Genre Analysis: Deep Dive into Discourse Communities and Genres

Genre Analysis: Setting the Scene

• Genre analysis explores how distant ideas, even in adjacent departments, stem from preferred rhetorical and linguistic choices.

• This approach seeks insights from cultural anthropology to understand these choices.

Key Concepts: The Concept of Discourse Community

A Need for Clarification

• Definition's Appropriation: The term 'discourse community' has been primarily adopted by instructors and researchers with a 'Social View' of the writing process (Faigley, $1986$).

• Formative Influences (Relativist/Social Constructionist Thinkers):

  • Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric ($1969$)

  • Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions ($1970$)

  • Fish, Is There a Text in this Class? ($1980$)

  • Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge ($1972$) on 'discursive formations'

  • Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature ($1979$)

  • Geertz, Local Knowledge ($1983$)

  • Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations ($1958$), particularly his commentary on 'language games' ($3.5$)

• Herzberg's (1986) Initial Understanding:

  • Discourse operates within community-defined conventions (academic disciplines or social groups).

  • Language use is a form of social behavior.

  • Discourse maintains and extends the group's knowledge and initiates new members.

  • Discourse is epistemic or constitutive of the group's knowledge (Herzberg, $1986:1$).

• Critique of Herzberg's Ideas: These ideas are consequential of the assumption that discourse communities exist, not criterial for establishing or identifying them. They lead to questions like how a community initiates members, not how to recognize the community itself.

• Definitional Problems:

  • Herzberg (1986:1) concedes the idea is