Page 116 - Literacy in the New Media Age

7
MULTIMODALITY, MULTIMEDIA AND
GENRE

A multimodal view of genre

So far I have treated the category of genre more or less as though it were
obviously and naturally realised in language, either in speech or in writing. Much
of the work done over the last twenty or thirty years assumes that genres are
linguistic phenomena. Yes, film, or video and television, have been described by
using this category, and of course they consist of much more than ‘just’ language.
And literary texts have been described in genre-terms for a very long time. But in
the broad area of literacy the work that underpins the interest in genre treats it as
a purely linguistic phenomenon. This needs to be expanded a bit by saying that
the assumption that genre is a linguistic category does not really surface into
explicitness: it is simply there. Yet as so many of the text-objects in the
contemporary world – as my example of the small card in the previous chapter –
make use of modes other than speech or writing, or make use of many modes at
the same time, the question must arise of whether ‘genre’ is a category that
applies to texts or text-like objects realised in other modes, in image, gesture, 3D
representations, or in relation to multi-modally constituted texts. Is genre a
linguistic category first and foremost, or most plausibly? Or is it a category that
applies to all forms of representation and communication?
The problem which arises is that the theoretical categories developed to
understand and describe genre are linguistic categories, developed by linguistics
for linguistically realised objects. The question then is whether categories that
are specific to the modes of speech or writing, to texts which are (predominantly)
linguistic, can be apt, appropriate or useful for describing texts which are realised
in other modes. Does it matter if we use linguistic categories to describe visual
or three-dimensional texts? Can that which is realised in language – that is, the
kinds of meaning that I discussed in relation to written genres – be realised in
other modes, in image, for instance, or in combinations of image and writing?
Can the meanings of negation, overt and covert, that I discussed be realised other
than in speech or writing? Or, to turn it the other way around, are there social
meanings which can be realised in the mode of image but not in the mode of