Genre Time/Space: Chronotopic Strategies in the Experimental Article

Abstract

Classical rhetoricians realized, through their identification of three discourse types, that text types or genres had differing orientations to time. Forensic discourse reviews past actions (What actually happened in the White House?); epideictic oratory celebrates or vilifies people or events in the present (Is the President still an effective administrator?); and deliberative discourse explores future decisions (Should the President be impeached?). This all-encompassing division of discourse into three types no longer, of course, suits the complexity of discourse types characteristic of modern disciplines or organizations. An engineering report, for example, typically reviews past problems and then proceeds to provide a range of future solutions. However, some recent reading in literary and social theory and some speculation on the experimental article and the powerful, hegemonic role that it plays in fields as diverse as medicine, education, physics, and social work suggests that the classical rhetoricians were insightful. Some text types that we call genres have definite orientations to time and space that we, as rhetoricians, need to attend to as these orientations clearly reveal strategies of power at work within discourse. In previous work I defined genre as Stabilized-for-now or stabilized enough sites of social and ideological action(Schryer 1993; 1994).1 In this definition I attempted to fuse Bakhtin's insight that genres are sites of both centrifugal and centripetal actions together with Carolyn Miller's insight that genres perform the work of organizations. This definition also reflected my understanding at that time that certain text-types or genres have simultaneously diachronic and synchronic relations. Genres have complex sets of relations with past and present text-types: genres come from somewhere and are transforming into something else. Genres, because they exist prior to their users, shape their operators; yet their users and their discourse communities constantly remake and reshape them. In this paper, I would like to extend this definition of genre to issues related to power. I suggest that when we interrogate a genre's relationship to power we need to explore its relationship to time, not just in terms of its relationship to the past, present, or future (as in the classical genres of forensic, epideictic or

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 49 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.