A GENRE THEORY PERSPECTIVE ON DIGITAL ... - ETD

CHAPTER II
A GENRE THEORY PERSPECTIVE
As I have suggested in the previous Chapter, extant research does not fully capture the
complexity and dynamism of digital storytelling as dialectically connected to the collective, the
historical, and the generic dimensions of the cultural practice. I have also argued that by studying
cultural tools and structures that embody collective, historically developed experiential and
ideological knowledge of a social practice, we can arrive at a more rounded understanding of
literacies as situated and mediated. In what follows, I draw on analytical frames found in North
American genre theory to complement theoretical advancements that have been made and to fill
in certain conceptual gaps in extant literature. I introduce genre as a construct with useful
analytical facility for exploring digital storytelling as situated, mediated, and distributed sociohistorical
phenomenon. From this perspective, we investigate digital storytelling as taking place
within the framework of the typified, historical, and generic.
At the foreground of my discussion is no longer the individual, but the dialectical copresence
of the individual and the cultural practice, as mediated by a system of genres and genre
practices, namely the typified coalescences of persons, activities, institutions, artifacts, and
practices. Here, I use the term genre in a rather expansive way. By genre, I am not referring to an
Aristotelian taxonomy for categorizing discourse solely in accordance to their formal, thematic,
organizational, and stylistic features. In other words, by genre, I am not talking about novels
versus sonnets, or tragedy versus comedy. Instead, I use genre to describe typified ways in which
40