In a recent FYC class, I asked my students to spend a few minutes writing down as many genres of Movies, Music, and Dances they could think of. The categories were supplied by the students as well. While the masks we wore limited our responses somewhat, we settled on working with three examples within each category.
Movies: Comedy, Horror, Thriller.
Music: Pop/Hip-hop, Jazz, Country.
Dance: Ballet, Jazz, Square.
This was simply a way of setting the frame for how we understand genres with which we are familiar. I turned the conversation toward how genre guides our expectations as witnesses, and that authors, artists, etc..., work with these expectations. One category I have chosen to more or less avoid in the classroom is that "speech genre" about which Mikhail Bakhtin writes so convincingly in "The Problem of Speech Genres." I avoid this because I deem it well-beyond the scope and intent of a 1000-level introduction course, but I am beginning to reconsider my position.
Bakhtin writes of the chasm that not only separates but distinguishes "primary and secondary (ideological) genres" (62). Bakhtin makes an odd claim I initially overlooked. "Language," he says, "enters life through concrete utterances (which manifest language) and life enters language through concrete utterances as well" (63). Language, language utterance, and style are all related, yet Bakhtin claims that style is almost accidental, or, perhaps more obscurely, the probable ripples of water after a stone is tossed in that water. Style is an incredibly complex, some might even argue moral aspect of language (65).
Let's pause and turn to Frank Farmer's "Pictures at an Exhibition: Bakhtin, Composition, and the Problem of the Outside," from a 2001 collected volume Saying And Silence. Here, Farmer emphasizes the neglected element of Bakhtin's thought: "'outsidedness'" (95). Identity, in Bakhtinian thought, is not self-generated, but conferred. This no doubt has a certain prohibitive atmosphere about it in current parlance and contemporary foci on identity. Perhaps that is why "outsidedness" has been neglected, but I am wondering if "outsidedness" and "genre" don't hold some alimental elements for our composition classrooms. I wonder this—and in wondering, I am saying that, at the moment, I am inclined to believe with some sense of awe—because each individual in our classroom is a sui generis, rendering each semester and each section of each semester, a sui generis. To my mind, this demands that each classroom is "othered" both to each other and within each other, and that by applying a Bakhtinian genre of "outsidedness" to this unique, non-iterative collection of individuals, a particular ethic with particular purpose can emerge.
I want to be clear here because of our current verbiage that the act of othering is not in advocacy here; "outsidedness" is a state, but it is not a state of alienation but of invitation. Unfortunately, the latter of these can be declined, and that is a possibility we will eventually have to confront. Summarizing Bakhtin's point in Art and Answerability, Farmer writes "Take away our mutual outsidedness, and we will not mean anything to each other at all."
I taught and am continuing to teach Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard To Find," and we are spending many days investigating how important genre is to understanding the piece and to understanding how any other work of art functions. I didn't take a pole, but the students seemed eager to talk about the story, freed from the need to find a "hidden meaning" in symbols. They spoke of the characters as though they, the students, had been spoken to. I think the importance of genre, genre as style, needs a return to the composition classroom as a demonstration of "outsidedness," that it is the irrefutable you-are-not-me, I-am-not-thee as an invitation we ought to accept. I suspect at that table, there's quite a feast.
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