ABSTRACT
When Derrida (1980) said that one ‘cannot not mix genres’, he was taking up a position which is barely compatible with that of what has been labelled in a recent publication (Reid, 1987) in Australia ‘the genre school’. This group of people who are all systemic-functional linguists have been making important and interesting interventions into the pedagogic arena in Australia, using methodologies and ideas that are derivative of, but not necessarily the same as, those of Michael Halliday. Their interventions have aroused both dedicated support and fierce opposition. Other Australian Hallidayans, like myself, whose status as ‘linguists’, because of their simultaneous positioning in the field of general semiotics, post-structuralism, and social theory, is often questioned in this context, have been working in other ways to extend and broaden an essentially Hallidayan base so as to take the Derridean, and the systemic-functional approaches of linguists like Martin (1985) and Hasan (1986), and a number of other approaches, into account (Birch and O’Toole, 1988). Much of this more broadly based work centres around genre-the many different ways in which it is defined, the things it can and cannot account for, and current attempts in other fields to address the same problems in different, or more complex ways.
