New Genre Concepts

Yesterday I spent a lot of time reading articles about genre, which was basically in my plan, although I didn't manage to take notes on those articles--that's today's job.  A lot of what I read was pretty interesting, though.  Although I think I'm pretty well versed in the fundamentals of genre theory, these one-shot articles do some interesting work fleshing out the more intricate parts of the body of knowledge.  I was especially interested in Peter Medway's discussion of fuzzy genres.  He writes about architecture students' sketchbooks, which are a very loose, baggy genre.  In fact, they're so loose that he wonders whether they constitute a genre at all.  Of course, he decides that they are, but only after arguing that ossified formal/textual characteristics should not be the main criteria by which we define a genre--rather, if I have this right, it's recognized by its use in particular contexts to meet a perceived exigence.  That piece was also useful because it gives a series of citations about multimodality and genre that I can probably draw from as I go about doing my work (I wonder if they're the same citations in Prior?). 

Also useful was Catherine Schryer's use of Bakhtin's chronotope to work toward a more critical understanding of genre and context.  Although she still seems to use the synecdoche where the genre is "contained" by its context (see my thought on this below), I do think that the chronotope might be a good way to approach context in a more rigorous way--a way that might satisfy some on my committee.  In part, I'm arguing that context is constituted by the written and visual (and other) genres that circulate in any given situation.  But her idea gives the possibility that I can define context by configurations of space, time, and human values--if I get the chronotope correctly.  I find this attractive because it might add a more material understanding of context into the mix.  I'll have to think about this some more.

To return to this idea of the container metaphor of genre: does structuration get us out of this or does it perpetuate it?  The synecdochic view would hold that context influences text, or that text is a local manifestation of a larger context.  Structuration also poses the opposite here, that not only does situation/context/society/form structure genre, but genre also participates in structuring context.  This seems to substitute a part/whole metaphor for a container/contained metaphor.  Is that any better?  I think maybe it is, since it recognizes a more dynamic, complex view of things.  But one thing that I would take from Russell is that it's the idea of use that really matters here.  I think it's Pare that talks about this idea or maybe Medway, but if different people were to produce the same text in vastly different situations--i.e. a business person producing a memo for a company and a student producing a memo in a professional writing class--they wouldn't constitute the same genre.  This seems useful to me, too, because of the idea that the images that will be used in these different classes that I'm looking at won't necessarily be the same genre since they're being used in different ways. 

Regardless, my plan for the day is to take notes on these articles from The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre, and then maybe to go on and read some of Devitt or Bawarshi, or else some more one-shot articles.  I'm not sure if I need to go back to those more foundational texts or not as I go about developing my definitions.  I'm thinking that it might not hurt to go through and think about how they define concepts without necessarily reading the whole thing.