Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Paul Heilker
The essay is an amateurs raid in a world of specialists . . . . a
private experiment carried out in public.
Scott Russell Sanders (660, 665)
I have no particular expertise in genre theory: this essay, then, is
an amateurs raid on the world of genre specialists; it is my private
thought experiment about genres being carried out in public. And
naturally, therefore, there is some trepidation involved. But let me try
to be clear about thisIm not afraid of being wrong or embarrassing
myself here. I do those things all the time. In very public ways. Being
wrong or embarrassing myself is not the issue. What I am afraid of is
that I may be right; Im afraid that genres may, in fact, be ways of being
in the world.
About 20 years ago when I was a PhD student, I heard Jim Corder
define rhetoric as a way of being in the world through language, through
invention, structure, and style: Out of an inventive world, he said,
[we are] always creating structures of meaning and generating a style,
a way of being in the world (151-52). This idea lay dormant in my head
for about 17 years, but now it threatens to consume me. I am not being
hyperbolic here.The implications of this concept are just now beginning
to impress themselves upon me, and they are everywhere, and they are
immense. If rhetoric is a way of being in the world through language,
then discourses are ways of being in the world through language,
through invention, structure, and style. And if discourses are ways of
being in the world through language, then their constituent genres are
ways of being in the world through language. And we arrive, again, at
my fear: I believe genres are ways of being, ways of emerging into the
world. I find this a challenging, disturbing thought.
In the time since I first talked publicly about genres as ways of being in September 2009, I have learnedno surprisethat I am not the
first person to voice this idea. In 1997, for instance, Charles Bazerman
contended that Genres are forms of life, ways of being (19). And in
2008, Deborah Deans likewise maintained that genres are not just forms
of social interaction but also ways of being (18), that genres . . . [are]
ways of being, rather than texts (23). But these assertions are about as
far as they went: that is, while Bazerman, Deans, Devitt, Bawarshi, and
numerous other scholars have done tremendous work explicating the
On Genres as Ways of Being - 19
social, rhetorical, dynamic, historical, cultural, situated, and ideological characteristics of genre (Deans 20), no one has really yet begun to
grapple with what I can only describe as the ontological implications of
genre. That is the task I will take up in this essay.
Let me begin by trying to come at this via some personal examples.
As mentioned above, the first time I publicly talked about genres as
ways of being was at the 2009 Spilman Symposium on the Teaching of
Writing at the Virginia Military Institute, where I was invited to speak
on the program with Chris Anson and Cindy Selfe. Long before I got to
Lexington, though, I knew that opening my mouth at the podium and
making this presentation was going to substantially and significantly
change me: I knew that my enactment of the particularand for me,
unprecedentedgenre in question, that of the invited plenary paper,
was going to fundamentally change how I was in the world. It was
quite obviously not going to be the typical conference or conference
presentation, where I was one of hundreds of speakers in hundreds of
sessions, where I could offer some slight addition to or variation on
my research to a tiny audience of my friends, where I could deviate
wildly from what I proposed to talk about, where I could throw the
paper together on the plane or the night before. Oh no. I knew since
the moment Christina McDonald graciously invited me to be a part of
the Spilman program that writing and presenting my paper was going
to call me up and out of my previous way of being in the world, that I
would need to be more than I was in order to complete this writing assignment, that I was going to have to be bigger and bolder and more
significant than I was used to being, than I liked to be, than I wanted
to be. The ancients called this the sublime, the experience of having
a discourse pull us up and out of our mundane ways of being in the
world and invite us, and challenge us, and compel us to rise toward
the realm of the gods, to become something new, something more.
So I felt compelled to attempt a high wire act, to let it all hang out, to
go hard or go home (as we used to say on my softball team), to crash
and burn if necessary, but to most definitely not play it safewhich
I didnt, as the next two personal examples, also from that talk, will
amply demonstrate, I hope. Being compelled in such ways is not all
bad, of course. Its called growth. But that doesnt mean it was easy.
My Spilman talk was not the first time this had happened to me,
either, not the first time that coming to inhabit a new genre had required significant changes in how I inhabit the world. The first time I
can remember this happening was high school graduation where, by
some strange turn of the cosmic wheel, I was somehow selected to be
the class speaker. I still dont know how this happened. I mean, I did
everything I could to not be noticed. Nonetheless, I had a commencement speech to write, an assignment in a new genre that both allowed
me and required me to adopt new ways of being in the world in order to
complete it, that both gave me an opportunity for growth and required
that growth from me.
This photo was taken just before I left for the graduation ceremony.
Because of the expectations of the genre of the commencement address,
this guy, this putz as we used to say on Long Island, was called up and
out of himself, up and out of the ways he was then in the world, and
emerged into the world in a new way. As a result, I philosophized, I
pontificated, and I exhorted my classmates about change, movement,
entropy, Americas place in the world, post-Vietnam cultural malaise,
personal responsibility, discipline and achievement, the nature of identity and discrimination, political apathy and agency. Again, this guy
had absolutely no business talking about any of those things, and yet
he did, fairly cogently, as it turned out.
Heres the last 40 seconds of that speech (as I said, I am not afraid
of embarrassing myself here):
It is true that we, as a nation, are slipping. But fortunately, it is
a new decade with a new wave. We all know that things can be
better, so why not let us, as the first class of the 80s, cast off the
apathy we have gathered about ourselves, our community, our
country, the world, and spearhead the rebuilding of our society as
a whole. Id like to leave you with a quotation appropriate of my
farewell wishes for success in all your endeavors. Its from a song
by Todd Rundgren, and its a good summary of my hopes for all
of us: World of tomorrow, life without sorrow, take it because its
yours. Thank you, good luck.
ties on me I wasnt ready for and resented, for instance, and I come to
inhabit comfortably the genre of the counseling session. But it doesnt
stop the disease. I am deeply, ecstatically immersed in the scholarly
discourses of rhetoric and composition for the first time, finding at
last the intellectual home I have always been looking for. But it doesnt
stop the disease. And Im in love. But it doesnt stop the disease. The
only thing that does stop the disease is the rhetoric of spirituality that
I learn around the tables of a 12-Step program.
I sit, miserably at first, and listen to people talking about God,
and honesty, and acceptance, and control, and selfishness, and fear;
I learn, very haltingly, to begin talking about change, and pain, and
growth, and healing, and faith the way that they speak of such things;
and I begin, quite reluctantly at first, to read and write the texts that
make me a member of this community. For instance, I am invited and
compelled to write in new genres like the 4th Step, a rigorously honest
inventory of those I have wronged and how I have done so, combined
with a probing analysis of the part I have played in how others have
wronged me. And I come, over time, to inhabit a new way of being in
the world through language. And this new rhetoric, this new form of
invention, structure, and style, this discourse and its constituent genres,
saves my life by fundamentally altering how I am in the world.
But what were the prerequisites required before this transformation
could take place? How did I have to be to even engage in these genres?
Well, I had to be sick and tired of being sick and tired, completely
beaten down, utterly defeated, hopeless, powerless, and coming up
pretty damn quick on deaths doorstep before I was willing to read
and write and dwell in these discourses. And I mean that literally: I
think we dwell in certain discourses, that we live there, that we inhabit
them. But I simply wasnt capable of learning this rhetoric, of reading
and writing and dwelling in these genres until I was truly desperate,
until I had literally nowhere else to go.
I come to a difficult question, then: If genres are ways of being
in the world through language, then what happens when we stop using
a genre? Do we lose that way of being in the world? My experience,
at least, strongly suggests that this may be the case. I have been sober
for a good chunk of time now, but it hasnt always gone swimmingly.
There have, unfortunately, been times when I have drifted away from
the rhetoric of spirituality that I learned around 12-Step tables, when
I have stopped reading and writing and using genres like the 4th Step.
And those unlucky enough to have crossed my path at such times can
attest that when I am not in the world through these discourses, when
I am not reading, writing, and dwelling in these genres, I am an absolute menace. When I am not dwelling in these genres, I get mentally,
On Genres as Ways of Being - 23
emotionally, and spiritually ill, and it doesnt take long. It only takes
a few weeks or maybe a couple of months of not being in the world
through these genres for the disease to take hold again and start running the show. Without exaggerating then, I think the use or failure to
use certain genres may well be a matter of life or death, for some of us
at least.
OK, enough about me. Let us come at this now from a rather different angle. Genres are human-created artifacts; they are technologies in
that sense. And like all technologies, they embody and enact ideologies,
values, ideas about what we should believe, what we should want, and
how we should be. Like any technology, genres both assume things
about and require things of their users. As a case in point, I submit for
your examination the common student desk.
And I submit to you that this cultural text, this technology, this genre
of furniture, if you will, makes a host of demands on its users, on how
we need to be, on how we need to be present in the world, in order
to use it. For the next section, as I ruminate about this rather concrete
example, I would like you to ask yourself this: To what extent do these
same conditions apply to the written genres we might assign to our
students? To what extent do the written genres we assign make the
same demands on our students?
24 - Writing on the Edge
OK, Ill stop. I could go on, but you get the picture. In sum, I submit that the written genres we ask students to use make very similar
assumptions about and demands on how their users must be.
Let us now take a look at an actual written genre and ask the same
questions. The genre I know best is the exploratory essay. I have been
thinking and writing about it for 20 years, but new and very different
and difficult things get illuminated when I start thinking about it as a
way of being in the world, as a way of emerging into the world. Michael
Hall argues that the exploratory essay arises in the late 1500s as both
a product of and response to the Renaissance idea of discovery (73).
But what does exploration really mean if we take it seriously? What
does exploration require of us? How do we have to be to explore and
to essay effectively? Well, we have to be willing to leave the known
behind, to give up control and safety, to sail off the edge of the map,
and perhaps not come back. We have to embrace uncertainty, to stand
naked and clueless in the face of new data and experiences, and to
foreground that uncertainty in our writing. In like manner, in writing
an essay, our acts of discovery are inward journeys as much as they are
outward expeditions. What would it mean to truly discover something
about yourself? And to then communicate that to an audience? What
would it require of us? It would mean acknowledging that we dont
know ourselves, that there are parts of us that remain mysterious, outside
our consciousness, outside our control. It would mean acknowledging
that there are parts of us that may be buriedand if we acknowledge
that anything is buried we face the possibility of hordes of things being
buried. It would mean facing the possibility that we have lost parts of
ourselves over the years, the possibility of getting parts of ourselves
back, parts we may not recognize or even like, parts we might have
wished had stayed lost or buried. I mean, these things were lost or
buried for a reason, right? It would mean recognizing and accepting
that our beings are not wholes, but rather fractured and discontinuous.
It would mean trying to reconcile various, perhaps contradictory parts
of our being, and it would require us to be both willing and able to do
so while lots of curious people are watching very, very closely.
Sanders says, The writing of an essay is like finding ones way
through a forest without being quite sure what game you are chasing,
what landmark you are seeking. You sniff down one path until some
heady smell tugs you in a new direction, and then off you go, dodging and circling . . . dodging and leaping, this movement in the mind
(662). In an essay, then, thought itself moves. Essays can be records
of how ones thoughts actually move when composing. So how do
we have to be to compose one of these things? And to then share the
results? How does the essay require us to emerge into the world? Well,
26 - Writing on the Edge
Like I said, Im pretty fond of this document. Its an arresting, stirring, optimistic statement about the power of writing, about the power
of genres, to build a better world.
Even so, this statement gives me pause. Let me try to explain why.
It has long been held as good practice in creating writing assignments
to analyze carefully what kinds of thinking will be required to fulfill
the assignment, what kinds of writing processes will be required, what
kinds of technology and tools and access will be required, and the like.
We have also long understood that rhetoric and writing are ideologicalthat different kinds of writing assume different epistemologies,
different fundamental understandings of the nature of truth, of the
relationships among reality, knowledge, and language. And we long
ago learned to discuss our writing assignments in terms of what the
students will do and be able to do as a result of completing them, that is,
we learned to talk about our writing assignments in terms of observable
and easily assessable behavioral objectives. But the CCCC statement
is calling us, I think, to move beyond the cognitive implications of our
writing instruction, beyond the procedural, and logistical, and ideological, and behavioral ones as well. I think we need to begin focusing
more on how our writing instruction, how the genres we assign, form
human beings rather than human doings, on how the genres we assign
call students into being in the world.
I began this essay by talking about the sublime, and I apologize
for the slippery spiritual language, but I dont yet know how else to try
to get at the issues involved, how else to get at how important I think
this is, how high I think the stakes are. I am beginning to think that
all genres we attempt, especially all new genres, may be sublime or at
least potentially sublime, that they may all have the potential to invite
us and require us and compel us to come up and out of our previous
ways of being in the world, to become something new, something more.
Thats not necessarily a bad thing, of course, but thats an additional
level of responsibility for writing teachers that I dont think we have
even begun to comprehend.
In conclusion, then, Ive done the easy work here by looking at
exaggerated genres like the invited plenary paper, the commencement
address, the texts of 12-Step programs, and the exploratory essay, each
of which magnifies the stakes involved and makes them easy to see.
Far more difficult work lies ahead as we think about less flashy and
histrionic genres, when we consider all those forms listed on the 4Cs
statement, for instance, when we consider the emotional, psychological,
existential, ontological prerequisites and transformations required by even
the most prosaic forms of prose we regularly assign. This is the crucial
work we all need to take up. There are simply too many genres for any
one person or even group of scholars to analyze in this way. The only
recourse is for individual writing instructors to begin wrestling with
these very difficult questions themselves. So when students take up your
writing assignments, the genres you assign, how do they need to be in
the world? This is not the same thing as asking what students need to be:
thats a question about sociological roles. And it is not the same thing
as asking who students must be: thats a question about the social construction of identity. When students take up your writing assignments,
the genres you assign, how do they need to be in the world? How does
the assigned genre require them to emerge into the world? How does
it require them to exist in the world? For instance, what psychological
states must they inhabit to complete the assignment? What emotions
does the assignment require them to embody and enact? Conversely,
what do they have to give up to write in a particular genre? How can
they no longer be? How does a genre you assign invite students to be
in the world? How does this genre dare them to be in the world? How
does this genre insist that they inhabit the world? And finally, what
happens when they stop writing in these genres you assign, when they
stop inhabiting these ways of being in the world?
Works Cited
Bazerman, Charles. The Life of Genre, the Life in the Classroom. Genre
and Writing: Issues, Arguments, Alternatives. Eds. Wendy Bishop and Hans
Ostrom. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/CookHeinemann, 1997. 19-36.
Bawarshi, Anis. Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place
of Invention in Composition. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2003.
Conference on College Composition and Communication. CCCC Statement on
the Multiple Uses of Writing. 19 November 2007. http://www.ncte.org/
cccc/resources/positions/multipleuseswriting 1 October 2010.
Corder, Jim W. A New Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Taken as a Version
of Modern Rhetoric. Pre/Text 5.3-4 (1984): 137169.
Dean, Deborah. Genre Theory: Teaching, Writing, and Being. Urbana, IL:
National Council of Teachers of English, 2008.
Devitt, Amy. Writing Genres. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 2004.
Free School-Desk Clipart. http://www.freeclipartnow.com/education/
school/school-desk.jpg.html 1 October 2010.
30 - Writing on the Edge
Hall, Michael L. The Emergence of the Essay and the Idea of Discovery.
Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre. Ed. Alexander J. Butrym. Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1989. 7391.
Huxley, Aldous. Preface. Collected Essays. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959. vix.
Montaigne, Michel Eyquemde. The Complete Works of Montaigne. Trans.
Donald M. Frame. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1957.
Sanders, Scott Russell. The Singular First Person. The Sewanee Review
96 (1988): 658672.
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