Where Do Genres Come From?

Week 2, Session 2

Case Studies of Genre Change

Carolyn R. Miller

April 18, 2023 2

Class schedule adustment

Week IV: New Genres in Teaching and LearningMonday, August 6 (time to be announced)Plagiarism and originality on the internet, with Prof. Charles Bazerman

Tuesday, August 7

reading list will be revised!

April 18, 2023 3

Agenda

• genres and health-care discourse• genres and business organizations• conceptual issues• methodology issues

Discussion questions: What are the research methods used in these two studies? How can we study contemporary non-public genres?

April 18, 2023 4

Health care, Schryer & Spoel

• What is the relationship between identity and genre in the medical case presentation?

• What is the relationship between identity and genre in the midwifery profession (in Ontario, Canada)?

April 18, 2023 5

Business genres, Zachry

• How are rhetorical choices of professionals enabled and constrained by prior workplace communication practices?

• How have technologies, management systems, government regulations affected workplace communication practices?

April 18, 2023 6

Genres, genre systems

• genres function within complex social systems

• genres interact

• genres are hierarchical metagenre

April 18, 2023 7

Genre and activity theory

• human activity occurs within complex contexts

• humans learn from the tools and practices in those contexts

• humans internalize values and beliefs acquired from social contexts, tools, and practices

• texts and contexts interact, co-constitute each other

April 18, 2023 8

Genre and ideology

• cultural objects (including genres) incorporate values, beliefs, perceptions, attitudes relationships of power and identity: who

may speak, to whom, when, where, with what object, etc.

relationships of meaning and persuasion

April 18, 2023 9

Pierre Bourdieu

• 1930–2002• French sociologist• Outline of a Theory

of Practice, 1972• Invitation to

Reflexive Sociology, 1992

• Practical Reason, 1998

http://www.toupie.org/Citations/Bourdieu.htm

April 18, 2023 10

Bourdieu: habitus

• rejects subjectivism of primary experience

• rejects “objectivism” of passive observer

• rejects structuralism, which reduces agent to bearer of structure (dupes, dopes)

• claims to work empirically, scientifically

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Bourdieu

“I wanted initially to account for practice in its humblest forms—rituals, matrimonial choices, the mundane economic conduct of everyday life, etc.—by escaping both the objectivism of action understood as a mechanical reaction ‘without an agent’ and the subjectivism which portrays action as the deliberate pursuit of a conscious intention . . .” IRS 121

April 18, 2023 12

Bourdieu: habitus

• principle of construction, principle that generates and organizes practices and representations

• a system of “structured, structuring dispositions”

• system of durable, transposable dispositions

• without conscious purpose or mastery

April 18, 2023 13

Bourdieu: habitus

• from Aristotelian “hexis,” disposition, to scholastic-Latin “habitus”

• similar to Schutz’s “lifeworld”• expresses “a feel for the game that does not

need to calculate” focuses on creative, active, inventive capacities of acting agent

• “principle of continuity and regularity” and also of “regulated transformations”

April 18, 2023 14

Genres as

• “social action” (Miller 1984)

• “mediating tool” (Zachry p. 62)

• “constellations of … improvisational strategies” (S&S p. 260)

implications? choices?

April 18, 2023 15

Genres and regulation

• Regulated resources (S & S, p. 250)

• Regularized resources

• Regulated genres (S & S, p. 266)

• Regularized genres

• Regulating genres (metagenres)

April 18, 2023 16

Environmental Impact Statements

• created by National Environmental Policy Act of 1969• were not a genre (first five years) because they had

no coherent pragmatic force• were an “imperfect fusion of scientific, legal, and

administrative elements prevented interpretation of the documents as meaningful rhetorical action.”

• legal and administrative problems• criticism from government administrative units,

environmental community, industry compliance efforts.

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Three regulated genres

EIS (Miller) Informed choice (Spoel)

Sales reports (Zachry)

legislated exigence, audience

institutional exigence, audience

corporate exigence, audience

no fusion of elements

rhetorical-ideological tensions

discipline, habit (replication, regularization)

not a genre, no pragmatic force

is a genre, recurrent practice

is a genre

April 18, 2023 18

Methodology

• What are the research methods used in these two studies?

• How can we study contemporary non-public genres?

April 18, 2023 19

Methodologies

• archival research (Zachry, Jamieson)

• criticism (Jamieson, Spoel)

• critical discourse analysis (Spoel)

• observation (Schryer)

• interviews (Schryer)

April 18, 2023 20

Assignment for Tuesday

• ReadingShepherd & Watters, “Evolution of

Cybergenres”

Yates et al., “Explicit and Implicit”

• Group oral reportWhat issues do the digital media raise for the use and study of genres?