Amy J. Devitt could have ended her paper on page 580 where she writes “Genre, is truly, therefore, a maker of meaning”. As interesting as the writing piece was, for about 8 pages, Amy J. Devitt went on to mention recurring situations in almost every single page. In short, recurring situations is another intellectual fancy word for “Genre”. The point I am trying to make is that I understand the origins of how genre was formulized and that Aristotle’s theories made genre the discourse we have today. However, many of the concepts were repetitive and just formulated in a different sentence. For example, Devitt writes “Genre, thus, depends heavily on the intertextuality of discourse” (576). To my understanding this ultimately means that genre discourse is made up and influenced heavily by other genre’s/ ideas that already exist. I do concur that this reading was a lot easier to digest than our reading from last week. Devitt made many points that I agreed with, however I do think the paper could have been shorter. Anyways, I do agree with Devitt’s concern of genre being “deterministic”, meaning a lot of instances of genre are inevitable. Genre is dynamic and will adapt to the social changes whether its dealing with language or different social groups. But once again, it is situational. Just as texts get their meaning from other texts, genres also derive from each other. Genre’s as well as subgenres are literally a derivative of each other. Lastly, personally I do think reading and writing genres are the exact same. At the end the day, you’re writing something for someone else to read, and this person will only read it if it is assigned to them, or if it fits in a genre that they admire. I do believe genre is a very complex discourse, and that not many academics discuss it enough. However, I do believe if you’re trying to make this an important topic for students, maybe making a simple topic and having students be perplexed by it, is not such a good idea.
Complexities of Genre
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