Genres in new economies of language
Ilana Gershon2021, International Journal of the Sociology of Language
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Abstract
This article suggests that one of the understudied and substantive ways in which actors produce and transform social hierarchies and classifications is by aligning and mis-aligning genres. Alignments within and across genres have furnished methods for construing and evaluating qualities of people-as examples , the genre repertoires of job applications or promotion dossiers. A fine attunement to new and emergent semiotic alignments via genres can also reveal how people are engaging with social and technological transformations. To study this, we advocate turning to four focal points: shifting genre hierarchies, stabilizing genres, cross-genre identities, and empty genres. In his essay on speech genres, Bakhtin (1986) noted that speech genres are "the drive belts from the history of society to the history of language" (65). For Bakhtin, certain genres came to define or "set the tone" of literary language more broadly, embedding norms and understandings about meaning, addressivity, and function that went largely unnoticed but were vital in shaping the production of language. Bakhtin introduced to linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics an orientation to situating sets of genres within ideological frames connected to and situated within history (see, among others, Bauman 1999; Bauman and Briggs 1990; Briggs 1993; Hanks 1987). In developing Bakhtin's ideas further, these scholars discussed how "the capacity of genre to create textual order, unity and boundedness" and, conversely, fragmentation and disorder that "can be invoked to varying degrees" dependent on one's participant role "is of profound interactive, ideological and political-economic significance" (Bauman and Briggs 1992: 156). Since the early 1990s, genre has fallen a bit out of fashion as an analytical tool to wield. In this piece, we suggest that there is much at stake in thinking with genres again to
