Genre and the Performance of Publics - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607324423 ISBN 13: 9781607324423

Publisher: Utah State University Press, 2016

Synopsis

In recent decades, genre studies has focused attention on how genres mediate social activities within workplace and academic settings. Genre and the Performance of Publics moves beyond institutional settings to explore public contexts that are less hierarchical, broadening the theory of how genres contribute to the interconnected and dynamic performances of public life. 

Chapters examine how genres develop within publics and how genres tend to mediate performances in public domains, setting up a discussion between public sphere scholarship and rhetorical genre studies. The volume extends the understanding of genres as not only social ways of organizing texts or mediating relationships within institutions but as dynamic performances themselves.

By exploring how genres shape the formation of publics, Genre and the Performance of Publicsbrings rhetoric/composition and public sphere studies into dialogue and enhances the understanding of public genre performances in ways that contribute to research on and teaching of public discourse.

About this title

About the Author

Anis Bawarshi is professor and associate chair of the English Department at the University of Washington. He is the author or coauthor of several books and articles on rhetoric and composition studies, rhetorical genre studies and uptake, and writing knowledge transfer.

Mary Jo Reiff is professor of English at the University of Kansas. She has authored or coauthored various books and articles on writing knowledge transfer, audience theory, public rhetoric, critical ethnography, and rhetorical genre studies.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Genre and the Performance of Publics

By Mary Jo Reiff, Anis Bawarshi

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2016 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-442-3

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: From Genre Turn to Public Turn: Navigating the Intersections of Public Sphere Theory, Genre Theory, and the Performance of Publics Mary Jo Reiff and Anis Bawarshi, 
PART I: THE INTERDISCURSIVITY OF PUBLIC GENRES: DYNAMICS OF UPTAKES, AGENCY, AND THE PERFORMANCES OF PUBLIC LIFE, 
1 Genre as Interdiscursive Performance in Public Space Vijay K. Bhatia, 
2 Between Genres: Uptake, Memory, and US Public Discourse on Israel-Palestine Anis Bawarshi, 
3 Disambiguating Uptake: Toward a Tactical Research Agenda on Citizens' Writing Dylan B. Dryer, 
PART II: HISTORICIZING PUBLIC GENRES: INVENTION, EVOLUTION, AND EMBODIMENT OF PUBLIC PERFORMANCES, 
4 Defining Moments: Genre Beginnings, Genre Invention, and the Case of the English-Language Dictionar Lindsay Rose Russell, 
5 Geographies of Public Genres: Navigating Rhetorical and Material Relations of the Public Petition Mary Jo Reiff, 
6 Bodily Scripts, Unruly Workers, and Public Anxiety: Scripting Professional Embodiment in Interwar Vocational Guides Risa Applegarth, 
PART III: INTERMEDIARY PUBLIC GENRES: MOBILIZING KNOWLEDGE ACROSS GENRE BOUNDARIES, 
7 Uncovering Occluded Publics: Untangling Public, Personal, and Technical Spheres in Jury Deliberations Amy J. Devitt, 
8 Discourse Coalitions, Science Blogs, and the Public Debate over Global Climate Change Graham Smart, 
9 Multiple Intertextual Threads and (Un)likely Uptakes: An Analysis of a Canadian Public Inquiry Tosh Tachino, 
PART IV: DIGITAL PUBLIC GENRES: MEDIATING PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT AND EXPANDING PUBLIC PARTICIPATION, 
10 Appropriating Genre, "Taking Action" against Obesity: The Rhetorical Work of Digital Genre Systems in Public Discourse Monica M. Brown, 
11 Exigencies, Ecologies, and Internet Street Science: Genre Emergence in the Context of Fukushima Radiation-Risk Discourse Jaclyn Rea and Michelle Riedlinger, 
12 Spreadable Genres, Multiple Publics: The Pixel Project's Digital Campaigns to Stop Violence against Women Jennifer Nish, 
About the Authors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Genre as Interdiscursive Performance in Public Space

VIJAY K. BHATIA

Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's (1986) suggestion that texts are invariably dialogic and hence must be looked at and accounted for in the context of other relevant and related texts, it is possible to claim that writers or speakers often interdiscursively appropriate, directly or indirectly, discursive resources, including genre conventions, and often manage as well as manipulate discursive space and participant systems in an attempt to create novel and hybrid genres through rhetorical processes of recontextualization, reformulation, reframing, and resemiotization. Although I have discussed the function of interdiscursive appropriation of discoursal and generic resources in professional contexts elsewhere (see Bhatia 2010), I believe it has an even more significant role to play in public discourses of different kinds in realizing a variety of communicative intentions in various media. Drawing on the analysis of a typical instance of media discourse, this chapter aims to give more substance to this claim by elaborating on the notion of interdiscursivity as appropriation and management of discoursal resources in genre theory and by arguing for a multiperspective framework to analyze interdiscursive performance in public space. In providing a framework that accounts for text-external resources for understanding genre performance, interdiscursivity can contribute to rhetorical genre studies scholars' burgeoning interest in genre uptakes as dynamically localized and interconnected in ways especially useful for the study of public genres this volume undertakes.

Let me first briefly refer to a multiperspective framework I introduced earlier (Bhatia 2004) for the analysis of discourse within which I would like to consider such appropriations of interdiscursivity in public discourse.

Three-Space Model for Genre Analysis

In proposing a three-space multiperspective model for the analysis of written discourse in my earlier work (Bhatia 2004), I underpinned the importance of context in genre theory. The three overlapping concepts of space — which include textual, sociopragmatic (incorporating both genre-based discursive and professional practices), and, more generally, sociocultural — help a discourse analyst to focus more appropriately on one or more of these three dimensions of space to analyze and interpret discourse. In fact, if we look at the three-space model in more detail, we realize that most forms of discourse operate simultaneously within and across four somewhat distinct yet overlapping levels in order to construct and interpret meanings in specific contexts. Drawing on this framework (Bhatia 2004), these levels of realization can be identified as discourse as text, discourse as genre, discourse as social practice, and discourse as identity and culture, which can be represented as in Figure 1.1.

The interesting thing about discourse analysis is that although the ultimate product we can see is in the form of a text, it is made possible by a combination of complex and careful selection of resources, which may include lexico-grammatical, rhetorical, and discourse organization, all of which are text internal. In addition to these text-internal resources, other contributors to the construction of discourse are conventions of the genre in question, relevant aspects of the social practice in which the genre is situated, and the culture of the community, discipline, or institution, which constrains the use of textual resources for a particular discursive practice. Thus, any instance of discourse as communication is simultaneously realized, and hence can be analyzed, at four levels: as text, as representation of genre, as realization of social practice, and as indication of social and individual identity as well as culture. Identity includes disciplinary, institutional, and professional identities in addition to individual, ethnic, and, more generally, sociocultural identities.

These distinct levels of discourse realization highlight two kinds of relationship, one between discursive practice and social practice and the other between text-internal and text-external semiotic resources and constraints. Text-internal resources have been researched for quite some time within discourse and genre analytical literature highlighting the notion of intertextuality; however, text-external resources so far have not been treated in as much detail in discourse and genre analytical literature. Text-external resources, as mentioned earlier, include the discourse and genre conventions that constrain not only the construction but also the interpretation, exploitation, and use (including genre uptake) of texts as some of the key aspects of social practices. They also include social identities and various manifestations of culture that motivate these discourses and social practices.

Interdiscursive Performance

The multispace model for genre analysis described above enables us to understand and account for the appropriation of textual as well as other semiotic resources and conventions at various levels of discursive engagement invariably exploited for the construction and interpretation of discursive as well as social, professional, disciplinary, and institutional practices, all of which can reveal interactive patterns of intertextuality and interdiscursivity. The concept of interdiscursivity, which is sometimes subsumed under intertextuality, is not entirely new and can be traced back to the work of Bakhtin (1986), Candlin and Maley (1997), Fairclough (1995), Foucault (1981), Kristeva (1980), and, more recently, Bhatia (2004; 2010) and several others. However, these two concepts have not been fully explored and sufficiently developed to investigate some of the complexities we find in discursive and social practices within genre studies. To make an initial distinction between these two related concepts, we can begin by assuming that intertextuality refers to the use of prior as well as contemporaneous texts, in particular within the contexts of "genre sets" (Berkenkotter 2008; Devitt 1991), transforming the past into the present. Interdiscursivity, on the other hand, refers to more innovative attempts to create various forms of hybrid and relatively novel genres by appropriating or exploiting established conventions or discoursal resources associated with other genres and social practices. Interdiscursivity thus accounts for a variety of discursive and social practices, often resulting in "mixing," "embedding," and "bending" of generic norms in professional contexts (Bhatia 1995; 1997; 1998; 2004). Interdiscursivity thus can be viewed as appropriation of semiotic resources (which may include textual, semantic, sociopragmatic, and generic) across any two or more different levels of discourse realization, especially those of genre, social practice, and disciplinary and institutional cultures (Bhatia 2010). Appropriations across texts thus give rise to intertextual relations, whereas appropriations across professional genres, practices, and cultures constitute interdiscursive relations. It must be pointed out that in most generic artifacts, intertextuality and interdiscursivity may be present simultaneously.

In order to develop a comprehensive and evidence-based awareness of the motives and intentions of such disciplinary, institutional, professional, and social practices (Swales 1998), we need to look closely at the multiple discourses, actions, and voices that play a significant role in the formation of specific discursive practices within relevant institutional and social frameworks in addition to the conventional systems of genres (Bazerman 1994) often used to fulfill professional objectives of specific disciplinary or discourse communities. This examination is possible only within the notion of interdiscursivity, which is an important function of appropriation of text-external generic resources across genres and social practices.

Before I proceed to discuss specific instances of interdiscursivity in public genres, I would like to give more substance to what I mean by text -external semiotic resources crucial for interpreting interdiscursivity as appropriation of generic resources. These text-external resources primarily include three kinds of factors, which make a particular genre possible (Bhatia 2004): discursive practices, discursive procedures, and social identities and different manifestations of culture.

Discursive practices, on the one hand, are essentially the outcome of specific discursive procedures and, on the other hand, are embedded in specific institutional cultures and realize various forms of identities, institutional as well as individual. Discursive practices include factors such as the choice of a particular genre to achieve a specific objective and the appropriate and effective mode of communication associated with such a genre. Discursive procedures are factors associated with the characteristics of participants authorized to make a valid and appropriate contribution; participatory mechanisms, which determine what kind of contribution a particular participant is allowed to make at what stage of the genre construction process; and the other genres that make a valid and justifiable contribution to the document under construction. Both these factors (discursive practices and discursive procedures) inevitably take place within the context of typical disciplinary, institutional, and professional cultures, which validate a particular genre and establish sociocultural identities.

Within our understanding of genres as interdiscursive practices, we see expert writers constantly operating within and across generic boundaries creating new but essentially related and/or hybrid (both mixed and embedded) forms to give expression to their "private intentions" within socially shared communicative practices and generic norms (Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995; (Bhatia 1994; Fairclough 1995). Interdiscursivity, therefore, spans discursive events and is often based on shared generic or contextual characteristics across two or more discursive constructs. Interdiscursivity thus can be viewed as a function of the appropriation of generic resources across three kinds of contextual and other text-external boundaries: genres, social practices, and identities and cultures. However, in the context of public discourse, it is also necessary to identify at least two other forms of management of discursive resources. One of them is the management and manipulation of discursive space and the other is the exploitation of available participant management systems to meet socially shared expectations and objectives — often mixing private and public discourses, on the one hand, and meeting and invariably exploiting the expectations of multiple audiences on the other. The exploitation of interdiscursive space is quite evident in the coconstruction of discursive practices leading to a creative manipulation of semiotic resources within the corporate world, especially in the context of annual corporate reports, which typically incorporate various disciplinary discourses, such as those of accounting, finance, public relations, and law within the same interdiscursive space in order to achieve the reports' professional objectives (Bhatia 2014). Participant management, on the other hand, is seen as a typical discursive resource to balance the expectations of various audiences, especially keeping in mind the interpretation and uptake of discursive intentions, as is often the case in the construction of legislative discourse. It may also be pointed out that often these appropriations, whether text internal or text external, discursively operate simultaneously to realize the intended meaning. The full range of appropriations can be represented as in Figure 1.2 above, which has been adapted from the one in Bhatia (2012, 25).

In a similar fashion, WU (2011) refers to interdiscursivity as "the mixing of diverse genres, discourses, or styles associated with institutional and social meanings in a single text" (96). He mentions the case of medical interviews in China, in which the interdiscursive relations between the "standard medical interview genre and counseling, between the discourse types of the traditional Chinese medicine and the Western medicine" (96) are commonly displayed.

It is interesting to note that some of the important aspects of interdiscursivity, particularly the relationship between genres and actions, have been extensively explored in rhetorical genre studies within the notion of uptake on genres. Anne Freadman (1994) was perhaps the first one to introduce uptake to genre study by using the analogy of tennis to describe how genres get their meanings in relation to one another. For her, genres are like "games" that constitute their own rules for play within what she calls "ceremonials" for the exchange of texts that she regards as "shots." In a series of articles since then, Freadman's main objective has been to explore how individuals use genres to interact within particular contexts (what she refers to as "discursive events" [Freadman 2012]) to create meaning, just as "shots" are picked and returned in tennis within specific spatial and temporal convergences. Anis Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff use the notion of uptake to analyze complex transactions that mediate meanings and actions between genres (Bawarshi and Reiff 2010). Charles Bazerman (1997) takes a similar position when he talks about the nature of the interrelationship between different genres as "discursively structured activities." He claims everyday genres, such as sales receipts, have specific relationships with tax laws, corporate records, financial reports, and even economic indicators.

In what follows, I would like to take specific instances of interdiscursive performance from a variety of public contexts not only to illustrate that it operates at all levels — generic, social practice, and social identity and culture — but also to claim that it allows a more rigorous and comprehensive analysis of genres in social practice. At the same time, analysis of interdiscursive performance also encourages evidenced-based studies of public discourse and institutional practices and cultures through the genres they often use. I would like to take up instances of interdiscursivity from a number of media genres from different contexts, which result from an appropriation of generic resources across genres, practices, and/or cultures in and across public and private spheres.

Interdiscursive Performance in Public Discourse

One of the most important and pervasive aspects of public discourse is the use of a private voice in the public domain. Media discourse, with its human interest in everyday affairs and in specialized content, often turns specialized disciplinary discourses into popularized versions to make them accessible to general readers. Another characteristic of media discourse is the use of personal opinions, often unverified, appropriated and interdiscursively transformed into public opinions in various contexts, as in letters to the editor, reviews of current developments, commentaries on current affairs, and even editorials. Other contexts of such hybrid discourses in the public domain are Internet public forums, talk shows on television, and, more recently, tweets, weblogs, and so forth. For our discussion here, issues such as how public opinions are interdiscursively represented in the media — through a variety of techniques (such as opinion polling and people-on-the-street interviews) and modes of construction, interpretation, and exploitation — are key instances of hybrids of private and public voices. It is also interesting to study and understand how such private discourses generated by these techniques are interdiscursively turned into public discourses, who contributes what to these opinions, and what makes these discursive events possible. How politicians and government officials invoke and contest the notion of public opinion in political debates is also interesting. Let us briefly look at some of the studies that highlight such interdiscursive events.

Ib Bondebjerg (1996), referring to television media, makes a relevant point, claiming that "soft, human interest journalism has arrived on television and private life stories have been lifted into public discourses, changing the established forms of journalism. At the same time new forms of television documentary — building on the documentary film tradition — have emerged, where hybridization of factual and fictional elements are found" (28). He further points out,

Even though we need the difference between fact and fiction, and it is very fundamental in our social and communicative behaviour, it is also true that the difference is not basic on all levels. At a textual level, within segments of a text, it may be hard to draw a clear line, and even though the context, the communicative situation and the act of reference are different in most cases, it is also important to note that we use our life categories and our basic experiences and schemas when we relate both to fictional and factual forms. Our use of, and response to, programmes of a hybrid nature may both influence our public knowledge of social matters and our emotional, interpersonal understanding of life. Programmes like these raise the question of how public discourse and private fascination are combined on the textual and experiential level of interaction between programme and viewer. (Bondebjerg 1996, 28)

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Utah State University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1607324423
• ISBN 13: 9781607324423
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 262
• Editor: Reiff Mary Jo, Bawarshi Anis