ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the relation between genres and culturally defined aspects of corporeality. Corporeality is both immanent in the actual present and grounded in a world that far transcends Indeed, it is just because corporeal dimensions play out differently in different practices that it provides a fertile area of research. Think of the many expressive gestures of face, hands, and posture that are part of speech as activity and that help specify the meaning of utterances. In the third dimension corporeality is a part, sometimes tacit and sometimes quite explicit, of the field of verbal practice. Corporeality is part of the field of production and reception, is most often ignored by intellectualist treatments of the body as an object of representation. It tends to be the least visible and the most subtle realization of corporeality in language, precisely because it is neither the focus of description nor the perceptible means of expression.