Page 103 - Literacy in the New Media Age

92 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

times wide theoretical differences among those who use this category.
And indeed it has to be said that this is so with other proponents of the idea of
genre, the work of scholars from North America such as Miller, Swales,
Bazerman, Freedman, Medway; scholars such as Bhatia and Hyland working in
Hong Kong; Ongstad, Berge in Norway, and others elsewhere. In my account I
am not concerned to give a survey; I am more concerned with sketching out
principles of approach in which I will foreground my own.
Let me construct one other example to illustrate the range of views within the
‘Australian school’. Let us say that the interview which I talked about in the
preceding section was an interview with a politician, on television, and that it is
just one part of a programme devoted to, say, youth unemployment. However, in
an English lesson it is the programme as a whole, the whole text of the
programme, that I might be interested in. The interview is merely one part of it.
The text as a whole consists of genres of several kinds – there might be a panel
discussion, a bit of documentary film of unemployed young people somewhere
in the city, some vox pop. The text overall consists of segments which are
generically distinct, but which together make up this text. Therefore we can say
that ‘genre’ and ‘text’ are not the same thing; on the one hand, the latter includes
the former, the former is an aspect of textual organisation; on the other hand,
they are categories of different kinds. Text is the category which refers to the
material aspects of language, the tangible phenomenon; genre refers to aspects of
the organisation of the text, an intangible phenomenon. The two are not
coextensive with each other. However, it needs to be added, there is no text or
textual element that is not generically formed. Here is one point of theoretical
difference: for some theorists text and genre are identical; for others, myself
included, they are not.
I might be watching TV the next night and be surprised that the programme I
am watching has pretty well the same structure as the one that I saw the previous
evening. Tonight the topic is ‘Drugs in the Inner City’. Again it has the interview
with the politician, the panel discussion and so on. Generically the programme/
text has stayed recognisably the same, yet in terms of its issues of concern –
what it is about – it is different. The one was about unemployment, this is about
drugs. This makes it clear that there is more to the make-up of text than generic
organisation alone. This text is different in discourse from that of the evening
before, even though generically it has stayed the same. Genre stays constant
across these two texts, but the issues vary. In this lies another point of theoretical
difference. For some theorists text is not fully explicable or describable through
the category of genre alone; for others genre subsumes all there is to say about
text – the two are coextensive.

Genre as sequence: temporality
One of the best known definitions of genre is that of Jim Martin (1993): ‘Genres
are staged, goal-oriented social processes which integrate field mode and tenor