Genres are the “available and familiar patterns of utterances [that] provide clues that allow people to make sense of each other’s utterances and to frame utterances meaningful to ones interlocutors … genre identifies the recognizable utterances we believe we are producing and receiving.”
Bazzerman picks up nicely with Miller’s typification. For Bazzerman, genres are “the resources of language that are socially and culturally available and that have been typified through histories of social circulation… the process by which language users create order and sense so as to align with each other for mutual understanding and coordination.”
Bazzerman’s definition and treatment of genre aligns with Miller’s in that he has us place the “object” of genres in socially constructed spaces – mediated by specific conventions of language – to understand how and why genres work to help users (writers, readers, speakers) make meaning through particular actions.
Bazzerman, like Miller, addresses how genres align the intent of the author with the meaning created by the reader (how genres work to correct the “thinness of the written sign”). “Meaning is not fully available and imminent in the bare spelled word. Interactants’ familiarity with domains of communication and relevant genres make the kind of communication recognizable: established roles, values, domains of content, and general actions which then create the space for more specific, detailed, refined utterances and meanings spelled out in the crafted words.”
Specific to Bazzerman’s “pragmatism” – he reveals one intersection of Composition and Technical Communication, without identifying it as such. In both classrooms, Bazzerman illustrates how an understanding of genre as a social (inter)action can help students read and write in “situations with which they are less familiar…” The use of genre in the classroom allows the instructor to expose the explicit nature of the communicative situations, organizations, activities, and contexts in which the students are (and will be) writing. “Making explicit the organization and dynamics of communicative situations helps students know more concretely what their options are and how they might frame their goals, enhancing potential for communicative success.”
In relating Genre theory to Language theory (two of the principals theories I’ve clustered around Technical Communication’s core pedagogies), Bazzerman proposes: “… words are effective within the situation to align participants and achieve local actions. This view is consistent with theories or reading that suggest we make hypotheses about the meaning of texts based on our previous knowledge and experience, the encounter with the text prior to the current moment.”
Bazzerman claims that genre typifications result from a process of pyscho-social category formation. Here I see Spinuzzi’s departure point and the application of Genre theory in his later work: “Genre taxonomies can be useful to define wide-spread functional patterns in robust social systems.” As a segue into Activity Theory: “What provides for communicative stability is not the genre itself, but the activity system it is part of… material, social, and textual universes surrounding each document are indexed and made relevant in the document by explicit representation or implicit assumption, establishing knowledge to be mobilized in reading the document. Thus we can say that knowledge is created and reside within specific genre and activity systems.”
Bazzerman proves useful for my efforts by placing genre at the intersection of social constructionism and activity theory – at the point where individuals (students) learn to participate and contribute in specific genres, activities, and knowledge systems.
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