The "daily reminder" as genre

Over on Twitter, I've assumed the identity of a cheerleader as a function of my participation in the debate over Brexit. Placed squarely on the sideline, I try to cheer those on the fields by doing remarkable poses, yells and dance moves to that effect. In the cheerleader-role, I've been running what I call my "daily reminder". Each day I post

"This is your daily reminder that you have millions of friends and allies in the EU."

And then I add some new remark which I feel—for whatever reason—is fitting for the day. Usually these are fairly upbeat; as fits the point of the reminder (see below), but they don´t have to be wholly without teeth.

A ”reminder”, Merriam-Webster usefully reminds us, is “something that calls a memory or thought to the mind”. Our spouse can remind us to remember the car keys, or we can remind ourselves to call the mayor before sunset. The reminder, thus has a clear social and cognitive function, it returns information to us that we might need for one reason or another. The reminder also has a negative side of course, it can bring back memories we’d rather keep away. “The sight of Marie in the crowd was an unwelcome reminder to Lucy of love lost”. However, there is a recurrent element between the two: the reminder aligns the mind with reality; brings back something that for whatever reason, had been pushed in the background. That is the function of the genre.

How about the daily reminder? Well, going by what has already been written it must be something important that tends to get lost or steps into the background every day, and which should be brought to the foreground again. (BTW: I DuckDuckGo’ed “daily reminder”; there’s a lot of motivational claptrap coming up; stay on this channel – don´t google it either; it’s probably even worse.) So, the “daily” reminder has to be there, because something gets lost and lost and lost and lost.

In the case at hand, there are many things that tend to get lost in the brouhaha of the Brexit debate, and many things one might want to use as a daily reminder. For me, one of those most close at hand is the fact that Brexit is an utterly pointless exercise. There is no necessity in it. It is voluntary; an unforced choice of something immensely damaging. And when you look at the consequences of Brexit, the question arises: why do this? This very important banality tends to get lost in the daily exchanges and thus could need a reminder. It’s a little harsh, but many people who have spent time in therapy know, that a hash fact stubbornly held on to can be quite healing. 

However, I chose another daily reminder, “that you have millions of friends and allies in the EU”. Why? First of all, because in a crisis like this with tempers flaring and fates, futures, and lives at stake, there is less kindness to go around than needed. I can’t vote, I can’t demonstrate, I can’t even sign the central petitions. I can, however, show a little kindness. And every day, someone seems to need it. It would take me a long time to count the number of times someone has expressed that they needed exactly that reminder on exactly that day. Most of the time, I don´t even know, why they need it; but they do, and I'm fine with that.

This is, in one important aspect simply reverse trolling. Just as the trolls and bots (remember to block them!!!) use your empathy to tear into people's feelings, because they know that we automatically establish a human connection around their awful utterance and treat it as if is is somehow meaningful, even when it is just hateful, I use peoples' empathy to soothe their feelings, because I know that they automatically establish a human connection around my consoling utterance and see it as meaningful, and thus put more into the words than I can. Empathy is a superpower—and can be harnessed for good.

However, there is a second—even more genre-like point: the recurrence makes the reminder move in time. You had one yesterday, and the day before that, you recognize it today, and you know it will return again tomorrow.  In my terms, you recognize it as a #genre and it works on you as such. And so, the recurrence adds power to the simple, apparently insignificant message. Just like nagging or criticism can wear you down, drip by drip, my little reminder accumulates impact, because it always returns. 

(Well, always and always. You get the point.)

It’s slightly pavlovian, of course, I am aiming for a conditioned response, but if that response is that someone smiles, feels better, and can handle what the world throws at them a little better, I’ll take it. 

NB: Again, this post was originally a twitter thread. You can see it here.

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Sacred Eating as Genre. An appreciation

My esteemed colleague Dr Meredith J. C. Warren has published a fascinating book on a genre called "hierophagy". Here, for your enjoyment and (hopefully) your enlightenment is a post on the book and its use of genre. It is written from an interdisciplinary genre research perspective.

The reference in—sort of—APA 6th:

Warren, M. J. C. (2019). Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature (Vol. 14). Atlanta: SBL Press.

And the cover. Not too sexy, but you know this is how these things look:

Let me add, that I really like Dr. Warren a lot. She is both a brilliant scholar and a very nice and energetic human being. I am a better researcher and a better person for knowing her. So, do not expect anything particularly belligerent. Today, I am not in the business of harsh criticism, but in the business of being extremely interested and making remarks to a piece of very fine scholarship. In other words, this is as much fun as academia gets, and I am here to enjoy it, not stomp upon it. I like having academic fun. I am just that kind of guy.

What is "hierophagy"? The book defines it as "specialized, sacred eating" (1). The book chooses it's topic from "Ancient Mediterranean Literature" with a clear focus in the Bible but also with a number of texts from the surrounding historical landscape. The basic idea is that somebody in a text consumes some item of food with an otherworldly origin (note that, apparently a book can be food; at least it can be eaten in a sacred way). The hierophagic eating transforms the eater and establishes a connection between the eater and the otherworldly realm. Persephone consumes food from Hades and is bound to the realm; John eats a scroll and has divine visions.

So, what is the genre angle?

Well, the hierophagic meal is itself a genre. It's a recurrent form of action with a particular social purpose. If you will, a "situation based fusion of form and substance". At this point, obviously, the genre crowd hears the voice of Carolyn Miller reverberating in the background. So here she is—in the foreground—with Chuck Bazerman. Don´t they look just lovely?

But I digress.

 The book is not a full-on piece of genre research; we'll get back to that, but it does rest on two moves already made in genre research, and it does so very well.

The first is, as hinted, Carolyn Miller's "Genre as Social Action" (1984). If you are somehow and do not know Miller, you can find the article here. It is the most quoted piece of genre research ever, methinks, unless you count Aristotle's Rhetoric. Also, there is a little piece on Miller and her influence on my blog here.

Anway, Miller describes how genres are forms of action. They serve rhetorical purposes in our social life, we use them in situations to achieve aims that are achievable through discourse. We do things with genre. This understanding has been foundational for modern genre research. It has been expanded, nuanced, developed, and sometimes twisted, but it has never been fully replaced, and is as alive today as it has ever been—and that's very much alive. 

Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature takes up the hierophagic meals as a genre in this Millerian sense, as it sees these meals as social actions. They are ways things are done in the social world. In the terms of genre research this, incidentally, is an uptake. A concept from Anne Freadman that Dr. Warren would enjoy immensely, I believe. I don't think it's online, but it is discussed in two central pieces by Freadman:

Freadman, A. (1994). Anyone for Tennis? In A. Freedman & P. Medway (Eds.), Genre and the New Rhetoric (pp. 43-66). London: Taylor & Francis
Freadman, A. (2002). Uptake. In R. Coe, L. Lingard, & T. Teslenko (Eds.), The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre (pp. 39-53). Cresskill Hampton Press Inc.

Anyway, Miller only gets Dr. Warren halfways there, because her book discusses "Ancient Mediterranean literature" (emphasis added), not ancient Mediterranean society more broadly, and Miller's concept is directed at an actual sociality. Real people doing real people stuff. Enter stage (right) a lesser researcher; yours truly, who has the honor of playing second violin to Miller's primarius. (Oh, and being second violin to Miller is extremely honorable.Nothing modest here; I'll take that chair any day).

A few years back I made an aesthetic take on Miller by superimposing her concept of genre as social action on narrative literature and thus describing "Genre as Fictional Action".  The study—less groundbreaking than Miller, but you can be less groundbreaking than Miller and still be the s....!—can be found here. It is a lot of fun, if you ask me. The basic idea then is, that you can analyse genre use in a literary work in the same way that you can analyse genre use IRL by looking at the genres themselves, the way they are used, and the—intradiegetic—social situation in which they appear as attempted actions. 24/

This enables Dr Warren to make a central move in her own readings: she does not need to address the IRL-role of hierophagy as a genre; she just has to see the way it works within the literary text she addresses with no commitment to a sociality beyond the texts.

I shall not enter into the text readings in Food and Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Literature. I might be able to add a thing or two from a perspective of literary analysis, but they are basically the scholarly realm of other researchers. Instead, I shall address two questions that are very much genre questions, and where I may have something more useful to add.

1) The position on the book vis-a-vis what I sometimes call genre research proper.
2) The hierophagic meal as an embedded genre.

1) By "genre research proper" I mean the field of research that either works with genre as its primary topic, or systematically uses existing genre research as an approach to other topics with a clear view to influence our general understanding of genre through its studies.

 The book is, obviously, much closer to the second approach, but it stops short of engaging with developing theory within the genre research field, among other things because it's field of reference is too slim to make a contribution like that. In case you are wondering: No, this is not a criticism of the book, it's an attempt to locate it in relation to genre research. In fact, the book has its own field or fields, as is evidenced by its rich bibliography from the study of ancient Mediterranean literature. It's first and most important contribution lies here. It's use of genre research is ancillary to this purpose. In that perspective, adding in a truckload of other genre researchers, some a lot better than me, would defeat the purpose by obscuring where the contribution lies.

Should we, nonetheless, choose to see it as a contribution to genre research proper, which is not an unreasonable uptake (there's Anne Freadman again lurking at the edge of the thread) even given what has been said above, we might say that it contributes to a return of aesthetics in genre research. Aesthetics has been well-nigh dormant in genre research proper for decades, but has been slowly resurrected these last years and might get to play a more prominent role in years to come. At least, I'll quote it in that function in future work.

2) By "embedded genre" I understand a genre that is contained within the framework of another genre; a pie chart in a report, a joke in a lecture, a threat in a novel. It is under-theorized in current genre research, and Bakhtin's description of primary and secondary genres has been given too much weight, including in my own "Genre and interpretation" (here). (I have a full-scale research article about it loitering in my drawer, but there are some revisions still missing before submission, so it might be a while).

In the context of Dr. Warren's book, it's worth noting that hierophagy as she describes it is systematically an embedded genre. It is not an overarching genre for a whole work, but is a genre that works as an element in other genres. So, it must always be seen in the context of the larger work, in which it appears. And it has this micro-genre kind of function: it is used as a building block in a larger whole. This does not make it any less interesting—personally I wrote a complete book chapter on the riddle in Grundtvig. Even if it only ever appears as an embedded genre in Grundtvig's writing, it is highly consequential. But it is worth noting because, among other reasons, the biblical form criticism also focuses on this kind of genre; even if it is wholly unaware of a organized field of genre research—often for purely chronological reasons: the form critics largely came first. So the questions become:

1) Does hierophagy exist on a "higher" level; is there such a thing as a work of hierophagy? 

2) Does the book's treatment of the embedded genre improve our understanding of the workings of genre in ancient literature compared with form criticism? 

3) What can the book teach us about the working of embedded genres generally, even if it does not use the term? 

I believe at least question is sort-of answered in the book, but I'll leave the answers to Dr. Warren herself. 

Anyway, a highly interesting book. I very much recommend it to you. Go buy, go read!

NB: This thread was originally a thread on Twitter. You can see the thread here.

NB NB: You can buy the book here.