Page 129 - Literacy in the New Media Age

118 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

retina segment. It is a ‘display’, but for a viewer with power – the power of the
consumer in the market society.

Genre labels

These examples raise again something of a recurring problem: what do we call
such ‘mixed genres’? There is in any case the problem that there very few
commonly used labels for genres; only really prominent ones have well-
understood names – whether literary (the novel) or non-literary (the interview) or
texts of popular culture (romance, film noir). That problem is somewhat
compounded by the differences in theoretical practice – where genre can be used
as the naming of the text as a whole or, as in my approach here, as the naming of
an aspect of text. One of the solutions that has been adopted at times is that of
inventing subcategories. So we have ‘interview’ but also then ‘job-interview’,
‘media-interview’, ‘radio-interview’ and so on. In these three cases the
qualifying adjective names quite different things, a very good reason for
avoiding this strategy. But even if we kept the categories steady, using one
category, say ‘what medium?’ (radio, TV, newspaper and so on), we would end
up proliferating types, and end up with an unprincipled list.
My preferred solution is to accept, to begin with, that mixing is normal, in
whatever domain, and at whatever level. In writing we can have clauses
functioning as subjects of a sentence, taking a quasi-noun role. We can have single
words or two-word structures functioning as complete message units, taking a
quasi-sentence role, and indeed functioning as complete texts – as in ‘No’ or ‘No
Smoking’. Mixed genres exist in written text, though they have been somewhat
of a theoretical embarrassment. Mixed genres exist in multimodal, or mono-
modal, non-verbal texts. The question is, what do we call generically mixed texts
in writing? We have no problem accepting generically hugely mixed texts such
as the novel as a genre. No one disputes that ‘novel’ is a genre label. Or is it
perhaps a matter of the intensity and the degree of mixing? If all genres are
mixed genres – as I suggested earlier – what is a ‘genre’, a pure genre; how and
where would it occur; and how would we recognise it?
In my approach, where genre does not name the text, but an aspect of the
text’s organisation (though I am happy to name the whole text after its dominant
generic features – as in ‘interview’), there is no problem in saying that a text can
be and in many cases will be generically mixed. If we see this as a matter of
‘levels’ then there is no problem at all: we have genres and generic fragments
embedded in, forming a part of, the text overall. The real issue in any case is not
really to have labels, though they can be useful devices, and it is clear that bad
labels can be importantly misleading. The science teacher’s use of the label
‘diagram’ might be one case in point. But the real issue is to understand the
generic nature of the text – what meanings does the text realise, what social
meanings are at issue?