Genre and the Invention of the Writer

Bawarshi, Anis. Genre and the Invention of the Writer. Logan: Utah State Press, 2003.

It has been my contention that when writer's reflect between drafts that the predominant thing that they do is “negotiate their rhetorical stance.”  Bawarshi's book is a significant support for this theory. She looks to Richard Young, Alton Becker and Kenneth Pike's assertion in Rhetoric: Discovery and Change (1970) that “invention involves a process of orientation rather than origination” (6). For Bawarshi, genre's represent one of the most (if not the most) important factors writers consider as they examine a rhetorical situation and write. 

Bawarshi's book reads as if it had been a dissertation. It has a beautiful laser-like focus on an idea that gets repeated over and over again as that idea is considered in multiple ways. To her credit and to the credit of her main idea, she never gets old or uninteresting in her discussion of this idea.  Her basic assertion is this: “Writers invent within genres and are themselves invented by genres” (7). But what is a genre, in her view?  She builds from Carolyn Miller's notion that genre's are not predominantly forms but are typified rhetorical ways of acting in recurring situations.  Bawarshi would give a large degree of agency to genre's themselves.  She looks to Pierre Bourdieu's notion of “habitus” as a parallel definition for genre's.  “Habitus” for Bourdieu are “structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures” (qtd. in Bawarshi 8). As such, genre's function as a kind of “topoi” plus: “Like habitus, genre both organizes and generates the conditions of social and rhetorical production” (8). It isn't that genre's structure and to a degree determine rhetorical action alone; genre's also have an epistemological or ideological component. Using the notion of the “rhetorical ecosystem,” Bawarshi argues that “genre's maintain rhetorical conditions that sustain certain ... ways of discursively and materially organizing, knowing, experiencing, acting, and relating in the world.”  Bawarshi interestingly moves in the same direction as Louise Cowans in her essay “Epic as Cosmopoesis”  

(http://lonestar.texas.net/~mseifert/epiccosmos.html) where Cowan asserts that genres present an ontological position, a kind of way of being that each form of literature presents to the reader. We recognize a genre, she says, not so much by its form, but by this ontological position.  Bawarshi's point is that genres are “discursive and ideological conditions that writer's have to position themselves within and interpret in order to write” (170).  As ideological structures they generate a particular knowledge, world view, motive to act or desire, as well as particular kind of articulation: “Genres are places of articulation. They are ideological configurations that are realized in their articulation, as they are used by writers (and readers). Genres also place writers in positions of articulation” (9). Cutting to the chase, we can use Bawarshi's own ending to summarize her main thesis: “By encouraging student writer's to recognize beginnings as genred positions of articulation, and by teaching students how to inquire into these positions, we enable them to locate themselves more critically and effectively as writers within those beginnings” (170).  What a beautiful quote! I would agree with everything she says here.

Let me add to her thinking my own thoughts related to reflection. If invention is a form of orienting and positioning (as well as being oriented and positioned by the genre), we would both agree that this dialectic process of invention doesn't just happen within pre-writing but is an on-going dynamic that occurs throughout the activity of writing.  As teachers, then, how do we “teach students how to inquire into these positions” and “enable them to locate themselves more critically and effectively as writers” within these genres? Of course, we would do multiple things like the heuristic exploring of a genre that she includes at the end of the book. We would model a critical examination of a genre. We would make considerations of genre part of the language of our course. In peer response we would ask students to consider notions related to genre in students' examination of each others' writing.  But if this orienting and locating is as she repeatedly discusses, a form of negotiation (similar to Flower's construction of negotiated meaning), then where and when does this negotiating happen.  Bawarshi answers this question, in part, herself: “The rhetorical art of adaptation or repositioning should become central to our teaching of writing, especially our teaching of invention, which would then become the art of analyzing genres and positioning oneself within them” (156). By highlighting adapting and repositioning” as the essence of the rhetorical art (finding the available means, but more), she is touching on the ancient notion of to prepon, appropriateness, as well as decorum.  

But where and how to we encourage this “adaptation and repositioning?”  Surely all this positioning doesn't just happen at the beginning of writing, but must be encouraged throughout the activity of writing. It is my belief that reflection is one powerful way that teachers in a structured and prompted way can encourage students (novice) writers to “adapt and reposition”--to invent their rhetorical practice as they negotiate their rhetorical stance.  Where we as teachers can help these student writer's become more adept at this negotiation and positioning until it becomes a tacit skill in their own rhetorical practice. Where Bawarshi and I might diverge is the degree to which she considers that genre dominates this rhetorical stance. Perhaps she is right, but I think the writer is also negotiating a whole host of complex considerations that might fall outside the world of genre including the task, their self-image, their knowledge, their audience, the text they have on the page vs what they intend. Bawarshi argues for a BIG GENRE (like Big Rhetoric) such that everything folds into the world of genre—everything is a genre—so from her perspective she may be right.  

Below will follow a number of snippets or jewels from her text.  

“I am interested in the synchronic relationship between genres and writers, especially the ways this relationship gets enacted during the scene of invention, where genre knowledge becomes a form of what Berkenkotter and Huckin call 'situated cognition'” (10). 

“Genres themselves take place within what Bakhtin calls larger 'spheres of culture' (1986), what Freadman calls 'ceremonials' (1988), and what Russell, borrowing from activity theory, calls 'activity systems' (1997). Within these larger spheres of language and activity, writers negotiate multiple, sometimes conflicting genres, relations, and subjectivities” (11). 

“We cannot, I argue, full understand or answer the question 'what do writers do when they write?' without understanding and answering the question 'what happens to writers when they write?'” (13).

production of the text – production of the writer

A Burkian definition of genre: “Genres are discursive sites that coordinate the acquisition and production of motives by maintaining specific relations between scene, act, agent, agency, and purpose” (17). 

“genres are not only typified rhetorical responses to recurrent situations; they also help shape and maintain the ways we rhetorically know and act within these situations. In other words, as individuals' rhetorical responses to recurrent situations become typified as genres, the genres in turn help structure the way individuals conceptualize and experience these situations, predicting their notions of what constitutes appropriate and possible responses and actions. That is why genres are both functional and epistemological—they help us function within particular situations at the same time as they help shape the way we come to know and organize these situations. ... To argue that genres help reproduce the very recurring situations to which they respond (Devitt 1993) is to identify them as constitutive rather than as merely regulative” (24).

“It is the genred positions, commitments, and relations that writers assume, enact, and sometimes resist within certain situations that most interest me. In particular, I am interested in the way these positions, commitments, and relations inform the choices writers make during the scene of invention” (45)

---and I would add “during the scene of reflection”

“We can learn a great deal about how and why writers invent by analyzing how writers get positioned within genred sites of action” (48).

“By focusing mainly on the writer as the agent of his or her cognitive processes, the writing process movement has provided only a partial view of invention. While the writer is certainly an agent of writing, to locate him or her as the prime agent of writing is to ignore the agency that is already at work on the writer as he or she makes decisions, shapes meaning, and reformulates it” (68).

“Following Ernst Cassirer, LeFevre argues that language does not mirror or copy an external reality; it helps constitute that reality” (70).

“Le Fevre calls for a continued inquiry into 'the ecology of invention--the ways ideas arise and are nurtured or hindered by interactions with social context and culture'” (71).

“it is perhaps more accurate to say that invention does not so much begin in the writer or even in some abstract social collective as it begins when a writer locates himself or herself within the discursive and ideological formation of a genre and its system of related genres” (72). 

“Each textual instantiation of a genre is a result of a unique negotiation between the agency of a writer and the agency of a genre's conditions of production. ... It is within the discursive and ideological space of genre—which I will later describe as the intersection between a writer's intentions and the genre's social motives—where agency resides” (79).

“Every time a writer writes within a genre, he or she in effect acquires, interprets, and to some extent transforms the desires that motivate it. As such, every articulation necessarily involves an interpretation” (91).

This quote about says it all:

“invention does not involve an introspective turn so much as it involves the process by which individuals locate themselves within and devise ways of rhetorically acting in various situations. In this way, invention is a process that is inseparable from genre since genre coordinates both how individuals recognize a situation as requiring certain actions and how they rhetorically act within it. Genres, thus, are localized, textured sites of invention, the situated topoi in which communicants locate themselves conceptually before and rhetorically as they communicate” (114).

“The primary goal of such a FYW course would be to teach students how to locate themselves and their activities meaningfully and critically within these genred positions of articulation. ...It is in the ability to teach students how to locate and invent themselves rhetorically within various sites of action (a rhetorical, metacognitive literacy)--an ability to heighten awareness of disciplinarity and rhetoric—that the future of FYW is most promising and justified” (154).