One of the best things about teaching is when my students cause me to rethink a concept or a situation that I’ve encountered elsewhere. Conveniently, this week, my students have made me think further about genre.
On Tuesday, my 11th grade honors English classes turned in folktales that they wrote. Over the past few weeks, we’ve talked about strategies common to folktales, how they work, and what functions folktales play in cultures. For this assignment, I asked my students to either update one of the folktales we’ve read, or to create a story of their own that functions as a folktale. I’ve been delighted by their creative, funny, and thoughtful responses, however, these responses have make me seriously reconsider the workings of genre.
A folktale can certainly be thought of as a genre of writing or a genre of short stories. My students have almost all grasped the elements of writing a story that make something a folktale, or at least folktale-like, but I see in their writing elements of other things that might also be called genres. Quite a few of the plots in the boys’ stories seem to be lifted from video games – can video-game-like stories be called a “genre?” Other stories mirror chick flicks, Disney movies, or Twilight-type novels. Certainly, we call these things “genres.” Yet, in both these situations, students have done things that mark their stories as folktales. I suppose my question is, can multiple genres be at work in the same piece of writing?
I think Miller’s “Genre as Social Action” might be of help here. Miller writes that classifications inform us about our own discourse (155). That other kinds of genres seep (or blast) into my students’ folktales tell me less about “folktale” as a sort of traditional genre than they tell me about how my students find exigency in these assignments that may seem to them odd or out-of-touch with daily life. Miller writes that to study these sort of everyday genres is to “take seriously the rhetoric in which we are immersed and the situations in which we find ourselves” (155). My students are indeed immersed in video game-type rhetoric, sitcom rhetoric, and Disney rhetoric, and Twilight/vampire rhetoric (which would account for the large number of stories which feature werewolves), among others. Thus, taking seriously this rhetoric and understanding its impact on student writing is important.
What might happen if I look at exigency in this situation? Exigence is “a form of social knowledge – a mutual constructing of objects, events, interests, and purposes that not only links them but also makes them what they are: an objectified social need” (157). To have exigency is to have a social motive. To create a folktale, students adopt, intentionally and unintentionally, from genres with which they have more familiarity and apply these genres to the characteristics that they know folktales have. They construct a tale that links what they know about folktales to what they know about creating a story that is “not real,” to what they know about writing papers for class, and what results is the unusual batch of folktales sitting on my kitchen table. They have engaged their intentions in a socially recognizable and interpretable way (158).
Looking at my students’ papers from the perspective of understanding the exigency behind these papers offers a somewhat more helpful view of how the genre of “folktale” is constructed by 16 and 17 year old students at Brown County High School than does trying to identify all the elements of different genres I see at work. (Interestingly, I think this mirrors Miller’s article: she first articulates why lots of taxonomy-type systems aren’t helpful, and the suggest one that “builds” genres from understanding the situations that cause them to be.)
It is perhaps not so much that multiple genres are at work, but that students construct their folktales drawing on what knowledge they have, from class and from life. Thus, they construct a genre unique to their own situation. Trying to re-create the types of 18th and 19th century folktales that they read in class is not only unrealistic, but it is not helpful in understanding how these teenagers negotiate the media/genres they use. Indeed, the genre of folktales that came out of my students’ writing is an “index to cultural patterns” and “tools for exploring the achievements of particular speakers and writers” (165). Pretty cool. :-)
In "Hamlet", there's a scene where the acting company arrives at Elsinore to perform for the King and Queen. Polonius tells the apparently-mad Hamlet what the company's repertoire is, comically rattling off a list of genres: tragic, comic, historical, tragical-historical, historical-comic, dramatic-comedic, etc. There is a genre for every occasion. It's a subtle satire of the somewhat new process (in Shakespeare's time) of genre classification. What I think Shakespeare was trying to say is that a story or narrative is not so easily packaged, and although it can be helpful for sorting of material it can become dizzying the more intricate and varied genre becomes.
ReplyDeleteTake Mozart's "Don Giovanni", for example. Technically, because the (ahem) "protagonist" dies in the penultimate scene of Act III, it is considered a tragedy. However, because the Don is an unrepentant rake and homewrecker, his death is more or less received with sighs of relief. It raises the question: do stage conventions and tropes really control genre? "Don Giovanni" is treated much like a comedy for much of its span, yet elements of tragedy and drama stand out like diamonds in the rough. Perhaps it is a comical facade applied like a varnish over a true tragedy, purposely put on by Mozart and Da Ponte, or perhaps by the standards of the day it really was a comedy, given the attitude towards women then. It remains a hotbed of debate which only furthers the intrigue surrounding this masterpiece. Sometimes genre simply fails to classify, so new possibilities arise.
Sorry, I meant "the penultimate scene of Act II", not Act III. Fail on my part.
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