Week 1: Classification, Mystification, and Revelation; or, Too Many "Tions" for One Post

                Since class on Tuesday I have realized the inadequacy of my performance on the trace assignment (and not just because Jason and I chose to make a map…). I use the word inadequate because through my own short-sightedness I became lost in the details and failed to see how Dr. Graban’s questions related to some of the larger questions that I should have been asking myself; I became what I both dislike and admire in Quintilian and Aristotle: a classifier. Worse, I became a classifier without a purpose.

                The overarching questions that I should have been asking are, “What is ‘genre’? And what do Quintilian and Aristotle express (explicitly or implicitly) about this topic?” These questions seem obviously implied by the more specific questions that I was assigned to address, but they are what I neglected to keep at the forefront in my trace, and they are what I wish to examine in this brief space.

Prior to beginning this trace I had a notion of genre as categories of writing (often difficult to clearly define) that have been named because they may share similar purposes, audiences, and a number of formal characteristics. Obviously, not a very precise definition (and sorry, I won’t be offering a better one in this post – just complications). I believe Dr. Graban gave me this topic because I mentioned in the first class that I was beginning to be interested in bringing questions of genre into the first year composition classroom. The extent of my “interest” envisioned class discussions and perhaps more extensive analyses about some of the genre features of the genres that the students would be writing for my class. In addition to articulating these genre features (such as style, tone, grammar, vocabulary, syntax, structure/organization, appropriate and sufficient evidence/information, etc.), I would have students consider how and why they might chose to ignore and/or subvert these genre features in their writing. And that’s about as deep as my consideration of genre went.

Enter in Aristotle and Quintilian, who do not actually use the term genre (which I was informed in the grad lounge was not part of Western vocabulary until the Enlightenment), but rather dispositio, elocutio, and pronuntiatio (roughly, arrangement, style, and delivery), which correspond approximately with my partial list of genre features. So, Aristotle and Quintilian don’t talk about “genre” as an abstract concept to be defined, but they do mention the names of certain genres, and spend quite a bit of time classifying, describing, and prescribing various genre features. So that’s that. But…

Quintilian says “it has always been customary with me, to bind myself as little as possible to rules” (Book II, Chapter XIII, Section 14), and “rules must generally be altered to suit the nature of each individual case, the time, the occasion, and necessity itself; consequently, one great quality in an orator is discretion” (Book II, Chapter XIII, Section 2). These passages, taken in conjunction with the idea that Aristotle’s prescriptions/descriptions are based on probability, not definitive truth (as discussed in class), then it seems that Quintilian and Aristotle’s treatment of genre is much less rigid than some of their other statements makes it appear. Each example of a “genre” is never going to fit perfectly with the genre’s criteria – each rhetorical act is its own genre despite the numerous similarities it shares (to varying extents) with other rhetorical acts.

To go even further, I would like to draw from Jennifer’s post, regarding her quote of Aristotle which says that an argument begins with “notions possessed by everybody” (180). She uses this quote and others to explore the idea that to create meaning, it is not enough to simply state new ideas; for the new ideas to have meaning for the audience, they must be persuaded of the new idea via knowledge they already possess (and forgive me Jennifer if I am butchering your post). To add to this, I posit that perhaps writers (and their various cognates), are most successful in creating new meaning when they are able to purposefully appropriate genres “possessed by everybody” and use them to build new genres to “suit the nature of each individual case,” as Quintilian might say. I don’t seem to have gone very far from my original conception of “learn genre features, then challenge them,” but I like the idea that genre is more intimately connected to creating new meaning than I had originally supposed; it is more than a method of categorization.