Reading Response: May 16, 2012

David R. Russell: Rethinking genre and society: an activity theory analysis.

Since I don’t know much (anything) about activity theory, this article helped me understand it and relate it to genre. The first paragraph provided some words and concepts that I expect we will hear again soon: activity system, cultural motive, biological motive, object. It also introduced the concept of one activity system (the family) interacting with another activity system (the supermarket). The article also helped me consider genre as something that is operationalized because it works; in Russell’s case, a shopping list. If it doesn’t work, “then it does not become operationalized into a genre.” In hindsight, I should already know this because I frequently refer to the Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), a tool that museum curators and librarians use to establish terms for objects, from account books to armchairs to posters to videotapes. The terms from the AAT map to the Genre/Form field in a library catalog, but I had never given the language much thought. Now it is starting to make sense that a “membership list” can certainly be a genre and that it is the result of the actions of an activity system (though I’m not sure that’s the best way to state what I’m thinking).

Amy J. Devitt: Writing Genres, pages 1-12

“Genre has been redefined, then, from a classification created by critics to a classification that people make as they use symbols to get along in the world” (8). I probably last considered genre in a scholarly manner in 1992, when it was still largely the province of critics. The more current definitions seem a lot more interesting and a lot less constraining. And also a bit more egalitarian. If genres are determined by everyday usage, then they are open to everyone. It also makes any sort of classification highly subjective, as with Devitt’s example of a memorandum which could be classified as business correspondence, memoranda, internal correspondence or even (a bit of a stretch to my mind) as academic writing. As someone who appreciates consistency, this may take some getting used to. Archivists typically use the term “correspondence” to describe all manner of communication unless there is a significant quantity in which case correspondence might be broken down into memoranda, personal letters, business letters, email, etc. But… sometimes “letters” is used interchangeably with “correspondence”. Fortunately, most other people use the terms interchangeably as well. Problems only arise when they are used in the same alphabetical list so that someone might stop at correspondence, not realizing that there are also letters further down the list. The endless permutations of genre classification make me think that genre theorists have ensured themselves a certain amount of job security.