Persuasive Genres

Old and New Media

Sujata S. Kathpalia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429516870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistic Semantics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book provides an analysis of persuasive genres in the domain of media, ranging from traditional to new media genres on the internet.

Kathpalia provides a layered analysis of a family of persuasive genres at the functional, semantic, and linguistic levels and a reconceptualization of genres as empowering rather than constraining, enabling rather than binding, and dynamic rather than static. The book leads readers to an understanding of genre that accounts for the way we interpret, respond to, and create genres in different settings whilst shedding light on how genres change and how they evolve into new and unique forms to meet the ever-changing needs of society.

This book would be of interest to those studying or researching the topic of genres, and those interested in reconceptualizing the way in which we interpret and understand genres from linguistic and discourse perspectives.

1 Different perspectives on genre

DOI: 10.4324/9780429243721-1

Introduction

Genres play an important role in our academic, professional, and social lives, enabling us to achieve a variety of communicative objectives. We rely on a repertoire of genres to operate in the different spheres of our lives, using them not only as tools to achieve communicative purposes but also to understand and refine these purposes. Acquisition of genres is a lifelong process that happens when we encounter a variety of genres typically associated with different communicative situations and habitually use them for communicating with other discourse community members. Frequent exposure to these genres builds our awareness of their conventional patterns helping us to interpret and produce similar texts based on past experience.

Traditionally, genres were associated with art (i.e. literature, folklore, films, etc.) rather than with their use in academic, professional, and social contexts. However, this has changed over time, with recent genre studies focusing on a variety of non-literary educational and professional genres. In current genre studies, the emphasis is on the construction, interpretation, and exploitation of texts beyond specialist disciplines like linguistics and rhetoric studies. Although genre still plays a central role in the teaching and designing of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and rhetoric courses, it provides a powerful framework for communication in the professional world of academia, business, law, and media. In these academic and professional settings, the characterization of genre as an unthinking application of formulas is fast eroding and a new, enlightening concept of genre with a focus on diversity and hybridity is gaining popularity.

Genre studies have progressed gradually from a textual analysis of texts belonging to a particular genre to ethnographic and socio-cognitive accounts of genres representing specific institutional, professional, and organizational cultures, revealing underlying tensions between professional and private intentions in their construction. Associated with these studies is an attempt to tackle the challenges posed by hybrid genres, which defy the concept of generic integrity proposed in past studies. As these hybrid genres reflect the flux in contemporary communities of practice that are dynamic and continuously changing to keep pace with organizational changes, genre studies have also been shifting their attention to the evolving discourse practices of these organizations. In fact, in critical genre studies, the focus of analysis has progressed from generic constructs to professional practices, specifically to exemplify explicit versus implicit meanings conveyed by professional genres as well as public versus private intentions of professionals in conveying these meanings. Other complexities in genre studies involve the belief that genres cannot be analyzed in isolation as they are influenced by other genres in institutional and professional settings, forming colonies of genres that are closely connected and organized in genre chains. To add to these challenges in genre studies, the migration of genres to online platforms in the internet age compels genre analysts to go beyond their concern with printed texts to digital texts that are multimodal in nature.

Although we have come a long way from the early conception of genre in the field of ESP as a rigid and formulaic way of teaching and constructing texts, the term genre is still being approached with trepidation due to the many challenges associated with it. Therefore, despite its widespread usage in disciplines like applied linguistics and in the expanded context of our professional and everyday lives, more research on the concept of genre is necessary to address the challenges posed by recent genre studies. The objective of this book is to revisit the concept of genre in the light of new research in genre studies, especially in the context of old and new media genres. More specifically, the aim is to examine the consequences of transporting old genres to a new digital platform with its many technological affordances and the birth of new digital genres/sub-genres in this environment, on the concept of genre.

Definitions of genre

Since the early 1990s, although many genre studies have claimed that certain discourses constitute a distinctive class or genre, there have been differences in their conceptualization of genre. For instance, should genre be defined in terms of its communicative purpose, substance, or form, or on the action it is used to accomplish, i.e. on the basis of its communicative goal, textual similarity or task-specificity. As a result, three different frameworks have emerged over the last two decades to explicate genre theory. Among these are the ESP school (Bhatia, 1993, 2004, 2017; Swales, 1981, 1990); the Sydney school using a Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach to genre (Hasan, 1977, 1979, 1984; Martin, 1985; Martin, Christie, & Rothery, 1987); and the North American school of genre studies known as New Rhetoric Studies (NRS) (Bazerman, 1994a; Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1995; Miller, 1984, 1994). The definitions of genre proposed by the proponents of these three schools of thought are reflective of their orientation towards genre:

English for Specific Purposes:

A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the parent discourse community, and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. The rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style.

(Swales, 1990, p. 58)

Systemic Functional Linguistics:

Genres are how things get done, when language is used to accomplish them. They range from literary to far from literary forms: poems, narratives, expositions, lectures, seminars, recipes, manuals, appointment making, service encounters, news broadcasts and so on. The term genre is used here to embrace each of the linguistically realized activity types which comprise so much of our culture.

(Martin, 1985, p. 250)

New Rhetoric Studies:

I will be arguing that a rhetorically sound definition of genre must be centered not on the substance or the form of discourse but on the action it is used to accomplish.

(Miller, 1984, p. 151)

The orientations towards genre are distinct in these three frameworks, with the first defining genre as texts sharing similar communicative purposes within discourse communities, the second as culturally composed activity types that are used to accomplish things, and the third as typical rhetorical actions (Hyon, 1996).

Swales (1981, 1986, 1990) and Bhatia (1993, 2004, 2017) have been instrumental in shaping genre theory in ESP with their focus on the form–function correlations within genres based on their communicative purposes in social contexts as well as in extending the notion of genre to critical genre analysis (CGA). As for the Australian genre theory, it evolved within the larger framework of Halliday’s (1978) SFL, which was extended by Martin and his colleagues (Martin, Christie, & Rothery, 1987) to define genres as structural forms that are used in certain cultures and contexts to achieve various communicative purposes. Finally, in the new rhetoric approach to genre theory presented in Miller’s seminal paper ‘Genre as Social Action’ (1984), genre was conceptualized differently by focusing more on the situational contexts in which genres occur and on their social purposes or actions rather than on the forms of these genres. Despite these differences in the conceptualization of genre, the three different research traditions share common ground as they all consider genres to be recognizable communicative events with clearly identifiable communicative purposes shared by members of a discourse community and ‘the most important feature of this view of language use is the emphasis on conventions that all the three manifestations of genre theory consider very central to any form of generic description’ (Bhatia, 2004, p. 23).

Perspectives on genre

The study of genres has been around since Aristotle in the form of traditional taxonomies of oratory and literary works. However, in recent years, genre has become a popular framework for analyzing non-literary discourse. As mentioned earlier, three main schools of thought – ESP, SFL, and NRS have emerged with different perspectives in defining and analyzing spoken and written genres. A brief review of the three genre perspectives is provided below.

English for Specific Purposes

In the field of genre analysis, there are two scholars, Swales (1990, 2004) and Bhatia (1993, 2004, 2017), whose research work has had a tremendous impact on genre studies. Swales’ first book Genre Analysis: English in academic and research setting (Swales, 1990), introduced genre analysis as a new discipline in the field of discourse. It traced the beginnings of genre analysis in the domains of anthropology, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and functionally motivated language learning. In defining genre, the communicative purpose of texts is prioritized and described from the perspectives of discourse community, genre, and task. The first book provides an in-depth analysis of the research report genre and the next book Research genres: Exploration and applications (Swales, 2004) provides a detailed account of other research genres such as the PhD dissertations and defence, research talks, and research articles. While the first book is a benchmark in the field, the second one appeals to a wider audience of researchers, graduate students, and practitioners in the fields of communication and education.

Swales (1990) offered a working definition of genre by means of a series of observations in his introductory book on genre analysis. According to him genres are ‘a class of communicative events’ (p. 45) sharing a ‘set of communicative purposes’ (p. 46); the various realizations of genres ‘vary in their prototypicality’ (p. 49); they have constraints on possible realizations ‘in terms of their content, positioning and form’ based on their rationale (p. 52); and discourse communities tend to have ‘nomenclature for genres’ that are insightful in helping us identify these genres (p. 54). Expanding on these different aspects, he explains that genres are usually important in a culture, occurring frequently (e.g. news reports) or rarely (e.g. Presidential Press Conferences), with language and paralanguage playing a key role in their realization, and most importantly the communicative event encompasses these genres, their participants, the environment in which they are produced and received, as well as their cultural and historical associations.

As for the communicative purpose of genres, Swales (ibid.) emphasizes that genre membership is determined by the shared purpose in a community rather than on form or stylistic features, and purposes can be overt (e.g. recipes), multiple (e.g. political speeches), or even complicated. Another way in which genre membership can be established is through family resemblances and shared features in texts belonging to the same genre. While recognizing that the communicative purpose of a genre provides an insight into its rationale, Swales demonstrates how rationale plays an important role in shaping a text such as a ‘bad news’ letter in which both the rhetorical structure (e.g. a buffer preceding the bad news) and the language (e.g. impersonal, regretful, and non-judgemental) are constrained by the rationale. Finally, the heuristic value of nomenclatures and insider metalanguage used in communities is highlighted and an investigative mode of enquiry is recommended, such as paying attention to community members’ naming procedures and eliciting genre categorizations from them. In Swales’ concept of genre, the communicative purpose of a text is the binding force that determines genre identity, drives language activities in a discourse community and controls processing procedures such as encoding and decoding of texts. Regarding the concepts of genre and discourse community, we are reminded that as members of a discourse community, we operate through a repertoire of genres both in our professional and social lives, expanding on this repertoire and becoming more proficient in these genres throughout our lives.

The most recent addition to genre theory has been Bhatia’s (2017) book on critical genre analysis in the context of professional communication. It makes a major contribution to genre analysis by building on his previous books, the first of which highlights a two-tier linguistic and rhetorical analysis of academic and professional genres for educational purposes (Bhatia, 1993) and the second demonstrates a three-space multidimensional and multi-perspective genre framework for professional written discourse (Bhatia, 2004). The third book goes beyond the semiotic resources of professional genres and emphasizes ‘generic constructs and professional practices, information that is stated and unstated, and socially recognized communicative purposes and private intentions of members of specialist communities’ (Kathpalia, 2017, p. 50). The most crucial part of the book is its explication of the notion of ‘criticality’ in genre theory – the added dimension of demystifying the mult...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Different perspectives on genre
• 2. Multi-level genre analysis of texts
• 3. Genre analysis of conventional and digital book blurbs
• 4. Genre analysis of conventional and digital reviews
• 5. Diversity in old and new media genres
• 6. Revisiting the concept of genre
• Appendix: Sources for the examples
• Index