Genre studies
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.
[8] 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'.
[4][17] In her article, Miller draws on Lloyd Bitzer's notion of exigence as "an imperfection marked by an urgency",[18] that is a condition in the world that serves as an "external cause of discourse.
[26] He then examined how practices of intertextuality and citation developed with modern scientific genres to create more collaborative relations within sciences.
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.
"[40] 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.
According to Alpers, a misconception persists in modern criticism that literary convention is an "arbitrary and inflexible practice, established by widespread usage and imposed from without."
For him, generic conventions are "not fixed procedures imposed by impersonal tradition;" rather, they are the living "usages of other [writers]," "the shared practice of those who come together."
Fishelov, like Alpers, sees generic conventions as an inescapably "vital part of the literary communicative situation," linking present and past writers to each other, as well as to readers.
Genre was not a black-and-white issue even for Aristotle, who recognized that though the "Iliad" is an epic it can be considered a tragedy as well, both because of its tone as well as the nobility of its characters.
[50] This delineation of rhetorical genres persisted into the medieval and early modern educational traditions, being codified in the work of the Roman orator Cicero,[51] the pedagogue Quintilian,[52] in the influential Rhetorica ad Herrenium,[53] and elsewhere.
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.
"[56] Black's critique of neo-Aristotelianism enabled Karlyn Kohrs Cambell and Kathleen Jamieson's turn toward a situation-based, historically-developmental conception of genres.
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).
"[67] In other work, they examine how the structuring of genre systems can be strategically used to organize interaction[68] and influence response timing in electronic interchange.
[69] Natasha Artemeva has made similar observations based on an eight-year ethnographic survey that followed engineering students from academia and into the workplace environment.
[70] 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).
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.
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.
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).
[75] Through three examples of discourse, the papal encyclical, the early State of the Union Address, and congressional replies, she demonstrates how traces of antecedent genres can be found within each.
She reiterates the intended outcome through her statement of "choice of an appropriate antecedent genre guides the rhetor toward a response consonant with situational demands".
Similarly, individuals recognize the characteristics of the recurring rhetorical situations in the same way as they see them as affirmation of what they already know about the preexisting genre.
Devitt focused on activity system of genre and that the participants' situation, contexts and text are all mutually created "no one aspect fully determines the other."
(Fairclough) Activity theory is not grounded in any one area of field of research, but instead draws from several disciplines including psychology, behaviorism, and socio-cultural studies.
[79] Similarly, in Tracing Genres Through Organizations: A Sociocultural Approach to Information Design, Clay Spinuzzi asserts that the use of certain tools in certain situations can help users to act purposefully in that activity.
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).
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).
