Bill Hart-Davidson
When reading Hart- Davidson’s excerpt Genres are Enacted by Writers and Readers, the first thing that came to mind when reading the title was, “ Genre takes the form of whatever we want it to be” or “Genre, hey! I know that term, it means the type of fictional or nonfictional work when I’m looking for a book!”.
Well, if you think about it, really think about it, the definition above is technically accurate…. If you’re talking about Genre in terms of literature, but in writing as Hart-Davidson states it’s the “stabilization of formal elements by recognizing genres as the visible effects of human action, routinized to the point of habit in specific cultural conditions.” Basically, it’s the habitual or instinctive response that we, as readers, have from personal experiences, that can influence and shape the reading or writing that we complete. Some examples similar to this would be the habitual response to focus on homework or current school work; these are repetitive and are reinforced in some way to shape writing and help discover the type of genre you want to write in or fit in.
Which brings me to my other thoughts, “Can a text or form of writing become a genre depending on the context?” and “ Can we take that context, from genre, and change it?” Well, to put it simply, yes. According to Hart-Davidson, who states “ [Genre] One is that no single text is a genre; it can only be an instance of that genre as it enters into contexts (activity systems) where it might be taken up as such an instance” it basically means that depending on the context that is needed from readers and users as they “play” with the text and express their needs by building off of prior knowledge or texts, which plays into my other thought on how that context can be changed over time. It’s similar to how a child grows throughout the different stages of development, as their needs change, they build off of previous experiences and learn from them to create new/ changed ones.
Neal Lerner
Lerner, in his excerpt, explores the details of how writing can act as a disciplinary form, depending on the discipline or context that it’s used. He stresses this using examples in the form of citations stating “ On the most visible level, citation practices vary by disciplines- and often within subdisciplines” meaning if a person is writing a paper or essay, the citation that you’re using depends on what that person, in particular is studying. It’s like saying that a student who’s studying to be a educator will reference multiple psychologist theories, like Piaget and Vygotsky into their paper, but won’t go into much explicit detail about it, unlike a student who’s studying psychology specifically, who will most likely cite everything known to a future psychologist. It just depends on the disciplines “values and practices” or specifics.
Which leads into how, over time, a discipline’s values and practices can evolve or become revived. Similar to how someone would “revive” their house or living room for a new refreshing start, a discipline would be revived by the members who “ shape, make distinct, and value its forms and practices of knowledge creation and communication” (Lerner 2.3). It’s building off a foundation. You start with the “histories of those genres” or the “old” stuff and gradually add in the “new” stuff or the “ values and practices” of that designated discipline. This also ties into how the boundaries around those disciplines can flex and become less “fixed and stable”. It allows for the fluidity and flexibility of these disciplines and genres to intertwine or mingle with each other, much like how psychology and education “mingle”.
Kevin Roozen
Playing on the previous words from above, words like Foundation, Old , and New all describe what Kevin Roozen expresses in his excerpt Texts Get Their Meaning from Other Texts, he explains this phenomenon by saying “ …the fact that whatever meaning a writer or reader makes of a particular text is not a result of their engagements with that particular text alone. Rather than existing as autonomous documents, texts always refer to other texts and rely heavily on those texts to make meaning”.
Now you might be wondering why I bolded the very end of that quote…. Well it’s because that part of the quote in particular, stuck out to me and also made me think back to the previous reading, Words Get Their Meanings From Other Words by Dylan B. Dryer, who explained that words get new meanings from other words, or older words and evolve over time, much like how Roozen refers to it in the quote above.
As newer texts, whether in forms of picture books, novels or even scholarly texts, come out they are always, if not mainly, built on that foundation from previous texts that came before them. That’s how they are eligible to change and evolve, whether you’re talking about language, as Dryer does or Texts, like Lerner does, they all evolve from some form of foundational base. It’s like trying to build a house on the dirt, it can work, but you really need that base or starting point to give it structure to grow.
Amy J. Devitt
In previous sections, I’ve mentioned the word flexible, as it relates to how genre in writing can evolve and change form depending on the members influence in a specific discipline. Which is what Devitt expands on in her excerpt Generalizing about Genre: New Conceptions of an Old Concept.
On page 574 of the excerpt Devitt states “It makes a genre a normalizing and static concept, a set of forms that constrain the individual; genuine writers can distinguish themselves only by breaking out of those generic constraints, by substituting an individual genius for society’s bonds” essentially, what she means is that in order for writers to, basically, break the status quo, they need to be able to differentiate themselves from basic generic constraints that society deems respectable. It’s similar to how a child at school wants to fit in by getting a hydro flask ( which was everything and anything that everyone was talking about) but the more they thought about getting that one thing, they broke the societal mold by not getting that water bottle, but getting something completely different than the status quo.
Devitt’s excerpt ties in similar themes that were mentioned in other excerpts such as Neal Lerner’s Writing is a Way of Enacting Disciplinarity and Bill Hart-Davidson’s Genres are Enacted by Writers and Readers, where they mentioned that, the influences that humans act on or build on can have a heavy influence on the genre of writing and within those specific genres there are ways that the genre itself can change outside of what Devitt says is the “societal bond”.
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