Main Point
Freadman uses the metaphor of a tennis game to correspond with genre, specifically, and via a convoluted route, to make the point that
"Knowing a genre is also knowing how to take it up: the manners are reciprocal ... learning to write is learning to appropriate and occupy a place in relation to other texts, learning to ensure that the other chap will paly the appropriate game with you, and learning to secure a successful uptake: the rules for playing, the rules of play, and the tricks of the trade." (64)
Reasoning
Freadman suggests that genre is a game; the players in the game are texts in dialogue with one another. Much as "shots" in a game, the structure of and response to each text is dependent on the context and intended purpose (goal). Just as players are defined by their role in a game, texts are defined (and understood) by the role (conextual situation) indicated by the genre in which they are written. Freadman uses examples of manuals, menus, doctor prescriptions, doctor referrals, briefs, public transport tickets, columns and more to demostrate how the same factual information will be expressed differently depending both on the genre in which it is written and the social rules understood by the recipient/audience.
What's cool
Well, I guess what I found coolest was the way Freadman explains genre on p.60. After mixing metaphors (after comparison to a tennis match, she moved on to comparisons with game theory, recipes, markets, and generally mucking about in the topic, she draws the conclusion that defining genre necessitates defining not just the structure of the text itself, but the context in which it occurs:
"The variety of liminal and closing texts, their arrangement, and their formal features, have a great deal to do with the business of setting the genre of the text they enclose ... The notion that our texts arise within ceremonials, and that their form is determined by their ceremonial place and function, can be restated to say that the ceremonial frames time and space, setting it apart from others, and marking its specificity. The distinction I made earlier, between 'a game and the playing of that game', can also be made between a piece of music and its performance, and a play and its performance. The performance in either case is not restricted to the players: it includes the constitution of the audience, their assembly in particualr time and place, and the rituals whereby that assembly marks the audience as audience, rather than as a collection of discrete units, setting them in position to make the playing possible." (60)
While this doesn't strike me as a big breakthrough per se, I enjoy the perspective - comparison of textual communication to a performed art inspires heightened awareness of the depth and texture that writing possesses, but which we rarely appreciate because we don't experience it as immediately interactive in real-time.
Also, its comforting to once again find myself wading hip-deep in the repetition of themes, obscenely extended explanations, and generally exhaustive dissections of every possible tangent a topic can possibly take, which is otherwise recognisable as the genre of "rhetoric theory texts."
Extending conversation
As I was reading this selection, I had in mind a reading from this morning - Gopen and Swan's The Science of Scientific Writing, which is also very much concerned with context. However, Gopen and Swan focus on techniques in the text, employed by the writer, to faciliate both clear conveyance of the intended message AND clear reception and comprehension of that message by readers. By clarifying and honing structure, positioning, and linking, we can work with the presentation expectations of the audience to successfully communicate the intended message.
Of course, Freadman is viewing from a more macro perspective, at the overall context of the texts and the greater social dialogue in which they occur. I find it helpful to analyse and investigate with both lenses to better understand both the greater context in chich we write and the specific methods by which we improve odds of reaching our audience.
From Gopen & Swan:
"We cannot succeed in making even a single sentence mean one and only one thing; we can only increase the odds that a large majority of readers will tend to interpret our discourse according to our intentions."
While it's true that literature is interpreted in vastly different ways, it's my experience taking creative writing courses that as a writer of literature the objective is to communicate one's intended meaning. I appreciate the Gopen & Swain comment.
ReplyDeleteRight, and the success of that communication depends on the dynamics of the interaction of reader/audience, textual format, and clarity of writing by author. The clarity and format of the writing by the author interacts within the context of the genre AND within the context of the audience composition (reader, reader's expereince, reader's knowledge, reader's situation).
ReplyDeleteI found the tennis metaphor helpful in imagining the motion writing takes. I like what she says on p.59: "meaning is not content, it is place and function" (though I think it should say meaning is not JUST content...). The tennis game takes place on a court, in a very distinctive setting, which I think works well to show how the "game" of writing has a location, which also implies a movement and makes it a vehicle.
ReplyDeleteChuck already sorta mentioned this in his post, but since I had already typed it before I read his, I'm posting mine anyway.
ReplyDeleteFrye’s attempt to systematize literary criticism so that those who do it and read are aware of its conventions contrasts with Freadman’s metaphor of genres. Frye proposes a literary criticism taxonomy of sorts, and for Freadman, Frye’s scheme would seem extremely reductive and acontexual. I realize Frye and Freadman seem to be getting at different things—Frye at a novel way of literary criticism and Freadman at a theory of genre---but if the two were to discuss the genre of literary criticism, Freadman would move beyond mere systemization or conventions of literary criticism and look at the context in which a the criticism is produced and consumed. Even though what Frye did was revolutionary of the time, he seems to me to replace one restrictive paradigm (structuralism) with another (archetypes). Freadman claims that learning to successfully use a genre, goes beyond merely learning its rules or conventions (or learning to apply Frye’s taxonomy). She rebuts the notion that genres are merely forms that people pour information into. Instead, she argues that learning a genre’s conventions is the starting point—a gathering of tools for one’s tool box, learning the rules of tennis. However, to successfully participate in a genre, one must learn appropriate instances and contexts in which to deploy the various available means associated with the genre. One must be able to adapt strategies to the rhetorical situation.
I realize that another reason Freadman's piece appeals to me is because here the author is not only alive, but she is playing tennis. Freadman's metaphor, in all its shining simplicity, speaks to the human dimension of writing. Writers gain insights about the rules of genre and about their speech communities largely by being in the game, and since no one begins an expert, practitioners, being human, must inevitably break the rules as they gain knowledge and skill. The imagery of tennis illustrates the volleying in which writers of all genres engage while learning a new genre or expanding the boundaries of the genres one already practices.
ReplyDelete