Draft 1, Chunk 6 (Genre)

[This was first written on 14 September 2011]

Introduction

There are just a few more key words that I want to cover and, having written about POWER, MEMORY, IDENTITY, and MATERIALITY, I want to turn now to GENRE. This concept is important to me because of my disciplinary background. It is used both in literature and in certain areas of linguistics to recognise the fact that language users do not ‘reinvent the wheel’ every time they speak or write. They tend to produce utterances and texts that fit broadly into existing categories. The concept of GENRE provides a way of talking about this phenomenon and I shall begin by outlining how it works and why it might be relevant to us.

Genre

In literature, the ‘existing categories’ available to writers include tragic drama, the novel, the short story, the epic poem and so on. But there are plenty of everyday GENRES that may be so familiar to us that we do not always think of them as GENRES. There are conventions for writing letters, recipes, and to do lists, for example. [See Tony Bex, Variety in Written English: Texts in Society, Societies in Text (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), chapter 7, ‘Genre’, on ‘everyday’ written GENRES.] And spoken GENRES might include jokes, prayers, or anecdotes. [See Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by Vern W. McGee, edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1986).]

If a friend likes my food and I offer to jot down some guidelines for making it, I do not ponder the best way to couch these instructions in written language. I resort to an existing model. I have seen plenty of recipes before and I simply adopt the conventions that they use.

These conventions include the overall organisation of the text. Recipes conventionally have two separate sections: an inventory of ingredients, which comes first, and step-by-step instructions for using them, which come second. The ingredients are typically listed. That is, you do not write whole sentences introducing them. You just write the name of the ingredient and the quantity required. And the instructions are usually written with the verb form that grammarians call the ‘imperative’ – the one you use to give orders: ‘Chop the onion finely’, ‘Simmer for ten minutes’. Sometimes you can insert first-, second- and third-person verbs after the imperative: ‘Simmer for ten minutes. I find this is sufficient but you may prefer to give it longer. Some people insist it must be fifteen’. The point here is that certain grammatical patterns are characteristic of certain GENRES. To look at another aspect of the language of recipes, because they are divided into two sections – ingredients and instructions – the distribution of the definite and indefinite article (‘the’ and ‘a’/’an’ respectively) has a certain shape. The instructions are likely to include lots of indefinite articles, which we use when we introduce an object or person into discourse for the first time: ‘a large onion’, ‘a pint of milk’. (Actually, looking at one of the recipe books on my shelf, I find that the author tends to use ‘1’ instead of ‘a’ or ‘an’.) By the time we get to the instructions, though, all the ingredients have been introduced, so we switch to ‘the’, which marks objects already introduced into discourse: ‘chop the onion’, ‘heat the milk gently’. I’ve laboured this discussion a little because I want to emphasise quite how conventional, or conventionally patterned, the language of particular GENRES can be.

If the concept of GENRE, broadly speaking, provides a way of emphasising that speakers and writers do not continually reinvent the wheel but adopt existing conventions for certain types of communicative act, we can begin to see GENRE in terms of a cluster of characteristics including the following.

(1) Topic

Particular GENRES tend to be associated with particular types of content. Recipes deal with the preparation of food. Tragedies deal with the sufferings of great men and women. It is possible to use the conventions of a particular GENRE to write or speak about other topics but this constitutes a type of transformation that is, in itself, meaningful. You sometimes see twee little texts on the internet that use the GENRE of the recipe to talk about something more abstract. Here is an example from the website of a wedding planner in Florida:

Recipe for a Happy Marriage

1 cup consideration
1 cup courtesy
2 cupfuls flattery carefully concealed
1 gallon faith and trust in each other
2 cupfuls praise
1 small pinch of in-laws
1 reasonable budget, a generous dash of cooperation
3 teaspoon pure extract of "I'm sorry"
1 cup contentment
1 cup each confidence and encouragement
1 large or several small hobbies
1 cup blindness to the other's faults

Flavor with frequent portions of recreation and a dash of happy memories. Stir well and remove any specks of jealousy, temper or criticism. Sweeten well with generous portions of love and keep warm with a steady flame of devotion. Never serve with cold shoulder.

(http://www.weddingsbygloria.com)

This is an important aspect of GENRE: it is not deterministic. You can write a text that plays with GENRE in more or less creative ways.

(2) Layout and Language

I’ve already commented on the layout and grammar of the recipe and, to broaden the discussion further, one might think about the conventions for laying out a written letter, which we were drilled in at school. To some extent letters also have a characteristic grammar, often emphasising the present perfect verb form: ‘I have done’, ‘she has gone’, ‘we have seen’. In English, this is the tense that is used to indicate a strong connection between a past event and present state of affairs so it has a ‘newsy’ quality.

(3) Speaker/Writer and Recipient

Letters to friends have a different layout and use different language from business letters (although these may have enough in common to be sub-GENRES rather than entirely distinct.)

(4) Setting

A sermon is a rather formal GENRE that is associated with churches and chapels. A priest might be talking to the same recipients about a religious topic, but, because s/he is not in that particular physical setting and institutional context, would not give a sermon.

Genres in Rotherham

As Steve and I walked around Rotherham, I keep noticing GENRES. For example, there is a type of graffiti where a series of names is listed. They are positioned one above the other (not strung out in a horizontal line) and with a plus sign between each. And there is an old-fashioned GENRE of graffiti, that still seems to be current and that looks like this: ‘NL [heart] DS’. At the same time, the inscriptions on grave stones can be seen as a GENRE (or perhaps a group of sub-GENRES). They typically use formulae such as ‘in loving memory of’; the text is usually centred rather than left aligned; there is a marked use of quotation (an issue that I shall return to under the heading of APPROPRIATION).