Жанроведение: Теоретические подходы и направления.

Branch of general critical theory

Genre studies is an academic subject which studies genre theory as a branch of general critical theory in several different fields, including art, literature, linguistics, rhetoric and composition studies. Literary genre studies is a structuralist approach to the study of genre and genre theory in literary theory, film theory, and other cultural theories. The study of a genre in this way examines the structural elements that combine in the telling of a story and finds patterns in collections of stories. When these elements (or semiotic codes) begin to carry inherent information, a genre emerges. Linguistic genre studies can be roughly divided into two schools, Systemic Functional Linguistics or "SFL", and English for Specific Purposes or "ESP." SFL scholars believe that language structure is an integral part of a text's social context and function. SFL scholars often conduct research that focuses on genres' usefulness in pedagogy. ESP also examines the pedagogical implications of genre, focusing in particular on genre analysis as a means to help non native English speakers to use the language and its conventions. ESP genre analysis involves identifying discourse elements such as register, formation of conceptual and genre structures, modes of thought and action that exist in a specific discourse community. A third approach developed from scholarship in New Rhetorics, principally Carolyn R. Miller's article "Genre as Social Action" and is called rhetorical genre studies (RGS). RGS has found wide application in composition studies, whose scholars insist that the textual forms that are usually called "genres" are only traces of recurring social action. The social action itself, in other words, is the genre, not the document or text that it leaves behind.

Systemic functional linguistics scholars believe that language is organized within cultures based on cultural ideologies. The "systemic" of SFL refers to the system as a whole, in which linguistic choices are made. SFL is based largely on the work of Michael Halliday, who believed that individuals make linguistic choices based on the ideologies of the systems that those individuals inhabit. For Halliday, there is a "network of meanings" within a culture, that constitutes the "social semiotic" of that culture. This "social semiotic" is encoded and maintained by the discourse system of the culture. For Halliday, contexts in which texts are produced recur, in what he calls "situation types." People raised within a specific culture become accustomed to the "situation types" that occur within that culture, and are more easily able to maneuver through the "situation types" within that culture than people who were not brought up within it. Halliday's approach to cultural context in the formation of recurrent "situation types" influenced other scholars, such as J. R. Martin, to develop a linguistic pedagogy called the 'Sydney School'. Martin led the SFL pedagogical approach, which emphasized the role of context in text formation. Martin and his associates believed that process based approaches to education ignored the cultural boundaries of texts, and privileged middle and upper class students at the expense of students from lower class backgrounds. According to Martin and other SFL scholars, an explicit focus on genre in literature would help literacy teaching. Focusing on genre reveals the contexts that influences texts, and teaches those contexts to students, so that they can create texts that are culturally informed. Through their genre work in schools, Martin and his associates developed a definition of genre as a "staged, goal oriented, social process." In the Martinian genre model, genres are staged because they accomplish tasks that require multiple steps; they are goal oriented because their users are motivated to see the completion of the stages to the end; and they are social because users address their texts to specific audiences. ESP focuses on specific genres within spheres of activity, such as the medical profession, but it also focuses on the broader concept of communicative purposes within fields of study. English for Specific Purposes shares some characteristics with SFL studies. Both believe that linguistic features are connected to social context and function, and both aim to help disadvantaged students grasp the system in which texts are created so that they can create similar texts, by teaching them the relationship between language and social function. Both try to accomplish their goals by teaching specific genres to underprivileged users. However, there are also some important differences between ESP and SFL. Whereas SFL scholars focus on teaching basic genre structures to primary and secondary school students, ESP scholars are focused on teaching Professional and Academic disciplinary genres to University and graduate level students. ESP students tend to be more bound to discursive genre subjects, within very particular contexts. ESP focuses on micro level genres and contexts, whereas SFL focuses on macro level contexts.

Rhetorical genre studies or RGS (a term coined by Aviva Freedman) scholars examine genre as typified social action, as ways of acting based in recurrent social situations. This founding principle for RGS was developed in Carolyn R. Miller's essay "Genre as Social Action," which was published in 1984. In her article, Miller draws on Lloyd Bitzer's notion of exigence as "an imperfection marked by an urgency", that is a condition in the world that serves as an "external cause of discourse." Miller modifies this objective view with Kenneth Burke's notion of "motive" as internal source of human action. Drawing on Alfred Schutz's phenomenological concept of typification, she views situations and exigences as social constructions. Genres are typified ways of responding to recurring social situations. As a consequence genres are not fixed in number and cannot be organized into a taxonomy; rather they are evolving historical constructions that "change, evolve, and decay." A rhetorical approach focuses on genres not as forms but as communicative actions. RGS scholarship has developed beyond Miller's founding definition of genre. Charles Bazerman examined the historical evolution of the experimental article in the sciences and social sciences demonstrating how the major features and variations emerged. He analyzed how the changing forms of the genre and the proliferation of its varieties carried out the activities of those sciences, formed the knowledge of various disciplines, and established criteria about how knowledge should be formulated and evaluated. He also found evidence about how genre expectations influenced the social structure and values of sciences. He then examined how practices of intertextuality and citation developed with modern scientific genres to create more collaborative relations within sciences. Carol Berkenkotter and Thomas Huckin begin with the notion that genre is knowledge foundation, and argue that genres embody communities' knowledge and ways of acting. Berkenkotter and Huckin redefine genre as social cognition. She uses the game of tennis to explain the ways genres, as typified actions, are "taken up" by writers (tennis players). Tennis players, she says, do not exchange tennis balls, they exchange shots. Each shot only has meaning within the game, its rules, and the context of the game being played. Shots are meaningful because they take place in a game. The game is meaningful because it takes place within "ceremonials." Thus, the final at Wimbledon provides a different context than a game between friends. Genres are the games that take place within ceremonials, and shots are utterances, or verbal exchanges. We cannot really understand a text without understanding the ceremonial in which it occurs. "Uptake" is the illocutionary response elicited by particular situations. A number of different scholars have proposed terms that highlight the different ways genres may be related to each other. Amy Devitt initially proposed "genre sets" as those genres produced by an individual actor, carrying out that person's various roles, as part of the person's role set. Bazerman proposed "genre systems" to indicate the systematic unfolding of genres in an activity setting. John Swales proposed a similar term, "genre sequences." Clay Spinuzzi, with his term "genre ecologies," emphasized a more open set of genre options in a setting. Vijay Bhatia proposed "genre colonies" to note how genres move from one activity system to another to create new clusters of genres. For instance, if we were to take a courtroom as an activity system, the judge's genre set could be defined as only those genres used by the judge, while all the communications produced by all the witnesses, lawyers, and other court officers would be included within the genre system, and the regularized series of utterances from judge to lawyers to witnesses could be identified as a genre sequence. The total range of kinds of utterances in the court would form a genre ecology, and the introduction of technical discourses through, for example, the testimony of expert witnesses could indicate the colonization of genres from one domain to another. Bazerman, in a more complex example, studied the history and workings of the multiple activity systems and their associated genres that Thomas Edison needed to engage with, including journalism, finances and equity markets, patents and the courts, civic regulation, industrial laboratories, commercial marketing, corporate organization and others, in order to develop a system of lighting and centralized power. The technical innovations only became possible by gaining presence, meaning and value within the communications of each of these systems. Another influence on rhetorical genre studies comes from M. M. Bakhtin's analysis of genre, based in literary criticism and non structural dialogic linguistics. Bakhtin considers genre as responsive to social, situational context, laden with intertextual history and ideology. Bakhtin states, "Utterances and their types, that is, speech genres are the drive belts from the history of society to the history of language." His work strengthened the developing view of genre both as a semiotic structure and as a recurrent action analogous to the speech act or utterance. Translated into English from the Russian in 1986, Bakhtin's "Problem of Speech Genres" began to influence genre studies in the 1990's (for examples, in the work of Berkenkotter and Huckin, Devitt, Freedman, Journet, and Schryer.

At the end of the 18th century, the theory of genre based on classical thought began to unravel beneath the intellectual chafing of the Enlightenment. The introduction of the printing press brought texts to a larger audience. Then pamphlets and broadsides began to diffuse information even farther, and a greater number of less privileged members of society became literate and began to express their views. Suddenly authors of both "high" and "low" culture were now competing for the same audience. This worked to destabilize the classical notions of genre, while still drawing attention to genre because new genres like the novel were being generated (Prince, 455). Locke, in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), had reduced data to its smallest part: the simple idea derived from sense. However, as the science of cognition became more precise it was shown that even this simple idea derived from sense was itself divisible. This new information prompted David Hartley to write in his Observation on Man (1749), How far the Number of Orders may go is impossible to say. I see no Contradiction in supposing it infinite, and a great Difficulty in stopping at any particular Size. (Prince, 456). The possibility of an infinite number of types alarmed theologians of the time because their assumption was that rigorously applied empiricism would uncover the underlying divine nature of creation, and now it appeared that rigorously applied empiricism would only uncover an ever growing number of types and subsequent sub types. In order to re establish the divine in categorization, the new taxonomical system of aesthetics arose. This system offered first beauty, and then the sublime as the taxonomical device. The problem with Aesthetics was that it assumed the divine and thus the sublime must underlie all these categories, and thus, the ugly would become beautiful at some point. The paradox is glaring.

American rhetorical education in the early 19th century was dominated by Hugh Blair's belletrism, emphasizing five common forms (letters, treatises, essays, biographies and fiction), and in the later 19th century by what became known as the modes of discourse," based on eighteenth century faculty psychology and codified as narration, description, exposition, and argument (sometimes called persuasion). These formalized and context free categories were codified in textbooks and influential in the teaching of writing through the middle of the twentieth century. in 1925 neo Aristotelian speech criticism inaugurated by Herbert Wichelns in 1925 revived Aristotelian rhetorical genres and codified them in the teaching of new departments of speech communication. Edwin Black identified the classification of rhetoric into forensic, deliberative, and epideictic genres as first among the "primary and identifying ideas of neo Aristotelianism." Black's critique of neo Aristotelianism enabled Karlyn Kohrs Cambell and Kathleen Jamieson's turn toward a situation based, historically developmental conception of genres.

Ever since the late 18th century literary critics have been trying to find a theory of genre that would be more commensurate with the realities of individual texts within genres. The evolution of genre took many twists and turns through the 19th and 20th centuries. It was heavily influenced by the deconstructionist thought and the concept of relativity. In 1980, the instability engendered by these two new modes of thought came to a head in a paper written by Jacques Derrida titled, "The Law of Genre." In the article Derrida first articulates the idea that individual texts participate in rather than belong to certain genres. He does this by demonstrating that the "mark of genre" is not itself a member of a genre or type. Thus, the very characteristic that signifies genre defies classification. However, at the end of this essay, Derrida hints at what might be a more fruitful direction for genre theory. "There, that is the whole of it, it is only what 'I,' so that say, here kneeling at the edge of literature, can see. In sum, the law. The law summoning: what 'I' can sight and what 'I' can say that I sight in this site of a recitation where I/we is." By which Derrida means that not only is taxonomy a subjective sport, but due to this very fact, the place and time the taxonomical act takes place deserves further study. Then, in 1986, Ralph Cohen published a paper in response to Derrida's thoughts titled "History and Genre." In this article Cohen argued that
genre concepts in theory and in practice arise, change, and decline for historical reasons. And since each genre is composed of texts that accrue, the grouping is a process, not a determinate category. Genres are open categories. Each member alters the genre by adding, contradicting, or changing constituents, especially those of members most closely related to it. The process by which genres are established always involves the human need for distinction and interrelation. Since the purposes of critics who establish genres vary, it is self evident that the same texts can belong to different groupings of genres and serve different generic purposes. (Cohen, 204)

RGS scholars largely agree that while genres are indeed dynamic and constantly evolving entities, they are difficult to change. Amy Devitt describes this bind, as she considers a genre to be "both the product and the process that creates it" (580). To Devitt, genres not only respond to recurrent situations, but they construct them as well. Berkenkotter and Huckin note that "Genres are always sites of contention between stability and change. They are inherently dynamic, constantly (if gradually) changing over time in response to the sociocognitive needs of individual users." This phenomenon makes theorizing genre evolution challenging. Carolyn R. Miller has explored the implications for genre change of the language of "evolution" and "emergence." Many RGS scholars have theorized how genres change. JoAnne Yates and Wanda Orlikowski, who introduced the importance of genre to the organizational studies and information technology fields, embedding it in structuration theory, assert that "one person cannot single handedly effect the change of an institutionalized structure [like genre]; other relevant participants must adopt and reinforce the attempted change for it to be implemented and sustained in practice" (108). Elsewhere they argue that "the potential for genre modification is inherent in every act of communication," but that only "significant and persistent modifications of genre rules that are widely adopted result in modified genre." In other work, they examine how the structuring of genre systems can be strategically used to organize interaction and influence response timing in electronic interchange. Natasha Artemeva has made similar observations based on an eight year ethnographic survey that followed engineering students from academia and into the workplace environment. Although Artemeva observed that two of her subjects impacted the evolution of workplace genres when a kairotic moment presented itself (164) these former student's success in changing the workplace genre also depended on three individually acquired skills: 1) "cultural capital", 2) "domain content expertise", and 3) "agency in the rhetor's ability" to not only see when a kairotic moment presented itself, but "to also seize the opportunity" (167). Thomas Helscher is not as optimistic; he writes, the "rhetorical constitution of [a] discourse community operates as a counterweight to the process of community growth and change" (30) and argues that the "transformation of the fundamental generic conventions by which communities constitutes themselves is paradigmatic of the process of social transformation" (32).

The definition of genre from dictionary. com is "a class or category of artistic endeavor having a particular form, context, technique, or the like." Such a definition seems to invite a fixed taxonomy of enduring categories; however, understanding genre attribution as a process recognizes that genre categories are mutable and evolving, and thus are only quasi stable. Metagenres such as institutional guidelines can be "ruling out certain kinds of expression, endorsing others", constraining and enabling. The concept of metagenre also provides a valuable way to understand the dynamics of institutional interrelations between genres. In the mental health discourse, for example, has been demonstrated the metageneric function of the American Psychiatric Association's (DSM) for standardizing and mediating the localized epistemological communicative practices of psychiatrists.

Genre began as an absolute classification system in ancient Greece. Poetry, prose and performance had a specific and calculated style that related to the theme of the story. Speech patterns for comedy would not be appropriate for tragedy, and even actors were restricted to their genre under the assumption that a type of person could tell one type of story best. This classical system worked well as long as the arts were largely directed by nobility and rich patrons. A common understanding of meaning was handy in knowing what the employer expected, and the crowds understood it. During the Enlightenment period in 18th century Europe, this system of patronage began to change. A merchant middle class began to emerge with money to spend and time to spend it. Artists could venture away from classical genres and try new ways to attract paying patrons. "Comedy" could now mean Greek metered comedy, or physical camp, or some other type of experience. Artists were also free to use their mediums to express the human condition in a way that was not possible under single patronage, or at least not profitable. Art could be used to reflect and comment on the lives of ordinary people. Genre became a dynamic tool to help the public make sense out of unpredictable art. Because art is often a response to a social state, in that people write/paint/sing/dance about what they know about, the use of genre as a tool must be able to adapt to changing meanings. In fact, as far back as ancient Greece, new art forms were emerging that called for the evolution of genre, for example the "tragicomedy." Unfortunately, genre does have its limitations. Our world has grown so much that it is difficult to absolutely classify something. Information overlaps, and a single book can encompass elements of several genres. For example, a book might be classified as fiction, mystery, science fiction and African American literature all at once. Genre suffers from the same ills of any classification system. Humans are pattern seeking beings; we like to create order out of the chaos of the universe. However, when we forget that our order is imposed, often arbitrarily, over a universe of unique experiences, the merit of the individual gets lost. If a system of classification, like genre, is then used to assign value judgments, we allow our preconceptions about the whole to influence our opinion of the individual. Genre is useful as long as we remember that it is a helpful tool, to be reassessed and scrutinized, and to weigh works on their unique merit as well as their place within the genre. A simple example of the inherent meaning in an art form is that of a western movie where two men face each other on a dusty and empty road; one wears a black hat, the other white. Independent of any external meaning, there is no way to tell what the situation might mean, but due to the long development of the "western" genre, it is clear to the informed audience that they are watching a gunfight showdown between a bad guy and a good guy. It has been suggested that genres resonate with people because of the familiarity, the shorthand communication, as well as the tendency of genres to shift with public mores and to reflect the zeitgeist. While the genre of storytelling has been relegated as lesser form of art because of the heavily borrowed nature of the conventions, admiration has grown. Proponents argue that the genius of an effective genre piece is in the variation, recombination, and evolution of the codes. Genre studies have perhaps gained the most recognition in film theory, where the study of genre directly contrasts with auteur theory, which privileges the director's role in crafting a movie.

There is something more about genre theory, and to that effect it is necessary to propose Kristen H. Perry's definition. Written (textual) genres are social constructions that represent specific purposes for reading and writing within different social activities, created by social groups who need them to perform certain things. They change over time, reflecting essential shifts in social function performed by that text. Genres also represent constellations of textual attributes: some attributes are necessary and other attributes are optional. Another definition which shows the different aspects of genre theory is Miller who defines genres as "typified rhetorical actions" that respond to recurring situations and become instantiated in groups' behaviors. Genre evolves as "a form of social knowledge—a mutual construing of objects, events, interests and purposes that not only links them but makes them what they are: an objectified social need". This view sees genres not as static forms but, rather, as "forms of ways of being frames for social action environments for learning locations within which meaning is constructed" (Bazerman), suggesting that different communities use different means of communication to accomplish their objectives. To try to show the importance of the context in genre an example is used about a particular part of the genre theory—speech genres; but it is important to stress that context is really important in all situations. Context plays an important role in shaping genres (Holquist, 1986). Genre theory does not conceptualize context as simply the space outside of text or the container surrounding texts, but as dynamic environments that simultaneously structure and are structured by the communicative practices of social agents. Speech genres are recognizable patterns of language in context (Bakhtin, 1986): speech genres include both oral and written forms of language. Researchers have also shown that the rhetorical moves people must make within accepted genres to communicate successfully in particular contexts operate to reinforce communities' identities and to legitimate particular communication practices. Thus, the genres that communities enact help structure their members' ways of creating, interpreting, and using knowledge (Myers; Winsor, Ordering, Writing; Bazerman, Shaping, Constructing; Berkenkotter and Huckin; Smart). Genres are very important in our everyday life and we do not realize how much we use them, how much they affect us, or how much they determine the way we act and understand the others.

Analyzing the interaction between multiple, competing voices and registers in literary works, Mikhail Bakhtin argued that complex, secondary speech genres are constituted by simple, primary speech genres. Bakhtin defined complex, secondary speech genres as "novels, dramas, all kinds of scientific research, major genres of commentary, and so forth [that] arise in more complex and comparatively highly developed and organized cultural communication" (62). While Bakhtin focused on the historical emergence of the novel in much of his work, in "The Problem of Speech Genres" he claimed that his theory applied to all literary genres, including "profoundly individual lyrical work[s]" (61) such as the pastoral elegy. Complex, secondary speech genres form when they "absorb and digest various primary (simple) genres that have taken form in unmediated speech communion" (62). Primary speech genres are "short rejoinders of daily dialogue," "everyday narration," "brief standard military command" (60), "verbal signals in industry" (63), "letters, diaries, minutes, and so forth" (98), notable for their referentiality to and function within the pragmatic communicative contexts of "extraverbal reality (situation)" (83). When primary speech genres are absorbed by secondary ones, according to Bakhtin, they are "altered and assume a special character," losing "their immediate relation to actual reality and to the real utterances of others" (62). This process of absorption and digestion of primary speech genres by secondary ones leads to a "more or less distinct dialogization of secondary genres, the weakening of their monological composition" (66). It is unclear, however, how this distinction between primary and secondary genres would apply in such quotidian comments as "I don't trust Joe's opinion, he has such a strange way of looking at things" or "Mary forwarded that recipe from the vegan website, so you need to be into that stuff to try it." While Bakhtinian dialogization may weaken the monological composition of secondary speech genres, it does not preclude a dominant theme, ideology, or cultural meaning from arising out of interplay of the "various transformed primary genres" (98) that make up a secondary work (although, Bakhtin admitted, this dominant ideology is difficult to isolate in complex works, and is, to a certain extent, left open to the interpretation of individual readers). In Bakhtin's view, primary genres undergo a more or less thorough process of contestation and resolution within the secondary work they constitute and "enter into actual reality only via the [work] as a whole, that is, as a literary artistic event and not as everyday life" (62). "As a rule, these secondary genres of complex cultural communication play out various forms of primary speech communication" (Bakhtin 98). Even as a work permits and enacts dialogization between characters, conventional forms, and semantic content, it resolves or "finalizes" that content into a "wholeness" of utterance, which is intelligible to readers, and therefore "guarantee[s] the possibility of response (or of responsive understanding)" (76). Through the finalization of disparate conventional and thematic strands, a work achieves the fullness of what Bakhtin called its "specific authorial intent," Milton's "speech plan" or "speech will" for his work, and readies itself for responsive understanding (reception, interpretation) on the part of readers (77). Despite its internal dialogization, the work delivers itself to readers as a semantically exhaustive whole, and in this way uses its internal drama to respond ideologically to its genre: "other works connected with it in the overall processes of speech communication in [its] particular cultural sphere" (75). These include "works of predecessors on whom the author relies," "other works of the same school," and "works of opposing schools with which the author is contending" (75). In this way the work forms a crucial "link the chain of speech communion" of its genre (76).