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Fig. 1.6: Some genres

Beside the conventionality of genres, these transposable patterns in meaning that configure similarity across context, there are also endemic patterns of differing. One pattern of differing is in the always unique redesign of meaning. Available designs, when reworked in a new context, always create (re)designs that are uniquely (re)configured, no matter how minutely, and context plays a big part in that reconfiguration. The world is repeated, but the world is also always new.

Then there is transgression. “The fact that a work ‘disobeys’ its genre does not make the latter nonexistent,” say Tzvetan Todorov and Richard Berrong. Indeed, to the contrary, “transgression, in order to exist as such, requires a law that will, of course, be transgressed. One could go further: the norm becomes visible – lives – only by its transgressions.”⁴⁸⁹

There are also hybrid crossovers and in-between genres. Text messaging is like speech, but not, and a distinctive genre in its own right. So are lectures and poetry, distinctive in their form for the way they capture aspects of the affordances of both text and speech.^§AS1.4.1

One measure of the existence of genre might be the discomfort of defying conventionality, sleeping in a kitchen or cooking in a bedroom, for instance. Sometimes the discomforts are warranted: running a marathon along a road instead of driving, or camping instead of staying in a hotel. Homeless sleeping in the doorway of an office building is not really a function of the genre of the office or its built form, nor is it like camping. In any event, discomfort is a helpful metaphor, the price of resisting fit-to-genre, with good reason, or not.

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⁴⁸⁴ Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, eds. 1993, The Powers of Literacy: Genre Approaches to Teaching Writing, London, UK: Falmer Press and Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, p. 2.

⁴⁸⁵ M.M. Bakhtin, 1952 [1986], “The Problem of Speech Genres,” pp. 60–102 in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, edited by C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press, p. 60.

⁴⁸⁶ M.A.K. Halliday and Ruqaiya Hasan, 1985, Language, Context, and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective, Geelong, Australia: Deakin University Press, p. 108.

⁴⁸⁷ Carolyn R. Miller, 1984, “Genre as Social Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70(2):151–67, p. 151.

⁴⁸⁸ John A. Bateman, 2016, “Methodological and Theoretical Issues in Multimodality,” pp. 36–74 in Handbuch Sprache Im Multimodalen Kontext, edited by N. Klug and H. Stöckl, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, p. 60; John A. Bateman, 2008, Multimodality and Genre: A Foundation for the Systematic Analysis of Multimodal Documents, London: Palgrave.

⁴⁸⁹ Tzvetan Todorov and Richard M. Berrong, 1976, “The Origin of Genres,” New Literary History 8(1):159–70, p. 160.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 181–183. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Genre §AS1.6