Notes on Anne Freadman’s Tardy Response

Abstract

So far, I have not been troubled by exigence, finding it a usefully modified version of motive. Now, though, following Freadman’s analysis, I recognize that the concept can interfere with orderly accounts of change, and also with what people call mixture or hybridity, which themselves seem to bid for change. I can see uses for communities of use (Miller, 2017), although I prefer Bakhtin’s (1986) “spheres of activity,” with its focus on what groups of people do, rather than what they say. I realize now that my complacency about these terms—and others—may be owing to my habit of summoning them to introduce genre to a new audience, usually one likely to think of genre as formal structure, if they think of genre at all. Or to frame for a genre-familiar audience an entry to new but related concerns.