Abstract
Focusing on matters of power and difference, this article examines rhetorical theories of genre and James Gee’s theory of Discourse. Although both theories offer productive ways of understanding literate practice, it is argued, they are limited in crucial respects. Genre theory offers few ways of understanding how and why some social actors have an easier time than others in producing generic texts and getting their texts deemed “legitimate” by recognized authorities. Gee’s theory, meanwhile, does not explain precisely how and where (i.e., at which conceptual level) communicants come to match Discourse to situation. This article contends that these limitations may be surpassed if the two theories are brought together in a particular way. In this new approach, genres and Discourses are viewed as mutually constitutive forms: Genres exist within Discourses and Discourses exist within genres. In adopting this approach, it is argued, researchers may study how particular genres are made to elicit performances of Discourses connected to particular social groups.
Keywords
Recently, when analyzing student portfolios, I ran up against certain limits of rhetorical theories of genre and James Gee’s theory of big-D Discourse (explained below). At the time, I was studying two high schools’ career portfolio programs. Students at these schools are required to build portfolios out of artifacts from classes, extracurricular activities, and outside endeavors. In personal essays, students explain how these artifacts plot out their trajectories into paid work. At the end of the school year, seniors present their portfolios to exit interview panels composed of educators and businesspeople. My intention was to study career portfolios from two angles: as compositional forms and as the creations of differently positioned actors. To study the portfolio as a compositional form, I drew from rhetorical theories of genre. To understand how students from different backgrounds use linguistic resources to compose themselves as different kinds of people, I employed Gee’s theory of Discourse. As I pursued my analysis, however, I discovered these two theories were limited in crucial respects.
In contemporary theories of rhetoric, genres are often defined as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (Miller, 1984, p. 159; see also Bawarshi, 2003; Bazerman, 1988; Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Campbell & Jamieson, 1978; Devitt, 2004; Freadman, 1994; Freedman & Medway, 1994; Russell, 1997; Schryer, 1994; Yates & Orlikowski, 1992). These theories offer productive ways of seeing how genres position individuals to recognize and build certain kinds of situations, take on identities appropriate to those situations, and act in accordance with those identities. Additionally, rhetorical theories of genre provide ways of understanding how actors adapt genres to suit unique conjunctures of space and time. However, these theories do not offer ways of assessing how and why actors from different social groups produce different kinds of generic texts that are assessed in different ways. Thus, although these theories helped me see how the portfolio genre positions students to mediate exit interviews and perform the identity of “the good student,” they could not help me understand how and why different students produce different kinds of texts. Moreover, they did not get me very far in understanding why exit interview panelists value different students’ portfolios in different ways.
Defining Discourses as “forms of life” or “ways of being in the world” (Gee, 2005, 2008), Gee’s theory offers ways of seeing how diverse social actors use language to embody different identities and bolster the status of those identities. Also, Gee’s theory provides ways of seeing how communicants build situations through performing Discourses. It does not, however, offer nuanced ways of understanding how communicants come to match Discourse to situation. Relatedly, it does not offer a robust theory of genre. Thus, Gee’s theory was useful insofar as it helped me see how students from different backgrounds perform different identities through portfolio work. It was less useful, though, when I sought to understand how students come to use the resources of the portfolio genre to mediate and act in exit interviews.
In short, although genre theory provides ways of seeing how communicants perform identities and mediate situations, it does not offer robust ways of analyzing power and difference. Conversely, although Gee’s theory provides ways of understanding power, difference, and identity, it does not offer nuanced ways of understanding how communicants recognize and build situations. The strength of one theory, I realized, was the shortcoming of the other. If these two theories could be brought together, I reasoned, literacy researchers could strengthen their understandings of how social actors from different groups work to recognize, construe, and act in situations.
When considering how to bring together these two theories, I recognized they share a common concern with situation and identity. That is, I saw that Gee’s Discourse theory and rhetorical theories of genre are concerned with the ways actors use language to take on social identities and mediate situations. Thus, I focused my attention on how these theories construe the relationships between language, situation, and identity, and I looked for points where their arguments converged. Examining these points of convergence, I considered how rhetorical theories of genre and Gee’s Discourse theory might be brought together in a framework for studying literate practice.
In this article, I follow and draw together the strands of these theories tied to situation and identity. Thus, although I begin with a brief overview of different theories of genre, I do not attempt to cover all aspects of all genre theories. Likewise, I do not attempt to review Gee’s theory in toto. Indeed, relative to my discussion of genre, I dedicate less space to summarizing Gee’s well-known arguments. In the following discussion, I focus on those parts of each theory that deal with situation and identity and then only those parts used in the synthesis presented in this article. My task here is to find useful parts of these theories and fuse them together into a new framework for analyzing genre and Discourse. With this new framework, researchers may better analyze (a) how genres call on communicants to build certain kinds of situations and perform certain kinds of Discourses, (b) how communicants from different backgrounds adapt generic resources to engage in different kinds of Discursive performances, and (c) why different actors’ generic and Discursive performances are assessed in different ways.
Alternate Theories of Genre
Although this article examines rhetorical theories that define genres as forms of social action, these approaches are by no means the only ways of understanding genres. Indeed, education researchers have used a range of theories to analyze genres and to reform genre instruction in classrooms. The following review outlines some of the more prominent theories of genre used in education research. This tour of genre theory sets up points of comparison and contrast with the rhetorical theories described below.
Mikhail Bakhtin (1986), whose work on genre has influenced a number of education researchers (Gee, 2005; Kress, 2009; Luke, 1996), expands traditional genre analysis to take in everyday genres, such as personal conversations, as well as literary genres, such as the novel. Crucially, he situates genres in the shifting realms of the social and cultural. That is, he argues that genres grow out of and, in turn, shape the dialogical interactions of socially located actors. The rhetoricians cited below extend this argument and work out in greater detail the interconnections between genre and social and cultural context.
M. A. K. Halliday (1978), in his theory of systemic functional linguistics, assigns genre to the mode (i.e., the role of language) in a social context. Along with tenor (the roles of social actors) and field (what is happening, purpose), mode helps predict register, or “the configuration of semantic resources that the member of a culture typically associates with a situation type. It is the meaning potential available in a given social context” (Halliday, 1978, p. 111). By separating genre from the construal of purposes and roles in social contexts, however, Halliday’s theory does not offer ways of seeing how genres position communicants to take on identities and act in accordance with those identities.
In her critique of Hallidayan views of genre, rhetorician Amy Devitt (2004) notes that Halliday at times describes genres as operating at levels of semiotic structure higher than mode. For instance, in one passage of Language as Social Semiotic, Halliday (1978) lists generic structure as working with textual structure and cohesion in the constitution of texts. Viewed this way, Halliday writes, generic structure “can be brought within the general framework of the concept of register” (Halliday, 1978, p. 134). That is, he argues in this passage that generic structure works in a general way to match semantic resources with basic contexts. Developing this connection between genre and register, followers of Halliday, including James R. Martin, Frances Christie, and Ruqaiya Hasan, often discuss genres in terms of broad associations between language and context (e.g., the language used by teachers and students in classrooms). For Devitt, however, such views are overly general and lead one to lose sight of the specific social actions carried out with generic texts (e.g., using the genre of the essay prompt to plan students’ writing). Thus, although Halliday’s theories bring into focus important dimensions of linguistic practice, they are unsuited to this investigation of the interplay between genre and Discourse in actors’ mediations of specific situations. The rhetorical theories of genre presented below are more finely attuned to the ways particular situations shape and are shaped by particular acts of communication.
Norman Fairclough (2003) modifies Halliday’s (1978) ideas to examine the character and functions of genres. Similar to the arguments advanced in this article, Fairclough defines genres as social actions, relates genre to discourse, and proposes methods for analysis. Fairclough’s argument and the argument presented below differ, however, in questions of representation and ways of being. Whereas he assigns ways of acting to genre, Fairclough assigns ways of representing and ways of being to discourses and styles, respectively. That is, he describes genres as offering communicants flexible ways of acting but not ways of representing and being. Following rhetorical approaches to genre, the theory offered in this article assigns all three—ways of acting, ways of representing, and ways of being—to genre. As explained below, however, these three are not only to do with genre.
Most familiar to education researchers, perhaps, are the theories and methods developed since the 1980s by Australian scholars in the orbit of the University of Sydney’s Department of Linguistics (see, for example, Christie, 1989; Cope & Kalantzis, 1993; Martin & Rose, 2008; Martin & Rothery, 1986; Reid, 1987). Sydney School researchers adapted Halliday’s theory of systemic functional linguistics to define genres as discursive forms used by social actors to function in the world. Equipped with this theory, Sydney School researchers designed curricular and instructional programs they hoped would open spaces for all students to develop explicit understandings of and facility with powerful genres, such as cover letters and scientific reports. Teachers who took up this project worked with students both to identify the features of important genres and to produce texts with those features. It was the hope of these teachers and of researchers aligned with the Sydney School that explicit instruction in composing important genres would enable underprivileged students to use the codes of power.
Although the Sydney School’s approach makes available ways of understanding the social nature of genre and ways of addressing issues of power and stratification, it is limited in two crucial respects. First, as Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway (1994) observe, the Sydney School advances an implicit definition of genres as static and stable across contexts and over time. Indeed, ask Freedman and Medway, if genres were seen as changing in relation to changes in context, “why should they be, and how can they be, taught?” (Freedman & Medway, 1994, p. 9). Thus, the Sydney School view occludes how genres evolve and decay over time and how generic practices are taken up, adapted, and contested by diverse actors pursuing different ends in different contexts. Second, as Allan Luke (1996) notes, the Sydney School approach deemphasizes critical analysis of oppressive systems in favor of description of generic forms in which power supposedly resides and through the use of which marginalized students might access key institutions. In so doing, Luke argues, Australian genre theory naturalizes the workings of oppressive systems and misconstrues power as residing in generic texts rather than in the relations and practices of diverse subjects in various fields. Thus, Sydney School theories are inadequate for this project in that they do not offer nuanced ways of analyzing differences in how generic texts are produced and assessed. Although the rhetorical theories described below capture the dynamism of genres in ways Sydney School theories do not, the former are not much better than the latter when it comes to analyzing difference and power. This problem, it is argued below, can be solved by blending rhetorical theories of genre with Gee’s theory of Discourse.
Rhetorical Theories of Genre: Language, Situation, and Identity
Emerging simultaneously with, though more or less independent from, Australian genre studies was the movement among rhetoricians to conceive of genres as forms of action. As rhetorical approaches are less well known in education circles than the theories of the Sydney School, I present below a review of certain rhetorical conceptions of the relationships between genre, situation, and identity.
Although not the first to articulate such a view (see, for example, Campbell & Jamieson, 1978), Carolyn Miller advanced in her seminal 1984 article “Genre as Social Action” a concise, theoretically sophisticated definition of genres as “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations” (Miller, 1984, p. 159). Thus, with Bakhtin, whose work on genre would shortly be translated into English, and with Kenneth Burke (1969a, 1969b), whose arguments about situation and motive shaped much of the New Rhetoric, Miller contended in her article that genres must be understood in terms of the typical, though ever-changing, dialogical interactions carried out by socially defined actors addressing one another in particular rhetorical situations. More so than Sydney School researchers, then, Miller defined genres as shaping and shaped by the flux and flow of social life.
To develop this theory of genre as social action, Miller (1984) builds out from Lloyd F. Bitzer’s (1968) argument that communicants develop “rhetorical forms” (i.e., genres) to respond to the exigencies of recurrent, objectively existing situations. Complicating Bitzer’s argument, Miller writes that because no two objective situations are actually the same, recurrence must be understood not as a natural phenomenon but as a social achievement. Through generalizing from their group-normed experiences, Miller explains, social actors build concepts of general types of situations. More specifically, they build concepts of genres, or types of rhetorical actions available within particular kinds of situations. Social actors store these types in their groups’ “stocks of knowledge” (Schutz, 1971) and use them to organize new conjunctures of experience as recognizable situations in which certain rhetorical actions may be performed. For instance, teachers store the genre of quiz questions in their “stocks of knowledge” and draw from this genre to organize and act in the situation of the pop quiz. Because each conjuncture of experience is unique, however, general types must always be adapted to suit the particularities of the moment. Thus, a teacher might link quiz questions to real-world events to engage a class that has difficulty with abstractions.
Crucial to Miller’s (1984) theory, then, is the understanding that types do not simply constrain rhetorical action—they also help make rhetorical action possible. Types create a background of expectation against which new action may be generated and made meaningful. Indeed, actions are understood as meaningful in part because they are similar to what has come before (“What type of action is this?”) and in part because they are different from previous actions (“How does this act differ from others of its kind?”).
How, though, does Miller (1984) relate types of actions to types of situations? Positing a reflexive relationship between the two, she writes that recurrent situations call for typified rhetorical actions, yet actors define recurrent situations as such through performing typified rhetorical acts. By drawing from generic forms to construe material circumstances as recognizable types of situations with recognizable types of motives, Miller argues, actors locate the rhetorical actions they can and should perform in those situations. That is, through engaging genres, actors discover exigencies. In this schema, however, exigence is defined not as a matter of subjective perception or objective assessment. Rather, following
What ends we may have: we learn that we may eulogize, apologize, recommend one person to another, instruct customers on behalf of a manufacturer, take on an official role, account for progress in achieving goals. We learn to understand better the situations in which we find ourselves and the potentials for failure and success in acting together. As a recurrent, significant action, a genre embodies an aspect of cultural rationality. (Miller, 1984, p. 165)
In maintaining potentials for action, though, genres do not determine whether or how given actors will eulogize, apologize, and so on. It is up to specific actors to meet or defy expectations as they adapt genres to organize and maneuver through new conjunctures of experience.
Drawing from Miller’s (1984) argument, then, an education researcher might examine how the genre of the essay prompt helps mediate the recurrent situation “teacher issuing a writing assignment.” Through analyzing sample prompts, observing writing classes, and interviewing teachers, the researcher might discover the typical prompt maintains potentials for teachers to issue directions, segment time (e.g., set due dates), contract relationships (e.g., teacher as director, student as executor), connect objects (e.g., computers, reference books, primary texts, etc.), and so on. Moreover, the researcher might consider how individual teachers realize those potentials or adapt the genre to build and act in different kinds of situations.
Although of some use to researchers, Miller’s early formulation of genre is imperfect, as she herself notes in a later essay (Miller, 1994). For one thing, she observes, it fails to describe exactly how macrolevel entities, such as culture, genre, and form of life, contextualize microlevel discursive acts. Conversely, she adds, her early formulation fails to explain in much detail how such microlevel acts constitute macrolevel entities. Also, observes Allan Luke (1994), she fails to explicate a theory of power to go along with her theory of genre. Thus, her theory provides few ways of understanding why some actors’ generic performances are often deemed legitimate whereas others’ are not. Despite these shortcomings (addressed below), the basic ideas laid out in Miller’s (1984) “Genre as Social Action” open important lines of investigation. Indeed, by situating genres in the dynamic and shifting realms of society and culture, Miller’s early formulation of genre theory brings into view the ways genres change in relation to changes in context, how genres shape and are shaped by the practices of socially defined actors, the ways genres accumulate in the stocks of knowledge of social groups, and how genres, through maintaining social motives, call actors to perform as particular kinds of subjects with particular kinds of desires.
Genres as Structures
Since the publication of “Genre as Social Action,” scholars working in rhetoric, composition, and other fields have critiqued and developed Miller’s (1984) ideas by examining the social and cultural dimensions of genre from disparate analytic positions. 1 Of particular importance to the new approach outlined below are conceptualizations of genre informed by Anthony Giddens’ (1984) theory of structuration (Bawarshi, 2003; Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Miller, 1994; Yates & Orlikowski, 1992). To review, Giddens argues that structures are double natured. On a conceptual level, they exist as flexible rules and resources for construing a situation in a particular manner and for assessing what is knowable, doable, and desirable in that situation. In this way, structures make available particular social motives shaped by particular ideologies or theories of how the world is or should be organized and how social goods, such as status, worth, and material goods, are or should be apportioned. Continuing, Giddens writes that on a practical level, structures are materialized in intentional, socially recognizable acts. Thus, by internalizing social motives as individual intentions and by acting on these intentions through engaging in recognizable social practices, actors materialize and reproduce structures (and, hence, ideologies, motives, and situations) even as they change these structures to suit local conditions. Once again, the meanings of social actions are functions (in part) of their perceived similarities to and differences from other acts of their kind. Finally, because structures must always be adapted and because a range of structurational rules and resources may be available at a given time and place, actors exercise bounded agency in selecting and adapting the rules they use.
Describing the applications for genre studies of Giddens’ (1984) theory of structuration, Anis Bawarshi (2003) writes,
Genres are structures in that they maintain the ideological potential for action in the form of social motives and the typified rhetorical means of actualizing that potential in the form of social practices. Genres are ideological concepts and material articulations of these concepts at once, maintaining the desires they help individuals fulfill. (p. 90)
By conceiving of genres as structures that help organize situations and maintain ideological potential for action, he argues, researchers may gain more nuanced understandings of the processes Miller sketched out whereby actors discover and pursue social motives through working in genres.
For example, the genre of the essay prompt works as a structure insofar as it helps teachers organize and act within the situation “teacher issuing a writing assignment.” More specifically, the genre maintains motives for teachers to internalize and act on. By selecting the genre, teachers discover motives to set topics, determine how claims may be supported, specify due dates, and so on. These motives, one sees, are bound up with certain ideological positions (e.g., the belief that personal experiences are shaky grounds for truth claims). By acting on and adapting the motives offered by the genre—that is, by composing and handing out essay prompts—teachers build the situation “teacher issuing a writing assignment” and alter, materialize, and recirculate the genre and its ideologies.
Although most genre researchers interested in structuration take up Giddens’ (1984) ideas, Pierre Bourdieu’s (1977, 1992) related arguments about agency and structure have much to offer genre study, as well. Although, relative to Giddens, Bourdieu offers less subtle explanations of how actors are motivated to communicate in specific situations, his theory of language highlights questions of power and difference left unanswered in much genre research. Specifically, Bourdieu calls attention to the ways acts of communication are formed by and work to (re)form structured inequalities. Moreover, he shows how disparate actors struggle to bolster the values of their own resources and strengthen their own positions. This perspective on language, power, and difference is incorporated into the argument below, largely by way of an interrogation of arguments advanced by Gee, who draws heavily from Bourdieu.
Genres as Sites
Another development in genre theory important to the approach developed below is the view of genres not only as forms of social action but also as “stabilized-for-now or stabilized-enough sites of social and ideological action” (Schryer, 1994, p. 108, emphasis added). These alternate frames—genres as structures, genres as sites, genres as habits—provide useful ways of viewing genres from different perspectives. Bawarshi (2003), playing two frames off each other, argues that genres are both “instruments and realms—habits and habitats. Genres are conceptual realms within which individuals recognize and experience situations at the same time as they are rhetorical instruments by and through which individuals participate within and enact situations” (p. 113). Moreover, to paraphrase Anne Freadman (1994), it is within genres that one discovers how, when, and why one should respond to other utterances and create the conditions for others to respond.
In locating himself or herself within a genre, then, an actor is called to recognize and construe a situation in a particular way (i.e., in accordance with certain ideologies) and to figure himself or herself as a particular kind of subject pursuing certain motives and engaging in certain socially recognizable acts. Thus, genres may be understood as sites where individuals constitute themselves and are constituted as ideological subjects-in-worlds. Indeed, argues Bawarshi (2003), “genres maintain rhetorical conditions that sustain certain forms of life—ways of discursively and materially organizing, knowing, experiencing, acting, and relating in the world” (p. 9). Because these habitats (and, therefore, the forms of life they sustain) must always be recreated by social actors and adapted to fit specific circumstances, however, actors exercise a degree of agency in assembling rhetorical sites and in forming themselves as subjects-in-worlds.
For instance, when an individual is handed and reads an essay prompt, he or she is positioned within a conceptual realm within which he or she experiences the situation “teacher issuing a writing assignment.” Within this habitat, the individual is called to constitute himself or herself as a student and is invited to take up and adapt the motives of a student within that situation. Moreover, he or she discovers how, when, and why he or she should interact with others. The individual, for example, may wait for the teacher to provide an overview of the assignment before he or she reads it word for word. He or she may also scan the text for key points (e.g., topic, due date, length) and then wait for the end of the overview to ask about missing information. Alternatively, he or she may work to build the realm of the prompt as a site for negotiation. The individual may interrupt the teacher and ask for more time to write the paper or may ask whether shorter papers will be acceptable. Teachers’ reactions to such efforts depend in large part on their own conceptions of the habitat of the essay prompt.
Summary
Bringing together the strands of genre theory outlined above, the following points emerge as key elements of a provisional definition of genre (to be complicated below):
Actors draw generic practices from the stocks of knowledge of their social groups. Stocks of knowledge are based on types generalized from group-normed experiences. These types help create a background of expectation against which new action may be generated and made meaningful.
Meaning is ascribed to a generic act on several bases, including the act’s perceived similarities to and differences from previous acts of the same type.
Given their social nature, genres are always ideological and invite actors to engage in certain actions (and not others) and to construe themselves and the world in certain ways (and not others).
As structures, genres provide actors ways of assessing what can and should be done in a given situation and ways of realizing that potential through the use of socio-rhetorical conventions. These resources are socially recognizable ways of patterning texts so as to build particular kinds of situations and pursue particular kinds of motives.
Through actors’ social practices, genres and motives are reproduced, reconfigured, and recirculated through the stocks of knowledge of social groups.
As habits and habitats, genres are both means for social action and conceptual realms in which actors negotiate when, where, why, how, and as whom they will act.
Genres enable actors to coordinate their utterances with the utterances of other actors.
Central to each of these points is the understanding that genre is a dimension of social practice and therefore must be taken up, adapted, and perhaps resisted by agentic subjects.
These features of genre can be inferred, for example, in Glenda Conway’s (1994) discussion of portfolio cover letters. This genre, developed over time in writing classes, mediates the situation “student reflecting on his or her development as a writer.” This situation entails particular identities and relationships (students are reflective individuals, teachers are guides), activities (self-assessment), forms of significance (portfolios are records of students’ development), and so on. The cover letter genre motivates the student to organize and act in this situation through using first-person constructions, striking a conversational tone, discussing drafts of individual papers, and so on. Moreover, Conway notes, the genre calls on the student to figure portfolio composition as a process undertaken by self-knowing individuals working to cultivate their mature selves. In this way, the cover letter genre invites the student to materialize an ideology central to many writing classes. Because genres do not determine action and because generic resources must be adapted to suit local conditions, however, the student produces a unique text against a background of expectation. In so doing, he or she reproduces, reconfigures, and recirculates the cover letter genre through the stocks of knowledge of the writing class.
Although such analyses are useful, they are limited insofar as they provide few ways of understanding how and why different actors produce and assess generic texts in different ways. For example, using only the theories described above, one can say little about the processes whereby Student A produces a cover letter that is different from and is assessed as superior to the cover letter of Student B. Indeed, using the ideas presented above, one can only hypothesize that Student A is more familiar with the cover letter genre, its ideologies, and the situations it mediates. To address this limitation, the approaches described above are placed in dialogue with Gee’s (2005, 2008) theories of Discourse.
James Gee’s Theory of Discourse
Drawing from work conducted in social theory (Bourdieu, 1984; Foucault, 1966), linguistics (Halliday, 1978), learning sciences (Lave & Wenger, 1991), and other fields, Gee argues that when communicants speak or write, they not only engage the situation they perceive but also build or construe seven areas of that situation. Gee (2005) identifies the seven areas of a “situation network” built through language as identities, social relationships, significance, activities, politics (the distribution of social goods), connections, and sign systems and knowledge. Crucially, Gee argues that these building tasks cannot be carried out from neutral positions. To engage in the inherently social process of meaning making, communicants must locate themselves as socially defined “whos” performing socially recognizable “whats” (Gee, 2005, p. 22).
Central to Gee’s understanding of how communicants perform as identifiable “whos-doing-whats” is his theory of Discourse. Defining small-d discourse as language-in-use, Gee defines a big-D Discourse as
a socially accepted association among ways of using language and other symbolic expressions, of thinking, feeling, believing, valuing, and acting, as well as using various tools, technologies, or props that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group or “social network,” to signal (that one is playing) a socially meaningful “role,” or to signal that one is filling a social niche in a distinctively recognizable fashion. (Gee, 2008, p. 161)
Thus, an education researcher might study the Discourses of Latina school administrators of the southeastern United States, school-age working-class girls, or a particular first-grade class. Studying the latter, a researcher might consider how, through singing their “Good Morning Song” each day at 8:30 a.m., students perform their classroom Discourse, signal their group membership, and build the situation of the classroom: They take on the identities of students (Gee’s Area 1), they relate to each other as classmates (Area 2), they mark 8:30 a.m. as the beginning of classroom time (Area 3), and so on.
A given social actor, Gee explains, mobilizes Discursive resources to build and act in a here-and-now situation. That is, he or she adapts Discursive norms to create linguistic and material patterns at a particular place and time. These patterns help construe that place-time as a certain kind of situation. More specifically, these patterns help identify him or her as a certain kind of person performing a certain kind of act. Through these efforts, he or she embodies a Discourse, materializes its ideologies, reconfigures its properties to suit local conditions, and recirculates it (in adapted form) through social space.
Take, for another example, a progressive first-grade teacher working through a unit on family. Drawing from the Discourse of progressivism and its characteristic modes of organizing space and interacting with children, he or she might structure the room to facilitate collaborative explorations (desks arranged in pods, not in rows), and he or she might pose a number of open-ended questions to his or her students (“What kinds of families do you see in your neighborhoods?”). In so doing, the teacher builds the situation “progressive educator facilitating child-centered learning,” adapts and performs the Discourse of progressivism, and recirculates the Discourse and its ideologies (e.g., the belief that children learn best when they are allowed to develop their own thoughts).
Continuing, Gee argues that Discourses, as sociocultural forms, are shaped by their evolving relations to other Discourses (just as social groups are shaped by their evolving relations to other groups). At times, moreover, certain Discourses interact within societywide conversations or debates about key issues. These conversations or debates, then, form part of the backdrop against which Discourses are performed. Thus, two Discourses might evolve in relations of ideological contestation (e.g., Discourses of liberalism and conservatism debate the roles of public schools) or complicity (e.g., Discourses of business and conservatism support each other’s positions in a range of conversations). Discourses might also combine together to create hybrid forms of life (e.g., Discourses of Marxism and Catholicism fused together to create the Discourse of liberation theology; Marxist and certain Catholic Discourses stake out similar positions in conversations about compassion for the poor). Given the relational nature of Discourses, then, each Discursive performance is shaped in part by the Discourses embodied by the speaker’s audience (e.g., a speaker embodying a liberal Discourse will talk one way about school vouchers to a friend embodying a conservative Discourse and another way to a friend embodying a Marxist Discourse).
Further describing the interactions of Discourses, Gee draws from Bakhtin’s (1982) notion of heteroglossia to observe that a single text might blend together forms of language characteristic of different Discourses. For instance, a cover letter introducing a writing portfolio might feature patterns that evoke both the Discourse of possessive individualism and the Discourse of liberal humanism. Researchers studying this cover letter, then, would want to explain why those Discourses interact in that way in that text.
Beyond noting that long-running Discursive conversations or debates shape the interactions of Discourses within texts, however, Gee’s theory has little to say about why Discourses relate in certain kinds of ways in certain kinds of texts. More specifically, Gee’s theory does not identify the specific conceptual spaces in which actors recognize particular kinds of situations and in which they determine the Discourses they should perform (and how they should perform them) in those situations. The theory tells only that social actors recognize and act in situations by drawing from and adapting Discursive norms.
For example, Gee’s Discourse theory can only get us so far in understanding why a conservative thinker’s pro-voucher New York Times op-ed piece reads the way it does. To begin, Discourse theory can bring into focus the long-running debates about vouchers between conservatives and liberals (the Times’ core readership). Thus, it provides general ways of considering how knowledge of audience may have shaped the writing of the op-ed. However, it does not offer clear ways of seeing how the op-ed, as a compositional form, offered the writer ways of bringing conservative Discourse in contact with liberal Discourse in the situation “writer advancing his or her opinion to the Times’ readership.”
What About Genre?
It is argued below that these limitations may be remedied by accounting for genre, a concept largely absent from Gee’s theory of language and literacy. Indeed, neither of his major books on Discourse (2005, 2008) includes an index listing for genre. In a brief article published in 2001, though, Gee describes how genres fit into his theory of Discourse. Genres, he argues, are
combinations of ways with words (oral and written) and actions that have become more or less routine within a Discourse in order to enact and recognize specific socially situated identities and activities in relatively stable and uniform ways (and, in doing so, we humans reproduce our Discourses and institutions through history). (Gee, 2001, p. 721)
Along with the theorists cited above, then, Gee conceives of genres in terms of social action. Whereas those theorists view genres as rhetorical forms that help constitute identities and activities, however, Gee defines genres more as tools used to enact identities and activities already constituted within Discourses. Thus, with only Gee’s definition, it is difficult to see how genres (or other aspects of Discourse) motivate agents to enact identities, perform activities, and build other areas of situation networks. For example, it is unclear how the genre of the writing prompt calls individuals to take on the identity of the teacher, set topics, subordinate personal knowledge to knowledge verified by academic review, and so on. Furthermore, by seeing a particular genre as existing only “within a [single] Discourse,” it is difficult to make sense of those genres used by actors embodying different Discourses. For instance, one cannot learn much about the genre of the worksheet, which is used by both teachers and students. In the following section, then, I build out from Gee’s conceptions of genre and Discourse by arguing not only that genres exist within Discourses but also that Discourses exist within genres.
A New Synthesis
Adapting both Gee’s theory of Discourse and the provisional definition of genre presented above, I conceive of Discourses and genres as mutually constitutive forms. Together, they provide actors flexible ways of recognizing and construing situations, identifying the motive potentials of situations, and realizing those potentials in socio-rhetorical practices. Discourses, understood as identity kits, “store” the generic habits actors use to build socially recognizable situations and perform as socially recognizable subjects. Genres, understood as rhetorical habitats, organize situations and motivate certain Discursive performances. Thus, from one perspective, Discourses are “stored” in genres and situations. Viewed from another angle, the conventions (i.e., ways of patterning language) that are offered by and that instantiate a genre also instantiate a Discourse (or Discourses); the conventions that are offered by and that instantiate a Discourse also instantiate a genre. Thus, to act as a certain kind of “who” (i.e., as a subject embodying a recognizable Discourse), one must build certain kinds of situations and pursue certain kinds of motives through performing certain kinds of “whats” (i.e., generic acts). Reciprocally, to build a certain kind of situation, pursue a certain kind of motive, and enact a certain kind of “what,” one must perform as a certain kind of “who.” In this way, we see, genres motivate and situate Discursive performances, and Discourses animate genres.
For example, different forms of teacher Discourse “store” the genre of the teacher employment letter. This genre organizes the situation type “teacher applying for a job,” maintains the social motive of securing employment in education, sustains ideologies of the teaching profession (e.g., experience in the field is more important than the status of one’s training institution), and motivates a particular performance of teacher Discourse. To build this situation and pursue this motive through enacting the genre of the employment letter, then, one must perform a version of teacher Discourse. Reciprocally, one way of performing teacher Discourse involves using the generic conventions of the employment letter so as to construe the situation type “teacher applying for a job” and to pursue the motive of securing work in education.
However, because genres are ideological forms and because they elicit the performance of certain Discourses (and not others), some social actors may find some genres difficult to engage. Indeed, if Discourses A and B stand in relations of contestation and if ideology X opposes ideology Y, a social actor invested in Discourse A and ideology X may have difficulty engaging a genre that endorses ideology Y and elicits a performance of Discourse B. Take, for instance, the genre of the portfolio cover letter. As Conway (1994) notes, it often endorses an ideology that values self-knowing individuals working to cultivate their mature selves. Thus, the cover letter genre tends to elicit the performance of an individualistic middle-class Discourse (Gee, 2004; Lareau, 2003). Students committed to more collectivist Discourses and ideologies might struggle to develop a feel for the cover letter genre (for a related critique of portfolios and individualism, see Michelson & Mandell, 2004).
How, though, do genres come to elicit certain Discourses and not others? How do they place Discourses in relations of contestation or complicity with other Discourses? How do they facilitate the coordination and/or hybridization of Discourses? These questions are taken up in the following section.
Genres as Discourse Contact Zones
As noted above, Gee makes three crucial points about the relational nature of Discourses: They are composed in part by elements of other Discourses, they change as they contact new Discourses, and the character of a Discursive performance depends in part on the other Discourses in circulation at that place and time. Gee, however, does not specify how or where Discourses interact.
This problem may be addressed if genres are viewed as Discourse contact zones. This concept both emerges out of and complements those described above. Beginning with Schryer (1994), genres may be seen as sites of action where communicants come to recognize, construe, and act in particular kinds of situations. In many situations, adds Gee (2008), there are multiple Discourses in circulation. As argued above, the performances of these Discourses—the ways their resources are adapted to build and act in specific situations—are constituted within genres. To extend the argument, then, genres may be viewed as zones within which the Discourses typical of a given situation are brought into relation with one another. Thus, through repeated action within these zones, there evolve flexible rules communicants use to enact, link, blend, and counterpose certain Discourses in certain ways. 2
For example, in the situation of the classroom, Discourses of teachers and students circulate. The genre of the syllabus, in helping arrange this situation, motivates and coordinates the performance of both Discourses (see Bawarshi, 2003, pp. 119-126). More specifically, the syllabus genre offers communicants improvisational rules for shaping their Discursive performances so as to engage other Discourses present in the situation. The teacher may, for instance, employ or adapt the genre’s rules for alternating between we will constructions and you will constructions (e.g., “This semester, we will explore how different poets view the soul. . . . You will write several papers in which you analyze certain poets’ ideas.”). These rules enable the teacher to address the student both as an equal (a member of a classroom community) and as a subordinate (someone who carries out tasks assigned by the teacher). The student, in reading the syllabus, may thereby come to see how he or she is expected to interact with the teacher and with classmates. Thus, the syllabus genre and its rules help constitute, motivate, and relate performances of teacher Discourse and student Discourse.
Genres and the Creation of New Discourses
More than just sites where separate Discourses are coordinated, genres are also zones where Discourses are blended together to create new Discourses. Indeed, as genres are adaptable, an actor may attempt to reconfigure a generic space so the Discourses sustained in that space blend with other Discourses. A given actor, though, may be more or less conscious of how and with what consequences she manipulates genre and Discourse.
Take, for example, a business-minded educator writing an introductory letter to the parents of his or her students. This teacher may attempt to adapt the rules of the letter home genre so as to blend a business Discourse into the teacher Discourse actualized in typical letters home. For instance, the teacher might construe education as an “investment,” or he or she might explain his or her pedagogical choices in terms of preparing students for the job market. With or without full awareness, then, the teacher attempts to change both the letter-home genre and teacher Discourse. Whether this adaptation is accepted as a legitimate way of performing the letter-home genre and teacher Discourse, however, depends in part on the historical relations (i.e., relations of contestation or complicity) between business Discourses and the Discourse of teachers in that school. Also of import are factors including the social status of the teacher, the perceived rigidity of the genre, the political commitments of parents, and so on. Thus, the (re)configuration of genre and Discourse is less often a matter of the direct imposition of one actor’s or one group’s will and more often a matter of contestation among multiple interests and multiple Discourses. Genres and Discourses, then, are reshaped or maintained through processes of negotiation and struggle, altered or sustained in general accordance with the balance of forces in particular situations.
Groups’ Efforts to Change Genres and Discourses
Rather than focus exclusively on individuals’ efforts to reconfigure generic spaces, researchers may also examine groups’ attempts to bring genres and Discourses into alignment with their own beliefs. That is, researchers may consider how a social group works to form or recast a generic space so the Discourses sustained in that space blend with the Discourses of the group. Through this process, the group endeavors to make its ways of building and acting within situations appear natural. On a functional level, then, the group advantages those members who have become habituated to the group’s practices and beliefs over time. Conversely, the group disadvantages nonmembers, who are left to blame themselves for failure to gain sufficient control over seemingly “natural” forms. Again, though, group members may be more or less conscious of what they are doing.
Think once again of the development of the cover letter as a genre that calls the writer to perform a student Discourse premised on self-creation (Conway, 1994). The genre evolved in this way in part because it is used within institutions (i.e., public schools) dominated by middle-class actors and middle-class beliefs in self-cultivation and self-promotion (see Gee, 2004; Lareau, 2003). Middle-class students engaging this genre may therefore be more apt than their less affluent peers to demonstrate a feel for producing the “right” kinds of reflections and performing student Discourse in the “right” way (see Collin, 2011; Michelson & Mandell, 2004).
Although nonmembers may gain understandings of and control over generic forms, the evolving and socially contingent nature of genre and Discourse complicates their efforts. Indeed, argues Luke (1994), static knowledge of the surface features of a genre or Discourse may be of limited use for determining how to act in novel circumstances and may be insufficient for convincing insiders that one is using the form correctly. Moreover, he concludes, even the demonstration of “deeper” knowledge of genres and Discourses may fail to overcome insiders’ reluctance to acknowledge the practices of those they identify as being of the “wrong” class, race, gender, sexual orientation, or region.
Summary
To see how power dynamics shape and are shaped by generic performances, researchers might view genre and Discourse as mutually constitutive forms. Moreover, to see how and where Discourses interact, they might conceive of genres as Discourse contact zones. The rules of these zones, or the ways Discourses are typically enacted and related to one another, are shaped by historical relations between Discourses. The conclusion to this article (a) sketches out research methods suggested by this new approach and (b) describes the kinds of studies researchers might conduct with these new tools.
Conclusion
Notes Toward New Methods of Genre Research
A genre study grounded in the theory described above would attempt to answer questions including:
What improvisational rules and resources does a given genre offer?
What kinds of situation networks are typically built with these rules and resources?
What kinds of ideologies shape and are circulated by generic practice?
What kinds of Discursive performances are typically called forth by the genre?
What other Discourses are in play in the situation mediated by the genre?
How are Discursive performances carried out in the genre shaped to engage other Discourses in play in the situation?
How do different actors learn, adapt, or resist the genre and its Discourses?
Which adaptations are accepted as legitimate and which are not?
Which other Discourses are complicit or in ideological alignment with the Discourses cultivated by the genre?
Which other Discourses contrast or are in ideological tension with the Discourses cultivated by the genre?
In working to answer these questions, researchers may discover how genres function in the building of particular kinds of situations. Furthermore, by considering questions of Discourse, researchers may investigate why some social actors find it relatively difficult both to work in certain genres and to get their performances recognized as legitimate.
To answer the above questions, researchers might use ethnographic tools and Gee’s (2005) method of Discourse analysis. They might investigate how different social actors adapt the rules and resources of a given genre to (a) build certain kinds of situations, (b) materialize certain kinds of ideologies, or (c) engage in certain kinds of Discursive performances. 3 Working recursively, researchers might: observe situations in which a genre is used; prompt those who work with the genre to explain its typical features (i.e., its rules and resources) and to discuss how the genre helps them understand and act in the world; ask local experts in the genre to assess the effectiveness of several sample texts; characterize the ideologies that shape and are endorsed in both effective and ineffective performances; identify the features of the Discourses typically enacted through effective generic performances (these might be considered central Discourses); identify the features of noncentral Discourses; consider how central Discourses are related to other Discourses (e.g., consider relations of contestation, complicity, and hybridity); and identify the social groups that have access to complicit Discourses and ideologies as well as the social groups that are invested in contrasting Discourses and ideologies. Having mapped the Discursive field of the genre, researchers may explain why members of certain social groups tend to demonstrate a better feel for working in a given genre than do members of other social groups.
Education researchers might take this tack in exploring the many varieties of school genres: student essays, syllabi, teachers’ employment contracts, school websites, letters home, worksheets, students’ notes to friends, school board minutes, and so on. More than just describing the characteristics of different school genres, though, researchers using this new approach might offer nuanced ways of understanding how genres may serve to privilege certain groups and certain forms of life compared to others. Researchers, educators, and community members might draw from such studies as they work to design curricula that provide opportunities for all students to interrogate and act in the world.
Footnotes
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
References
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