Beyond the Genre Fixation: A Translingual Perspective on Genre
Author(s): Anis Bawarshi
Source: College English , January 2016, Vol. 78, No. 3, Special Issue: Translingual Work
in Composition (January 2016), pp. 243-249
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/44075114
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Beyond the Genre Fixation:
A Translingual Perspective on Genre
Anis Bawarshi
hetorical genre studies, since the groundbreaking work of Campbell and RJamieson identified (1978), genres as Miller socially (1984), derived, Devitt intersubjective, (1993), and rhetorical Bazerman typifications (1994), has identified genres as socially derived, intersubjective, rhetorical typifications
that help us recognize and act within recurrent situations. From this work has
emerged an understanding of genres as social artifacts that, through their typifications,
can tell us things about how individuals define recurrence and acquire social motives to act in certain ways; about how genres relate to one another in the coordination of social activities; about how genres help construct and reproduce the situations that call for their use (and are hence ideological); and about how the explicit teaching of genre conventions might help students gain access to various systems of activity. In short, genre scholarship has taught us a great deal about the ways that genres help us define and make sense of recurring situations while providing the typified rhetorical and linguistic strategies for acting in these situations: both habitats for and habits of perceiving and acting.
If patterns, similarities, recurrence - some degree of typification - are all
distinguishing characteristics of genres, what then is the place of genre and genre studies in a translingual orientation focused on thinking differently about difference? What does a translingual orientation - with its focus on temporality, movement, and negotiation, with its view of language boundaries as porous and always emergent, always becoming (Lu and Horner) - offer to the study and teaching of genre, and
Anís Bawarshi has been a member of NCTE since 1995 and is a professor of English at the University of Washington, where he specializes in the study and teaching of writing, rhetorical genre theory, writing program administration, and research on knowledge transfer. He is co-managing editor of the journal Composition Forum and co-editor of the book series Reference Guides to Rhetoric and Composition. His publications include Genre and the Invention of the Writer : Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition ; Genre : An Introduction to History , Theory , Research , and Pedagogy (with Maryjo Reiff); Scenes of Writing: Strategies for Composing with Genres (with Amy Devitt and Maryjo Reiff); and Ecologies of Writing grams: Profiles of Writing Programs in Context (with Maryjo Reiff, Christian Weisser, and Michelle Ballif).
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how does such a perspective map onto current genre scholarship? In what follows, I will explore what I think we gain in genre research and pedagogy when we think of genre difference differently: genre difference not as a deviation from a patterned or recurrent norm, but rather as the norm of all genre performance.
By "Beyond the Genre Fixation" in my title, I mean to suggest two related
things: 1) a fixation on genre as an action, site, or object that, in my view, continues
to preoccupy thinking about genre and 2) the fixing or stabilizing of genre that results
from such a preoccupation. Despite work in rhetorical genre studies (RGS) that treats genres as dynamic social and cognitive phenomena, only stabilized for now (Schryer, "The Lab") and always subject to improvisations (Berkenkotter and Huckin, Devitt, Freadman, Paré, Russell, Schryer), dominant pedagogical approaches still fixate on genres as relatively static objects to be taught and acquired as part of disciplinary and professional enculturation. Genre explication - in the form of identifying prototypical genre conventions and relating them to their social function/purposes and in some cases also examining the ideological implications of these conventions - remains the
pedagogical norm. At the same time, because genre knowledge is associated with
disciplinary and professional participation, genres become used as benchmarks to distinguish between levels of literacy competence, such as what genres are
ate and useful to teach in basic writing and "ESL" courses, what genres are most
useful in first-year writing, what genres are best taught in professional and technical
communication courses, and so on. To be clear, I have been a supporter of these
ways of thinking about and approaching genre, and I have joined others in investing much of my professional attention in how we can make genres and genre knowledge effective means of access to forms of power and participation. The point I want to make, however, is that in our preoccupation with genres as sites of access, we have tended to privilege genres as things that can be made explicit through explication, and we have fixated on trying to figure out which genres are best taught when and where. A translingual perspective suggests that this is not enough.
Treating genres in this way is akin to treating genres as sentences, in the
ian sense. In "The Problem of Speech Genres," Bakhtin distinguishes sentences from utterances, arguing that while sentences are defined grammatically, utterances are defined performatively, by a change in speaking subjects within a sphere of nication. For Bakhtin, an utterance is a performed sentence, in space and time and in relation to others. Anne Freadman ("Anyone") makes a similar distinction between a ball and a shot. A ball, she explains, is an object, while a shot is a played ball (in the same way an utterance is a played sentence) whose performance is subject to rial, temporal, interdiscursive, interpersonal, and ideological relations. While it has helped us to focus on the thing-ness, how-ness, where-ness, and even the when-ness of genre, treating genres as sentences rather than utterances, balls rather than shots, has left genre pedagogies with an incomplete understanding of genre performances.
Approaching genres as performances enables students and instructors to examine the meanings and relations conditioned by genres as well as to open up genre actions to new interplays of possible meanings and linguistic relations.
What I most appreciate about recent contributions to translingual approaches
are the ways they conceptualize difference as the norm of language use and the
language labor that follows from this conceptualization. Translingualism challenges monolingual ideology's dichotomies between norm and difference, convention and creativity, which want us to imagine a vertical, hierarchical understanding of agency in which difference, transgression, and creativity are associated with more agency, cognitive ability, and language fluency, while norm and convention are associated with less agency, cognitive ability, and language fluency. Instead of a vertical "more or less" view of agency, a translingual approach posits a horizontal view in which agency is in play in all language use across the spectrum. At the heart of this tation toward agency, as Lu and Horner have argued, is the acknowledgement that translingualism is not a specialized use of language reserved for specific language users in specific contexts: translingualism is a fact of all language use. We are always translingual (though see Gilyard for an important caution against the flattening of difference and its stakes that can result from such a claim).
All language practices involve negotiations across asymmetrical relations of
power, as well as across time, and are grounded within material surrounds that, as Jay Jordan has recently argued, "cannot but inform, influence, and permeate daily
language activity" (366). Because time does not stand still and because relations of power are rooted in and shift across material contexts, iteration always involves
ference - and agency. Going back to Bakhtin's distinction between sentences and
utterances, the same sentence becomes a different utterance when performed in ferent moments of space and time. This is illustrated by a Volkswagen commercial airing a few years ago in which passengers holding scalding cups of coffee as they approach a speed bump utter iterations of the word "dude," each successively in a more concerned intonation as they approach the speed bump and then with a relieved intonation ("duuuuuuude") after they go over it without spilling their coffee, thanks ostensibly to the quality of the car's suspension system. In this case, each utterance means something different in space and time and intonation as the car gets closer to and then past the speed bump. If all language use is translingual, then, it is not a question of whether or not to allow translingualism, but how and to what extent to perform, acknowledge, and address it. Because it is subject to tion across temporal, spatial, and material boundaries, what recurs is never exactly the same; and this is where a translingual approach to genre becomes intriguing.
Recognizing agency and difference as always in play within recurrence
lenges us to rethink the way we understand agency in relation to genre. Genre
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needs to involve more than knowing the "grammar" of a genre. We need to extend
genre agency to include knowledge of strategic genre performances in space and
time, within asymmetrical relations of power. Anne Freadman, extending the work of J. L. Austin in speech act theory, refers to such situated and strategic genre
formances as "uptakes." "Uptake is the bidirectional relation that holds between"
genres ("Uptake" 40), Freadman writes. The keyword in Freadman's formulation is "holds," which offers uptake as a relational force or interplay that operates between genres and that accounts for the interconnections, translations, and movements of actions and meanings across genres. As "the local event of crossing a boundary" (43), uptake draws our attention not only to the relations between genres but also to how individuals move and translate across genres. In this sense, uptake can be understood both as a kind of transactional space as well as the effects or performances that result from this transaction. By "holding" genres together, uptakes enable meanings that are made possible from that set of relations, but they are also capable of disrupting
these relations. Freadman's major contribution to genre uptake is her claim that
uptake "selects, defines, or represents its object. . . . [Uptake] is first the taking of an object; it is not the causation of a response by an intention. This is the hidden dimension of the long, ramified, intertextual memory of uptake: the object is taken from a set of possibilities" (48). By selecting from a set of possibilities and not ers, the "holding" that uptakes perform can create a sense of seamlessness between genres that translate meanings and actions in generally unidirectional, well-worn paths, especially within regulated systems of genres that exist within institutional settings such as first-year writing courses, dominated by monolingualist ideologies. At the same time, as Freadman demonstrates, intergeneric uptakes, especially that occur outside of regulated or traditional boundaries, are less automatic and can be much more dynamic, unpredictable, and subject to transformations ("The Traps").
For me, the most interesting thing about uptakes is that they compel us to pay attention to the historical-material conditions and dynamics of agency and power that function between, hold together, and shape genre performances. While genres are typified kinds of action (socially recognizable, nameable phenomena that have
defined social functions), uptakes are the interplays between genres, the lines of movement and trans-actions , what Deleuze and Guattari call "volatile junctures"
(Massumi xiii). As Freadman recently put it:
No genre can do more than predict the kind of uptake that would make it happy, and no speaker or writer can completely secure an uptake. This is partly because no discursive event is a pure example of any genre, and partly because of the
able historical complexity of its moment and its ongoing action. We cannot . . . reflect productively on uptake outside of discussions of genre, nor is it productive to theorize
the action of genres without uptake. Genre is destabilized by uptake even as it asserts
Focusing on genre uptake performances, then, shifts our attention from genre
conventions to the interplays between genres - the complex performances that
take place between and around genres where agency is very much in constant play in relation to myriad forces and factors. Such a view of uptake puts it in timely conversation with scholarship in translingualism, which focuses on movements and translations across languages, modalities (see Shipka), and knowledge domains (see
Lorimer Leonard and Nowacek), as well as with recent ecological approaches to
translingualism (see, for example, Jordan 367).
Thinking about genre from a translingual perspective draws our attention to uptake as a research as well as a pedagogical site of transaction where memory, guage and other semiotic resources, genre knowledge, and meanings are translated and negotiated across genres, modalities, and contexts. Laura Gonzales's recent study, combining rhetorical genre studies, multimodality, and translingualism to examine L2 students' multimodal genre performances, can contribute to such an understanding of uptake in the way it reveals how the majority of L2 students in her study "exhibited
a nuanced understanding of multimodality [which Gonzales describes as "moving
purposely between languages, media, and contexts"] that could help instructors ther explore how to teach genres in less bounded ways" (np; see also Ray for a study
of genre uptake and new media composition). Multimodal composing processes in
Gonzales's study enabled students to engage in intergeneric uptakes that revealed their awareness "of how to leverage and layer . . . semiotic resources through their work, reflecting their extensive experience translanguaging" (np; for other studies of genre and translanguaging, see Gentil and Rounsaville).
Instead of thinking about how some uptakes involve more or less agency, a
translingual perspective invites us instead to think about the agency that is always already part of all genre uptakes, from the seemingly most creative to the most
conventional. This is because every genre uptake is taking place within certain
asymmetrical relations of power and material, economic, and historical conditions, within and across linguistic as well as spatial and temporal locations, to achieve cific goals (which may not necessarily be the ones conditioned by the genre in use), and subject to memory, emotion, an individual's sense of self, available discursive and linguistic resources, embodied dispositions, histories of engagement, and other agentive factors that genre pedagogies tend to overlook in their focus on genres as objects, artifacts, sites, and mediational tools. Paying attention to uptake allows us to examine translingual performances in this more complex way and to recognize the interlocking systems and forces at play in performances of genre.
We can make our genre pedagogies more responsive to this sense of uptake by examining and practicing genre performances: thinking about genres' uptake profiles (the range of possible iterations from prototypical to peripheral that a genre typically allows), considering the iterations and their affordances, paying attention to
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tion processes and their effects, and trying out various iterations/transformations within different contexts and goals. Inviting students to practice the iteration of a convention under different conditions and at different moments in space and time allows them to spend time within the uptakes - how and why genre users take up various conventions in various circumstances - and to identify and account for not only the relations and meanings that are secured by dominant uptakes, but also to pay attention to the uptakes that, in the words of Min-Zhan Lu, are "dismissed or trivialized" (613). And then to act on that knowledge in strategic ways, learning, for example, how to cue readers for encountering different, unexpected uptakes when these readers might not be prepared for, interested in, or tolerant of difference
and when uptakes are subject to power imbalances. Such strategic knowledge and
brokering of uptakes shifts the locus of agency from the genres themselves (which is often implied when explication of genres is the pedagogical goal and when genres are treated as sites of access) to their users, who are constantly having to negotiate genre uptakes across boundaries.
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