Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
ple arguably take these genre differences for granted, forgetting that they are
social conventions (see
Box 3.1)
. Each genre has a history - it came into
being at a certain point in the past. It also has a geography - it emerged in
specific places, and then (in many cases) became adopted far more widely.
From this we can conclude that different genres of communication exist
because they serve certain (for now) socially recognised functions and meet
felt needs. But since the functions and needs did not exist fully formed
prior to the genres, we can also conclude that communicative genres help
to
construct, reproduce and sometimes alter the wider context they ostensibly exist
to serve
. Generalising, we might say that any given epistemic community
tends to be synonymous with one or other genre (or sub-genre) of com-
munication. We might say too that specific discourses, in the count noun
sense of the term, are partly genre defined in terms of their creation and
reception/consumption.
BOX 3.1
Genre is a slippery term but it designates something very definite.
The
Oxford English Dictionary
defines genre as 'a style, especially of art or
literature'. The word 'style' directs us less to the particular
content
of
any given act of communication, or primarily to its
medium or mode
(e.g. visual or verbal), but more to the
kind
of communication it is
intended to be. How is the content of any given communication organ-
ised (for instance, is it a continuous story narrated by a single speaker
or writer, or is it a debate between opposing viewpoints)? Accord-
ing to what rhetorical conventions and practices are different acts of
communication designed and disseminated? We are well familiar with
the two 'meta-genres' of 'realist' and 'fictional' communication, so too
the related (though not exactly synonymous) meta-genres of 'serious'
communication versus that geared towards 'entertainment'. I call these
'meta' genres because, within them, there are numerous recognised
sub-genres. For instance, popular science topics and daily news broad-
casts are intended to be 'realist' (i.e. the opposite of fiction), yet they
achieve this in rather different ways, stylistically speaking. Likewise,
superhero comic strips are fictional, but not in exactly the same way as
the topics and films of J. R. R. Tolkien's
Lord of the rings
. In all cases,
genre differences and sub-genre variations are the products of human
decision-making - in other words, the genres are not determined by
the content they seek to communicate.
