Pink and Flowery

Yesterday in class, Vanessa made a comment that intrigued me. She said that perhaps certain writings create new genres, which create new readerships. These comment lead to two questions: Do genres have power over what we read and write? Do genres have agency?

Here is a situation that may help us examine these questions. If you walk down the religious books aisle of Barnes and Noble, you will see shelves and shelves and shelves of different looking Bibles. There’s an “Adventure Bible” or “Extreme Faith Bible,” and “The Action Bible” (which looks like a graphic novel) aimed at teens, a pink, flowery “True Identity: The Bible for Women,” a working mothers support Bible, a dark, masculine-looking “Manuel: The Bible for Men,” and “Every Man’s Bible.” There are scholarly-looking Bibles with the Apocrypha, and “The Bible for Busy People: Genesis to Revelation.” There are read the Bible in one year editions, denominational Bibles, “Life Recovery” bibles, and more.

I can think of two lenses through which to examine this situation. Let’s consider this situation alongside Burke’s concept of “naming.” The operative question here might be, why have we found it necessary to name, re-name, and name yet again essentially the same text? Burke writes about names, “A different kind of snow implies a different kind of hunt… names for typical, recurrent social situations are not developed out ‘disinterested curiosity’ but because names imply a command (what to expect, what to look out for)” (294). In renaming and re-presenting the text, a different kind of situation is implied. A pink flowery Bible named “True Identity: The Bible for Women” tells the viewer what to expect and look out for.

The situation can also be examined through Ong’s “The Writer’s Audience is Always a Fiction.” The “readership” of the Bible, or the audience, has been segmented. In this case, it is not the writer who has imagined the audience, but it is the editor/publisher that has done so. Different readerships are fictionalized based on assumptions about what will appeal to different audiences. The texts itself is not changed, but other variables (cover, book design, specific title, illustrations, notes beside the text) are manipulated to create essentially a new sub-genre, in the hopes of drawing in a new readership that perhaps sees a pink flowery Bible as more applicable to their lives than a plain Bible. In “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean,” Campbell notes that agency can be, “invented by authors at points of articulation,” and the case of the many Bibles is a demonstration of this point.

Let’s examine one more sub-genre. In the last few years, since the publication of the popular “Twighlight” vampire novels, a teen fiction sub-genre called “paranormal fiction” has developed. It is distinct from “fantasy” and “science fiction” genres, and the name developed out of recurrent social situations (lots of vampire novels being written, purchased, and read). As writers noticed that teens were particularly enthusiastic about vampires, werewolves, and the like, they reshaped their fictionalizations of certain parts of teen audiences to create a new genre. Campbell writes that collectivities have the power to enact or establish agency (5). If teen readers can be thought of as a “collectivity,” then they have agency to motivate writers (also a sort of collectivity) to create a new genre. It seems that genre creation in this case might be the result of agency on the part of both writers and readers. The genre then continues to draw in new readers, continually creating and re-creating the audience. Campbell also writes that texts have agency – “Textual agency is linked to audiences and begins with the signals that guide the process of “uptake” for readers and listeners, enabling them to categorize, to understand how a symbolic act is framed” (7).

My answer to, do genres have agency, is a yes. However, at this point, I don’t see textual or genre agency as independent of author and reader agency. Genres are “named,” or created as social situations, and naming itself may be an expression of agency. The “point of articulation” of the genre agency might begin with the author/creator, the reader, or as an interaction between the two, and genre agency is sustained by the audiences and the authors.