To be honest with y'all, I had a harder time making sense of this article than the last one on genre, which ended up being thrown out after I'd already dedicated a few hours to understanding it.
What I'm taking away from this is an image of genre being sort of exploratory, and those who use it effectively as being willing to take part in that exploration. Getting stuck in viewing genre as static and unchanging means being relatively inefficient as a writer.
The idea of a "genre crosser" resonates with me mostly in creative writing. In creative nonfiction, I tend to combine genres into a piece that's sort of a smattering, but I think it works artistically a lot of the time. I'll put together personal narrative, research and some poetic tactics (line breaks, segmenting, disregard for grammatical conventions, etc.) to form a piece that transcends any individual genre.
Being able to do that rhetorically, though, seems to come less naturally. I already tend to view rhetoric as an art form as well as a science, but if I can lean into the artistic side of it more, then I guess I'll have an easier time using genre effectively. I ventured such a thing in the creation of my radio essay, and I had a great time doing it - it was super eye opening, as I've said in my various essays and reflections on the topic. That's going to have to be the concrete example of genre-bending that helps keep me grounded through all this highbrow abstract reading on genre theory.
Hi Elise, thanks for your post. I like your description of how you view your own writing style. You seem to identify in a way that you see where you've crossed genre lines before an how you still do. I think some of the re-genres in the class are more extreme than others on the scale of how far they differ from the original piece. I love that you discuss rhetoric as an art form and a science. It is definitely both, and It is one of the truths about good writing that keeps helping me up to keep trying again when I fall, becuase someday I'll be a better writer if I keep at it. I feel like I've got a bit of the art and the science down, but have a ways to go in both. One of the ways in which I'm trying to break out of my comfort zone by not being worried to trash most or all of somehting and start from a new point of view, or just retry from zero.
ReplyDeleteI agree with your takeaway that genre being an exploratory process increases one’s strengths as a writer, but I wonder; is more experienced gained from crossing boundaries and failing to produce writing that resonates, or succeeding? More deep questions, man.
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