The Aligned Text: Discourse Types and Functional Modes

Abstract

A question which seldom, if ever, receives critical comment, is our capacity to categorize texts, and I am thinking here of all kinds of text, not only of those conventionally categorized as literary. At first glance raising the question may seen superfluous: We readily recognize a reference book, or a novel, or a newspaper, and consequently do not think twice about how to read them. There seems to be enough of a general consensus on the larger textual categories for it to be feasible to discuss borderline cases without having to go back to the basics of textual categorization each time. We know that a reference book is for consultation in pursuit of useful knowledge, that a newspaper is for the satisfaction of our curiosity for news, and that a novel is for our entertainment and instruction, but evidently — as the history of criticism amply demonstrates — not the kind of instruction that we can get from a reference book. The three types of text are clearly distinct categories, and to question this would appear to go against common sense.

‘But I was less concerned now with that deeper truth, the traditional attribute of God, which literature can best serve by telling lies, than with the shallower truth we call factuality.’ (Burgess, 1980, p. 45)