Genrefication: Discourses Change, so to should Pedagogies

When I was writing my thesis on the torture porn sub horror genre, people would ask me “what about The Passion of the Christ? Does that count as torture porn?” My immediate response was always that while The Passion obviously involved graphic and prolonged sequences of visual torture, the film’s purpose and intentions did not align with the traditional motives of the horror genre. Then the person would generally follow up my response with this question, “Well, then what makes a horror movie a horror movie?” Genre theory is tricky. Certainly there are things that genre films, like the western or film noir films, always include. But there are also things that change in genre films. For instance, while the fact that horror films have almost always had a monster figure at the narrative center, the setting of the monster’s violent escapades have changed, especially in the last twenty five years, from isolated, gothic places to more suburban and even urban environments. Genre distinction and definition is illusive, squarely and ultimately not fixed. In other words, as Walter Kendrick has said, the process of “genrefication” is a process of some attributes sticking and a lot of attributes changing to better reflect the cultural milieu or sociohistorical moment.

But we’re not supposed to be talking about film theory or horror theory; we are supposed to be talking about discourse theory and composition pedagogy. But I think what Bizzell’s piece “The Intellectual Work of “Mixed” Forms of Academic Discourses” acknowledges is something very similar to the theory of cinematic genrefication described above. After having read a number of Bizzell’s older pieces on “hybrid” then “mixed” discourses in the academy, this piece seems to possess less polemical suggestion and a more honest diagnosis of academic discourse. However, in that honest diagnosis, Bizzell finds some support for her earlier radical pedagogical proposals. Last week in class and on the blogs we discusses a lot about “allowance”: who is allowed to use non-traditional academic discourse, how much mixed discourses should we allow students to use, how much mixed discourses should we be allowed to teach in the composition classroom, are we as young scholars allowed to use these discourse. While many of these questions seem(ed) impossible to adequately address, Bizzell, in this essay, at the very least approaches a simple answer to the fundamental underpinnings of those “allowance” questions: discourse (genre) is not fixed, it is always changing (1). Therefore, Bizzell continues, “’alternative’ discourses have always been knocking around the academy” (1). In other words, we don’t have to think of alternative discourse as new or revolutionary, but as already existent, as already a part of the discursive, or generic, process. Of course, there are pieces of academic discourse, just like with the horror genre, which remain as necessary, stable components, namely what Bizzell calls the intellectual work of the academy, but there are also parts of the discourse that change with time, rhetorical purpose and aim. It is not that we need to think about allowing students write in mixed discourses, because they, like others in the academy at large, already do and will. What we need to do is encourage and provide space for pedagogies that help students learn to use, what Bizzell says, “their own discursive resources to bear in the intellectual challenges of the academic disciplines” (9).

That student-centered approach is exactly what the second essay we read for this week discussed. Jacqueline Jones Royster, in “Academic Discourses or Small Boats on a Big Sea,” argues for a shift of focus in literacy pedagogy. Moving away from “traditional discourse” centered pedagogies, or pedagogies of “correctness,” Royster suggests that literacy instruction be a people-driven enterprise (26). Royster says that a people-centered literacy pedagogy helps people “forge connections between what they already know as language users and the more that is available to be known” (28). What Royster is talking about, in many ways, is facilitating the evolution of discourse (genre). In encouraging the use of personal language in combination with the learning of other linguistic, rhetorical, and informational tactics, Royster is describing a pedagogical technique that uses, as Bizzell described, the natural (and not in the organic or biological sense) change of discourse, in the classroom setting. Sorry, bad sentence. What I mean is, Royster describes a pedagogy that involves what Bizzell outlines as happening over time. Not sure that was any better than the other sentence. Sorry.

Despite my inability to really say what I am trying to say, these two pieces both are hopeful for and reassuring to students and teachers: Bizzell’s demystifying alternative discourse by detailing how those kinds of discourses are already being used in the academy is freeing for a student; Royster’s paradigmatic shift towards a people-centered literacy pedagogy is encouraging for a composition teacher. Ultimately, in both cases, the authors’ move away from questions of “allowance.” For me, that move is the most reassuring and hopeful thing of all.