WRIT 2003 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Linguistic Prescription, Specific Performance
16 Nov 2017
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In her 1984 article, carolyn miller, defined genre as typified social action associated with a recurrent situation : classification and form. This view is largely ignored by contemporary artists. If we treat genre as form, we separate it from content (whereas it should be content and form) This ignores the writer and the writing process (both are important in creating meaning in a text) As bakhtin writes: form and content in discourse are one : genre as classification system. Genre classifications are not static but rather fluid and are constantly changing. We know from the cognitive research that without even being conscious of it all, people recognize genre as they use language. Thus in their everyday lives people classify all textual actions under common labels which, unbeknown to them, scholars call genres". The more complex a society, the more genres it has.
