1. Introduction
Our world is complicated and messy, and debates run rampant through the boundaries of what different social groups classify as truth. Rhetoric and composition, in its study of the world, how it works, and why it works, allows for similar debates to become prominent because every author writes to represent and communicate their own ideas and truths through the choices that they make with their language and stylistic conventions. In other words, there is a rich personal context present in any argument, and the clashes caused by these contextual differences creates intense social debates, where people are forced to pick one side or the other. In that moment, you are essentially choosing how you want to identify and present your ideology, and therefore choosing whether those ideologies are acknowledged or valued within a social setting. Difference easily becomes the point of ignorance and allows for both audience and author to easily fall into the trap of isolating their opinions and claiming their ultimate “truth” without consideration of other valid perspectives.
Genre, since it portrays the connection between the author and audience and exemplifies the idea of society choosing what writing is “correct” or “incorrect,” is the perfect example of this devolution back towards the insistence of binary structures within our social and political spheres. Genre functions as a conventional structure that allows the reader to categorize the text with significant expectations of what that text should look like. However, because it is often taught so systematically, it reinforces the systems that already exert control over our everyday social and political function. Genre then can easily become a perpetuation of the social hierarchies that have created a world centered on conformity to mainstream values rather than one that celebrates cultural or ideological differences. This then results in the furtherization of this conformity in composition and the resulting categorization of a text as either “correct” or “incorrect.” With this perspective, there is little debate over what genre is or how it works, but a lot of differing ideas of how genre should be utilized within pedagogy and composition studies.
2. Debate Map
In fact, the large debate around genre centers around the rhetorical divide between expressionist and social epistemic methodologies. There seems to be a common acknowledgement that genre is a largely social action, which is likely because genre developed as an established research specialization during the transition from expressionist to social epistemic rhetoric in academia. However, there is a high debate over whether genre functions as a reinforcement of the already typified social expectations and conventions that therefore constrain the author and their own nuanced context as writer, or if it is a community resource that can then be used to make connections, channel change, and reorganize these conventions. Either purpose allows for the social engagement between the author and the audience and therefore creates genre as a choice to interact with any topic in a specific way, with a specific goal in mind concerning how the audience will react to your writing.
This idea largely stems from Carolyn Miller’s introductory work on genre that helped establish the concept as a specific research field by defining genre as a necessary social action to classify your writing when trapped in a social setting that demands classification. Genre, according to Miller, “refers to a conventional category of discourse based in large-scale typification of rhetorical action; as action, it acquires meaning from situation and from the social context in which the situation arose” (163). This means that the typification, or erasure of these contexts, usually comes from a hegemonic power structure, which represents the social hierarchies that are consistently present within our own society and have intrinsically influenced writing and how the reader therefore responds. However, the main problem with genre as a representation of social hierarchies and their influence over how the audience reacts to a text is that it ultimately constrains the complex intentional and contextual rhetorical choices of the author. In other words, the conventions that genre perpetuates imbue the social position of both a piece of writing and the audience that consumes it, resulting in writing that is limited by the available conventions and closer to conformity than difference out of fear of being rejected, ignored, or even not believed. Writing then becomes a mere performance, meant to entertain within the predetermined parameters, which largely contradicts the ideas that are so central to the values of expressionist rhetoric. In a discipline that values discovery and focuses on the unique authenticity of an individual, genre is then an extremely limiting constraint that forces the author to relate more to the audience’s expectations than their own voice. Even in social epistemic rhetoric, where more value is held in the connection between the author and the social context that shapes their perspectives and therefore writing, genre is an enabling force for the structures that demand subservience to a higher authoritative culture or group and therefore limits the type of connection that an author can make with their audience.
It is important to note that there is, of course, somewhat of a need for classification as humans are creatures of habit and need to learn through systems of organization, categorization, and connection, yet it is also important to note that a strict rule-based adherence to these systems is inherently bound to fail as it lacks acknowledgment of the complicated nature of humanity. In this way, adherence to a genre can act as a guiding resource in order to further consider the audience within your writing and revising processes, but it also constrains the voice of the author and the discoveries that it is capable of making. Genre then becomes what Ken Hyland refers to as an “agent of ideological closure,” and therefore a limitation on the potential of a text’s meaning. Hyland celebrates and builds off of John Swales' argument for a shift in how we view genre – it should be seen in terms of its context within a community and as both a choice and constraint on those producing the text.
In other words, engaging in disciplined genres should open the possibility of positioning yourself both within a subject and within your own rhetorical context. Genre therefore becomes a community practice that “not only encourages us to focus on disciplinary ways of negotiating meaning, but also tells us something of how writers understand their communities – what they believe their readers are likely to find convincing and persuasive. So these repeated rhetorical decisions don't just construct communities, they also construct individuals” (Hyland). This implies that genre constrains the early stages of writing where the development and discovery of the author’s voice and the position that they want to carve out for themselves within the discourse they are entering is critical. However, it also implies the increasing value of these conventions as you continue to refine your ideas and specify exactly what you are trying to communicate with your reader.
Especially within expressionist rhetoric, this exploration of your individual voice and how you want to say something means that the standards and guidelines that genres create for a piece of writing and the author writing it are extremely limiting and do not allow for the discovery of any type of individuality. Instead, it forces the writer into a position where what you communicate and how you choose to do so is already chosen before you start writing. In this way, at least in the beginning stages of writing, there can be incredible value in what Peter Elbow simplifies into the phrase “ignoring the audience.” Elbow explains that what is meant by this is the focus on the development and discovery of the individual author’s voice in the early stages or their writing process, and then the gradual addition of the audience’s expectations into your draft as you revise. In this way, prose becomes centered more around the writer and their process of creation rather than the audience and their process of perception.
By “ignoring the audience,” the rules of genre fade away and further allow for the development of individuality without the pressing control of typified conventions. Elbow claims that “we tend to develop our important cognitive capacities by means of social interaction with others, and having done so we gradually learn to perform them alone” (56). In other words, we already know how to engage with an audience, and therefore compose within the conventions of genre, so what needs to be learned is how to write for your own self (the most common example used to illustrate this idea is freewriting). This idea is largely developed from Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford’s work on the distinction between “addressing” and “invoking” the audience. “Audience addressed” assumes the physical reality of the intended audience, but “audience invoked” stresses the audience as a created construction of the author. With this argument, audience is a complex, paradoxical, rhetorical situation that necessitates the use of the social and the individual in order to create a piece of work that speaks to and engages with the reader without being constrained by the rules that structure dictates as “good.”
Ede and Lunsford claim that the decision of how the audience is engaged is ultimately down to the author – what they create, and the choices that they make in doing so, determine the prospective influence the audience has on the rhetorical and stylistic possibilities of the writer. They state that “Except for past and anomalous audiences… all of the audience roles we specify – self, friend, colleague, critic, mass audience, and future audience – may be invoked or addressed. It is the writer who, as writer and reader of his or her own text, one guided by a sense of purpose and by the particularities of a specific rhetorical situation, establishes the range of potential roles an audience may play” (Ede and Lunsford 165-166). A strong sense of individuality is essential to determining when and how the audience should be interacted with in the writing process, including if it should be ignored altogether. This means that there needs to not only be a conjunction between the individual and the social sphere in which that individual is trying to engage, but also a strong enough sense of self to be able to determine when and where to value one over the other in the writing process (in other words, when to value the conventions that systems like genre perpetuate).
This argument, claiming the importance of the social and the individual working in tandem, demonstrates a shift in genre studies in the late 90’s, following rhetoric’s lead with its shift towards social epistemic methodology by introducing the power of combining the rhetorical context of both the self and the audience. The idea of this conjunction is to highlight the importance of the author’s personal choices and voice in their own work, and their ability to communicate those ideas without being constrained by typified language conventions. Genre has a high level of influence over the author, determining what they can or cannot write in any given context and what the audience will consider to be “good” writing – genres shape our perceptions of a text, much like social boundaries shape our understanding of our human connections. David Russell, in his work on motivation and genre, argues for a shift in perspective similar to Miller’s, where instead of viewing genre as a form of convention, it is treated as a “form of life.” In other words, genre dynamics allow for the refutation of cognitive-based practices that favor the idea of a static template rather than a developmental tool.
Russell illustrates this idea by positioning genre within a larger social context and therefore showing how it functions with both the self and the audience. He states that “Not only are one’s social self, others, and the cultural tools in use (including genres) inseparable from the bodies of others but also one’s physical self, one’s living body, in that one’s body affects and is affected by the bodies of others” (Russell). This mirrors the early notions of genre as social action, but develops it to include the connections between social, cultural, and individual bodies, better reflecting the nuance of human interaction. Russel claims that genre should more resemble the social behaviour of humanity, which is fluid and evolves, and thus cannot exist normatively. This idea is largely shared in Amy Devitt’s work on genre subjectivity, especially in the shared claim that genre should evolve with the development of human interaction and social situation. She reasons that “If genre not only responds to but also constructs recurring situation, then genre must be a dynamic rather than static concept. Genres construct and respond to situation; they are actions” (Devitt 578). In other words, genre becomes a social form that should mimic the natural order and chaos of human behaviour and therefore must become fluid and able to change with the different evolving groups that employ that form. This allows for the deviation away from mainstream cultural values and conventions to be constituted as a new form of “normal,” and therefore challenge the standards that are socially perpetuated on the writer, their process, experiences, thoughts, and ideas in order for it to be considered “good.”
Anis Bawarshi expands more on these social epistemic based ideas in his foundational work in genre, which claims that genre defines and organizes both writing and its inherent social action, therefore creating both the audience and the author as a function of genre itself, which thus shapes who people become as subject of genre; if genre remains limited, then so too will the people that are subject to it. This then begs the author to stray from genre norms, to challenge the social assumptions that come with them and try to be unique. The need to establish oneself among a community demands that the individual question the inherent social context present in both themselves and the audience they are hoping to interact with. Bawarshi’s framework for his research is the thematic argument that “genre does not simply regulate a preexisting social activity; instead it constitutes the activity by making it possible through its ideological and rhetorical conventions…Genre helps shape and enable our social actions by rhetorically constituting the way we recognize the situation within which we function” (Bawarshi 340). In other words, the typified regulations that genre perpetuates allows for the easy categorization of an activity or text, and therefore enables the audience to engage with situations “appropriately.” However, these universal standards cannot effectively apply to all situations, much like they cannot apply to all of humanity. Social behaviour and situations change, so conventions must change as well to evolve and still engage with the audience.
In this way, although genre dictates who authors become as subjects of said genre, deviation from these norms can better express who the author is and what they authentically believe in and can therefore better communicate the writer’s voice without being limited by social assumptions and expectations. This allows for a more diverse, accessible, and educational context that an audience can relate with, or at least learn from, which makes genre an invaluable tool for writing and/or editing when used as a community guide rather than a universal, hegemonic rulebook. In a more recent article attempting to reframe the conception of genre within academia and pedagogy, Bawarshi uses this argument to address the problem with the preoccupied thinking of fixating genre as one particular thing, and the resulting “stabilizing” of genre that results from this preoccupation. With all the work done in this field, he claims that genre has still remained static, a skill to be obtained as a “professional” rather than actually treating it as a fluid and nuanced tool like so much scholarship claims. No genre can do more than predict, so no author can be completely secure in the audience’s reaction in the moment; “partly because no moment is any one type of genre, and partly because of each moment’s unpredictable historical complexity” (Bawarshi). Humanity is complex, and therefore makes our social experiences complicated and individualized, meaning reactions and understanding of a piece of writing, while still based on a social context, are individualized as well.
3. Discussion
With this understanding, no matter how helpful a tool genre can be, there is only so much it can do, and therefore requires deviation in order to be successful. This claim becomes central to the debate within genre studies as it is a solution that addresses the challenges with both social limitations and audience categorization. Dominant cultural values impose expectations that dictate how the author should be writing and engaging with their own ideologies, but genre deviation refutes this standardization while still highlighting the importance of engaging with an audience that will naturally try to categorize any text that they encounter. Since most authors regardless are claiming for some sort of divergence from traditional hegemonic expectations by reframing what genre should function as, most research is concentrated on the theoretical question surrounding genre and its place within our larger societal framework. In other words, there seems to be a consensus regardless of view that deviation from genre is a good thing. The main debate, then, is not over how genre should be interacted with, but rather the function that it fulfills in a person’s writing process – Is genre a community’s tool, or a personalized road block? However, I want to counter with a simple question that challenges both perspectives – is it ever really that simple?
Paradoxes exist far more frequently in our world than most would like to admit, especially in rhetoric and composition, and genre is no exception. Much like in rhetorical theory, both the social and the individual are needed to create a process and a product that honors the author’s voice, defines and organizes social action, and breaks typical stereotypes, allowing for a more effective interaction of the individual with the social. Acknowledgement of this paradox within pedagogy can then create a space where the author’s own rhetoric becomes a significantly more valuable asset to the writing process, and consequently the process starts to develop the same or more value than the finished product. Genre’s insistence of this paradox (you must be both social and individual, use it as a tool and break all the rules anyway), allows for a better understanding of the balance necessary to learn in order to continue the development of the author’s writing process as a social action. A lot of work within genre studies is built on this paradox, expanding it to explain how this action can perpetuate social hierarchies over communities without power, and how genre can then be deviated from in order to combat these reinforced power structures.
Genre, as a social action, then must reflect the social situation that it is placed in, meaning it must reflect the messy and complicated behavior of humanity rather than the clean-cut rules of standardization. We cannot truly be categorized, no matter how much civilization tries to do so, for we are designed to grow and evolve and therefore exist in what I have named “the gray space.” This term refers to the space between; the middle area between predetermined social binaries where true humanity lives and flourishes. Life exists in shades of gray, no matter how black and white the dominant culture portrays social situations and interactions to be.
I am skeptical of anything that claims for the pure presence of one thing and complete absence of the other, and am therefore inclined to agree that the individual and the social must work in conjunction to shape genre into a system that can function as a supporting tool when it is needed. By acknowledging and residing in the gray space, the author acknowledges the nuanced complexity of engaging with the social action of genre while simultaneously communicating the validity and value of their own voice and experiences. “The genre function is the social and rhetorical scene within which we enact various social practices, relations, and identities” (Bawarshi 357). Therefore, functioning within the gray space allows for the interaction of the different conventions, interactions, and characters in a social sphere to attempt to navigate the boundaries of truth while avoiding the clash that comes from falling into boundaries that classify writers and their work into a binary of “correct” or “incorrect.”
This means that with a theoretical lens, genre is clearly a way to disrupt these binaries and support the author in creating and choosing social actions that then communicate the authentic voice and context of the individual to the larger social audience (who interact with their own personal contexts and ideas and create a social situation for the text). However, due to the newer nature of this research area, there remains a multitude of questions surrounding the practical application of these theories and claims. There is a large gap surrounding any real next steps for these ideas, which is essential to the sustainability of any shift in perception, including the great changes that genre has gone through. In other words, there is no room for progress without pragmatic action taken to ensure that social situations and interactions do not retract back into the binaries that hegemonic cultural values perpetuate over civilization for control. A question that surfaced throughout my research in response to this concern was whether genre deviance is in fact a genre of its own.
Genre functions as a social action that can either perpetuate the dictated expectations of a hegemonic culture or further the rich personal context and ideologies of the author. Therefore, deviance from genre must also have this dual potential. Deviance, in its original intention, challenges the typified conventions that are enforced on writers and that limit the writing process. However, much like any social concept, divergence from standardization can also easily become victim to the systems of conformity that intrinsically dominate the function of our typical societal operations. Theoretically, deviation of genre would become a form of genre itself, and would continue the cycle of social hierarchies assigning power and determining understanding. If this is the case, then what needs to occur in order to keep non-normative individuality from becoming mainstream hegemony? The only thing stopping genre deviation from reaching this shift is a pragmatic application, meaning the practical shift in the actions a writer takes while engaging with the conventions of genre. For example, consider the following questions: How do we teach flexible genre in, say, a freshman composition course? How does that affect the function of our current education system with reliances such as grades? What does that look like in literature-based composition, or editing/publishing?
4. Conclusions
I want to propose a tentative system for teaching this perception shift in genre and how to continue practicing the combination of an individual focus and a social action. With these ideas, I hope to help develop the authentic deviation from typified conventions and better inform the writing process, especially of writers belonging to social groups without power:
1. Teach genres with an awareness for the complex and nuanced social contexts that surround them. It is impossible to avoid a sort of bias over the classroom as a teacher since you automatically hold a higher level of authority, but it is important to show students the conventions that are necessitated by social hierarchies and show diverse engagements with said conventions. For example, teaching about underground literature, such as zines or manifestos by groups like Riot Grrrl or the Black Panther Party, alongside classical works, such as To Kill a Mockingbird or The Great Gatsby. This could then open the discourse around genre to the differences in both physical and social conventions within these genres, the personal choices that the author makes, and the social action that the text engages in. Audience response can also be analyzed to include the perception of these different genres into the classroom discussion as well, therefore stressing the importance of changing this hegemonic perspective.
2. Introduce the idea of writing without a specific audience in mind. Composing for a specific genre means typically focusing on the typified idea of what the audience and stylistic conventions should look like. But imagine what kind of ideas could come out of different, young, new minds when their writing is not limited by the standards that genre has ingrained within societal engagement. Starting a new project can already be overwhelming without the pressure of intrinsic hierarchical systems telling new writers that their differences are simply “wrong.” Encourage students to write for their own selves; write freely and authentically, with whatever style feels right, focusing on personal ideas and experiences. Examples of this individuality include brainstorming, visual mapping, freewriting, or perhaps even using this as a unit to diversify the curriculum and discuss counterculture literature.
3. Practice, practice, practice! It may seem redundant, but the idea of a discipline is to continuously learn more and sharpen what has already been learned. Genre, like a discipline, is not simply a skill that one can master and put on a resume. It is a tool that must be learned, relearned, and constantly exercised. Perhaps there are weekly writing exercises that are graded based on completion that have students try to balance the social action of genre with an individual aspect of their writing; or perhaps there is a large writing project structuring the course where genre has a gradual introduction and each phase is practiced repeatedly. Regardless, this shift in genre and how it engages with an individual writer’s process is crucial to the sustained development of transformed social structures, and therefore must be learned in the classroom.
By changing the perception of genre’s function, we can empower students to write beyond the constraints imposed on them by society and instead engage in both authentic individual expression and purposeful social action. In doing so, we can start to cultivate a future where diverse voices are able to challenge and change the social conventions that seek to limit them.
Works Cited
Bawarshi, Anis. "Beyond the Genre Fixation: A Translingual Perspective on Genre." College English, vol. 78, no. 3, 2016, pp. 243-249.
Bawarshi, Anis. "The Genre Function." College English, vol. 62, no. 3, 2000, pp. 335-360.
Devitt, Amy J. "Generalizing about Genre: New Conceptions of an Old Concept." College Composition and Communication, vol. 44, no. 4, 1993, pp. 573-586.
Ede, Lisa, and Andrea Lunsford. "Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy." College Composition and Communication, vol. 35, no. 2, 1984, pp. 155-171.
Elbow, Peter. “Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience.” College English, vol. 49, no. 1, Jan. 1987, pp 50-69.
Freedman, Aviva and Peter Medway, editors. Genre and the New Rhetoric. 1994, Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005.
Hyland, Ken. "Genre, Discipline and Identity." Journal of English for Academic Purposes, vol. 19, Sept. 2015, pp. 32-43.
Miller, Carolyn R. "Genre as Social Action." Quarterly Journal in Speech, vol. 70, no. 2, May 1984, pp. 151-167.
Russell, David R. "Motivation and Genre as Social Action: A Phenomenological Perspective on Academic Writing." Frontiers in Psychology, vol. 14, 2023.
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