Where Do Genres Come From?

1. Where Do Genres Come From? Week 2, Session 2 Case Studies of Genre Change Carolyn R. Miller

2. Class schedule adustment Week IV: New Genres in Teaching and Learning Monday, August 6 (time to be announced) Plagiarism and originality on the internet, with Prof. Charles Bazerman Tuesday, August 7 reading list will be revised!

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?

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)?

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?

6. Genres, genre systems • genres function within complex social systems • genres interact • genres are hierarchical  metagenre

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

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

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

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

11. 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

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

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”

14. Genres as • “social action” (Miller 1984) • “mediating tool” (Zachry p. 62) • “constellations of … improvisational strategies” (S&S p. 260) implications? choices?

15. Genres and regulation • Regulated resources (S & S, p. 250) • Regularized resources • Regulated genres (S & S, p. 266) • Regularized genres • Regulating genres (metagenres)

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.

17. Three regulated genres

18. Methodology • What are the research methods used in these two studies? • How can we study contemporary non-public genres?

19. Methodologies • archival research (Zachry, Jamieson) • criticism (Jamieson, Spoel) • critical discourse analysis (Spoel) • observation (Schryer) • interviews (Schryer)

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?