Genre, Kairos, and Ancestral Genres
“When a type of discourse or communicative action acquires a common name within a given context or community, that’s a good sign that it’s functioning as a genre…‘Genres are an intellectual scaffold on which community-based knowledge is constructed' ([Berkenkotter and Huckin]).”
“[W]e must see genre in relation to kairos, or socially perceived space-times…Kairos describes both the sense in which discourse is understood as fitting and timely – the way it observes both propriety and decorum – and the way in which it can seize on the unique opportunity of a fleeting moment to create new rhetorical situations.”
“We should not define a genre by its failed examples, even if they are a majority, but at the same time we must be open to the possibility that there may be multiple forms of success.”
“One important way to study the rhetorical innovation of a new genre, Jamieson argued, is to look for the ‘chromosomal imprint of ancestral genres…These ancestral genres should be considered part of the rhetorical situation to which the rhetor responds, constraining the perception and definition of the situation and its decorum for both the rhetor and the audience. And, within limits, by their incorporation into a response to a novel situation, ancestral genres help define the potentialities of the new genre: the subject-positions of the rhetor and audience(s), the nature of the recurrent exigence, the decorum (or ‘fittingness’ in Bitzer’s terms) of response.”
Subjectivity
“Subjectivity is not a transhistorical phenomenon, and its expression has no universal methods or conventions; rather, they are products of a time and place, formed in interaction with a kairos [Vivian]…[T]he self is a result of ‘operations’ by a subject ‘so as to transform [itself] in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality [Foucault] …Character is manifested in choice [Aristotle].”
Ecology
There are also a few connections to ecology in the vocabulary Miller and Shepherd use.
- “Our aim in this genre analysis is to explore the emergent culture of the early 21st century – as revealed by the self-organized communities that support blogging, the recurrent theoretical exigencies that arise there, and the rhetorical roles (or ‘subject positions’) they support and make possible” (emphasis added).
- “[G]enres are precisely the sites where change must be contained and controlled, where innovation must negotiate with decorum. As Berkotter and Hickin put it, genres ‘are always sites of contention between stability and change’” (emphasis added).
Blogs as Genre
- Kairos: Blogs as a genre arose in a time of mediated voyeurism – “the consumption of revealing images of and information about others’ apparently realized and unguarded lives, often yet not always for purpose of entertainment --, through a means of the mass media and the Internet” – and it reciprocal role of mediated exhibitionism (Calvert).
- Substance: non-fiction, links and commentary on links
- Form: reverse chronology, frequent updates, brief
- Pragmatic action: self-expression and community development
- Ancestral genres: “the diary, the clipping service, the broadside, the anthology, the commonplace book, the ship’s log”