Genre and the ‘Social Turn’ in Genre Studies

This article considers how our understanding of genre has evolved and argues that, in late 20th century, we witnessed a ‘social turn’ in genre studies, the cornerstone of which was the publication of Carolyn Miller’s article ‘Genre as Social Action’ (Miller 1984). There has been a steady paradigm shift from considering genre as a passive tool of taxonomy towards understanding genre as an active notion in relation to social world. As Anis Bawarshi and Mary Reiff, put it in their introduction to Genre: an Introduction to History, Theory, Research, and Pedagogy: ‘Part of the confusion has to do with whether genres merely sort and classify the experiences, events, and actions they represent (and are therefore conceived of as labels or containers for meaning), or whether genres reflect, help shape, and even generate what they represent in culturally defined ways (and therefore play a critical role in meaning-making)’ (Bawarshi and Reiff 2010, 3). Theorizing genre in relation to the social is particularly helpful for our understanding of contemporary mass visual culture, many forms of which become increasingly participatory due to ‘new technology centred upon digital microprocessing and computer programming,’ as aptly noted by Andrew Darley (Darley 2000, 35). The visual is prominent in the discussion of genre in film, television and new media. In addition to the main trajectory, which is traced in this article — a shift from the text towards the social in terms of understanding genres—further three genre trajectories are identified. First, the study of genre has become a multidisciplinary field (Kress and Leeuwen 2001), having developed originally in literary studies (Duff 2000, 1-16). Second, moving from scholarly discourses, genre has penetrated the vernacular (Miller 2012); as a result, genres are being increasingly identified by user communities (Swales 1990; Berkenkotter and Huckin 1993). Third, from being considered as a stable and unchanging category (see Bakhtin’s discussion of ‘old genres’ as complete and stable in Bakhtin 2000), genre is increasingly theorized as unstable and ‘stabilized-enough’ (Schryer 1993; see also Tynyanov 2000, Devitt 2000). In addition, the article analyses some ongoing issues related to distinguishing genres from other categories, such as, media and modes and, in the end, genre hybridity is touched upon.