres are no longer defined by what Thomas Beebee calls their cultural “use values” as legal documents that have cultural consequences, such as getting someone put in jail. On the other hand, though, a literary genre can supply an alternative vision of how everyday legal or public genres can be used, thereby transforming their cultural use values. That is, literary genres such as the novel have the potential to “de-form” or destabilize the realities represented by the genres they recontextualize. As Beebee explains, “In terms of my theory of genre as use-value, the purpose of the novel would be to provide a discursive space for different genres to critique one another” (154). In this way, literary genres can reveal cultural ideologies by denaturalizing and reconfiguring relations between everyday genres and their use values.4

      For Beebee, “primarily, genre is the precondition for the creation and the reading of texts” (250), because genre provides the ideological context in which a text and its users function, relate to other genres and texts, and attain cultural value: “Genre gives us not understanding in the abstract and passive sense but use in the pragmatic and active sense” (14). It is within this social and rhetorical economy that a genre attains its use-value, making genre one of the bearers, articulators, and reproducers of culture—in short, ideological. In turn, genres are what make texts ideological, endowing them with a social use-value. As ideological-discursive formations, then, genres delimit all discourse into what Beebee calls the “possibilities of its usage” (278). Philippe Gardy describes this transformation as a “movement of actualization” in which “brute information” or the “brute ‘facts’ of discourse” (denotation) becomes actualized as “ideological information” (connotation) (qtd. in Beebee 278). So genre is an “actualizer” of discourse, transforming general discourse into a socially recognized and meaningful text by endowing it with what Foucault calls a mode of being or existence. It is genre, thus, that gives a text a social reality in relation to other texts. Beebee concludes, “The relation of the text to the ‘real’ is in fact established by our willingness to place it generically, which amounts to our willingness to ideologically appropriate its brute information” (278). Genres frame systems of relations (intra-generically and inter-generically) within which texts become identifiable, meaningful, and useful in relation to one another.

      Bakhtin and Beebee offer a situated view of literary genres, one that is situated not only within a literary universe as Structuralist approaches understand it, but also situated in relation to other genres within a culture’s system of genres. Todorov has defined a system of genres as “the choice a society makes among all the possible codifications of discourse” (Genres 10). Such codifications include literary as well as legal, public, political, disciplinary, and other everyday genres, and together the complex relations of these genres organize and help generate a society’s social structures, practices, events, and discourses in dynamic inter-related ways. As a result, Todorov asserts, “in place of literature alone we now have numerous types of discourse that deserve our attention on an equivalent basis” (Genres 12). It is this understanding of the multiplicity of genres, their functions, and situations that, as Amy Devitt has argued, can integrate literary and rhetorical approaches. While literature courses may emphasize the role of the reader and composition courses the role of the writer, there is the potential for a shared understanding of “genres as involving readers, writers, text, and contexts; that sees all writers and readers as both unique and as necessarily casting themselves into common, social roles; that sees genres as requiring both conformity with and variation from expectations; and that sees genres as always unstable, always multiple, always emerging” (“Integrating” 715). In the next four chapters, we will describe how scholarship in Systemic Functional Linguistics, historical/corpus linguistics, English for Specific Purposes, rhetorical theory and sociology, and Rhetorical Genre Studies has paid attention to these other various types of discourse, in ways that have come to inform the study and teaching of writing.

      3 Genre in Linguistic Traditions: Systemic Functional and Corpus Linguistics

      While current approaches to genre in Rhetoric and Composition studies draw in part from work in literary theory, they draw more so from linguistic, rhetorical, and sociological traditions. In this and the following chapter, we will examine genre studies within linguistic traditions, namely Systemic Functional Linguistics, Corpus Linguistics, and English for Specific Purposes. Then in Chapters 5 and 6, we will focus on genre studies within rhetorical and sociological traditions, since Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) has been most closely linked with and has most directly informed the study and teaching of genre in Rhetoric and Composition studies.

Genre and Systemic Functional Linguistics

      Systemic Functional approaches to genre have contributed richly to how genre is understood and applied in textual analysis and language teaching over the last twenty-five years. Influenced in large part by the work of Michael Halliday (Halliday; Halliday and Hasan) at the University of Sydney, and applied to genre particularly in the work of J. R. Martin, Frances Christie, Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, Gunther Kress, Brian Paltridge, Joan Rothery, Eija Ventola, and others, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) operates from the premise that language structure is integrally related to social function and context. Language is organized the way it is within a culture because such an organization serves a social purpose