Page 99 - Literacy in the New Media Age

88 LITERACY IN THE NEW MEDIA AGE

The genre debates
One of the ironies of the still current debate around genre – in the UK it has now
made its furtive appearance in the National Literacy Strategy – is that the
category re-emerged into theoretical prominence, and in particular as ‘stable
type’, just at the time when its social life had become precarious, when the
‘security’ of the category had come very much into crisis, towards the end of the
1970s.
Genre – the term means, simply, ‘kind’ – has a history as long as the western
literary tradition. Aristotle used the term to distinguish major literary forms. In
more recent history it has come, by and large, to be used to name ‘established’
literary forms – the novel, the sonnet, the epic, the tragedy – in a somewhat
timeless fashion, as forms which existed out of history. Since the mid-1960s, a
rapidly increasing academic interest in popular culture – film, popular print
fiction (Radway, 1987), music and so on – has led to the use of the category as a
device for classifying the many objects of popular culture. Here it has come to
take on meanings of ‘heavily stereotypical form’. The distinguishing feature of
such texts was seen to be their strict adherence to convention rather than any
disposition or potential to variability, unconventionality or ‘creativity’. In this
context ‘genre-fiction’ or ‘genre-writing’ had come to be used as a marker to
distinguish between texts of high culture (not stereotyped; not, in that sense,
‘generic’) and popular or low culture. By extension that became a means of
distinguishing between kinds of reader, namely those who seek predictability,
repeatability, and those who look for the new, the unconventional, the
unpredictable.
Needless to say, these are classifications made from the ‘outside’, judgements
made by those who inhabit high culture. The users of ‘genre-fiction’ are fully
aware of nuanced variation, and assign precise valuations to these. Nevertheless,
this external – and disdainful – valuation is important to bear in mind in relation
to the debate which developed around the introduction and use of the term genre
in (literacy) education.
From the early 1980s the concept of genre began to be used in educational
contexts in Australia. The argument in Australia went broadly like this: if there
was a predictability and recognisability of text-forms, then these were important
facts about writing, and competence in writing, and it was knowledge that should
be made available explicitly for all learners in school. This was both a political
and a pedagogical move. On the political side it seemed clear that access and equity
depended on this knowledge and the possibilities of its use. On the pedagogical
side the idea seemed incontestable that writing could be taught better if the
characteristics of textual forms were understood, described and therefore
available for explicit teaching. More than that, it was clear that an explicit
curriculum was the essential prerequisite and underpinning of an equitable
curriculum. In a culturally and linguistically plural society it could not be
assumed that all children would come to school with the same