The concept of Genre

Swales, John (1990) Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings

Genre in Folklore Studies

For Malinowski (1960), folklore genres contribute to the maintenance and survival of social groups
because they serve social and spiritual needs.

Genre in Literary Studies

Todorov argues that the fact that works ‘disobey’ their genres does not mean that those genres
necessarily disappear. For one thing, transgression, in order to exist, requires regulations to be
transgressed. For another, the norms only retain visibility and vitality by being transgressed. This is
the process, according to Todorov, of genre generation. ‘A new genre is always the transformation
of one or several old genres: by inversion, by displacement, by combination’ (1976).

‘In a society, the recurrence of certain discursive properties is institutionalised, and individual texts
are produced and perceived in relation to the norm constituted by that codification. A genre,
literary or otherwise, is nothing but this codification of discursive properties’ (Todorov, 1976).

‘The writer is invited to match experience and form in a specific yet undetermined way. Accepting
the invitation does not solve his problems of expression… But it gives him access to formal ideas as
to how a variety of constituents might suitably be combined’ (Fowler, 1982).

Genre in Linguistics

Martin (1985) makes the following three-way distinction: genres are realised through registers,
and registers in turn are realised through language. As for genres themselves: ‘Genres are how
things get done, when language is used to accomplished them. The term genre is used here to
embrace each of the linguistically realised activity types which comprise so much of our culture
(Martin, 1985). Therefore, genres constrain the ways in which register variables of field, tenor and
mode can be combined in a particular society.

The second reason for recognizing that genres comprise a system for accomplishing social
purposes by verbal means is that this recognition leads to an analysis of discourse structure.
Genres have beginnings, middles and ends of various kinds. Verbal strategies ‘can be thought of in
terms of states through which one moves in order to realise a genre’ (Martin, 1985). Genre ‘refers
to the staged purposeful social processes through which a culture is realised in a language’ (Martin
and Rothery, 1986).

Linguistic contributions to the evolving study of genre lie in the emphasis given to: (a) genres as
types of goal-directed communicative events; (b) genres as having schematic structures; and most
strikingly (c) genres as disassociated from registers or styles.
Genre in Rhetoric

According to Campbell and Jamieson (1978): ‘A genre is a group of acts unified by a constellation
of forms that recurs in each of its members. These forms, in isolation, appear in other discourses.
What is distinctive about the acts in a genre is a recurrence of the forms together in constellation.

Miller considers herself as an anti-taxonomist, as she regards genres as unstable entities: ‘the
number of genres in any society is indeterminate and depends upon the complexity and diversity
of society’ (Miller, 1984). Secondly, she argues that ‘a rhetorically sound definition of genre must
be centred not only on the substance or form of discourse but on the action it is used to
accomplish’ (1984). Thirdly, Miller gives serious attention to how genres fit into the wider scale of
human affairs. She suggests that ‘What we learn when we learn a genre is not just a pattern of
forms or even a method of achieving our own ends. We learn, more importantly, what ends we
may have…’ (Miller, 1984).

Miller’s exceptional work reinforces the concept of genre as a means of social action, one situated
in a wider sociorhetorical context and operating not only as a mechanism for reaching
communicative goals, but also of clarifying what those goals might be.

Overview — Common Stance Shared by the Disciplines

- A distrust of classification and of facile or premature prescriptivism.

- A sense that genres are important for integrating past and present.
- A recognition that genres are situated within discourse communities, wherein the beliefs and
naming practices of members have relevance.
- An emphasis on communicative purpose and social action.
- An interest in generic structure (and its rationale)
- An understanding of the double generative capacity of genres —to establish rhetorical goals
and to further their accomplishments.

A Working Definition of Genre

A genre is a class of communicative events. A communicative event is here conceived of as

comprising not only the discourse itself and its participants, but also the role of that discourse and
the environment of its production and reception, including its historical and cultural associations.

The principal criterial feature that turns a collection of communicative events into a genre is some
shared set of communicative purposes. Genres are communicative vehicles for the achievement of
goals. When purposive elements come into conflict with each other, the effectiveness of the genre
as sociorhetorical action becomes questionable.

Exemplars or instances of genres vary in their prototypicality. It is possible to produce a small set
of simple properties that are individually necessary and cumulatively sufficient to identify all the
members and only the members of a particular category from everything else in the world. As we
have seen, communicative purpose has been nominated as the privileged property of a genre.
Other properties, such as form, structure and audience expectations operate to identify the extent
to which an exemplar is prototypical of a particular genre.

The rationale behind a genre establishes constraints on allowable contributions in terms of their
content, positioning and form. The shared set of purposes of a genre are thus recognised —at
some level of consciousness— by the established members of the parent discourse community.
Recognition of purposes provides the rationale, while the rationale gives rise to constraining
conventions.

A discourse community’s nomenclature for genres is an important source of insight. Active

discourse community members tend to have the greatest genre-specific expertise. Therefore,
these active members give genre names to classes of communicative events that they recognise as
providing recurring rhetorical action. We inherit genre categories that get passed down from one
generation to another. In direct contrast, genre-naming can equally be generative. While the
coining and deliberate usage of new labels for event categories can at times create substance and
structure out of an amorphous background, at others, the names may reflect empty categories
with no claim to genre status.

Genre Defined

A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of
communicative purposes. These purposes are recognised by the expert members of the parent
discourse community, and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes the
schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains the choice of content and style.
Communicative purpose is both a privileged criterion and one that operates to keep the scope of a
genre as here conceived narrowly focused on comparable rhetorical action. In addition to purpose,
exemplars of a genre exhibit various patterns of similarity in terms of structure, style, content and
intended audience. If all high probability expectations are realised, the exemplar will be viewed as
prototypical by the parent discourse community. The genre names inherited and produced by
discourse communities and imported by others to constitute valuable ethnographic
communication, but typically need further validation.

Pre-Genres

Ordinary conversation is too persuasive and too fundamental to be usefully considered as a genre.
Rather, it is a pre-generic ‘form of life’, a basis from which more specific types of interaction have
presumably either evolved or broken away. The interesting question for the genre analyst is not so
much whether conversation is a genre; instead, the interest lies in exploring the kind of
relationship that might exist between general conversational patterns, procedures and ‘rules’.

For present purposes, I will simply follow Longacre and suggest that narration (spoken or written)
operates through a framework of temporal succession in which at least some of the events are
reactions to the previous events. Further characteristics of narrative are that such discourses tend
to be strongly oriented towards the agents of the events being described, rather than to the
events themselves, and that the structure is typically that of ‘a plot’.

Differences among Genres

We have already seen that they vary according to complexity of rhetorical purpose. They also vary
greatly in the degree to which exemplars of the genre are prepared or constructed in advance of
their communicative instantiation (Nystrand, 1986). Genres also vary in terms of the mode or
medium through which they are expressed; indeed the configurations of speech versus writing can
become quite complex (Gregory, 1967).

An influential and representative advocate of the interactional orientation to reading and writing
processes is Widdowson. He expresses: ‘As I write, I make judgements about the reader’s possible
reactions, anticipate any difficulties that I think he might have in understanding and following my
directions, conduct, in short, covert dialogue with my supposed interlocutor’ (Widdowson, 1979).
According to this view, writers, at least competent ones, are trying to second-guess both their
readers’ general state of background knowledge and their potential immediate processing
problems.

Genres, Schemata and acquisition

Human beings consistently overlay schemata on events to align those events with previously
established patterns of experience, knowledge and belief. Our prior knowledge consists of two
main components: our assimilated direct experiences of life and its manifold activities, and our
assimilated verbal experiences and encounters. These sources will provide, amongst other things,
background knowledge about the content area of a discourse, which in turn allows us to evaluate
propositions in terms of their truth, and contributes to the evaluation of appropriacy and
relevance. Cognitive activities of this kind are thus invocations of content schemata.

Prior knowledge not only interprets facts and concepts but also calls up interactive procedures or
routines. Procedures may derive from both previous experience and prior texts and contribute to
the formation of formal schemata —‘background knowledge of the rhetorical structures of
different types of texts’ (Carrell, 1983).

Schema theorists have so far been most concerned with the cognitive aspects of text processing.
This important and understandable orientation has made the putative distinction between content
and form perhaps a more manageable distinction than genre analysts can easily maintain, for the
nature of genres is that they coalesce what is sayable with when and how it is sayable. In addition,
the schema theorist’s emphasis on cognition has tended to isolate the text from its communicative
purpose and from its environment. In the former case, the reader’s first attempts to match a
formal schemata is more likely to be, in the approach proposed here, a search for genre
identification and placement. In the latter case, the environment sets up powerful expectations:
we are already prepared for certain genres but not for others before we open a newspaper or a
scholarly journal.
In this sense, Nystrand proposes a process of elimination, which is a kind of ‘wedge’ in which the
first and broadest stage is to identify the genre, the second to identify the topic of the
communication and the third to recognise the sender’s stance on that topic. ‘These many layers of
context which envelop the text provide clues to the text’s meaning. The skilled reader uses these
clues systematically to eliminate what the text might be about’ (Nystrand, 1986).