Genre criticism

In rhetorical studies, genre theory provides a means to classify and compare artifacts of communication and to assess their effectiveness and/or contribution to a community. By grouping artifacts with others of similar formal features or rhetorical exigencies, rhetorical critics can shed light on how authors use or flout conventions in order to meet their needs. While genres have been used to classify speeches and works of literature since the time of Aristotle, genre didn’t emerge as a critical tool to describe and analyze texts until the twentieth century. Since then, genre criticism has taken three turns. The first turn, represented by Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, among others, focused on the formal features of communication. The second turn, represented by Carolyn Miller, among others, focused on recurring socio-cultural circumstances. In the latest turn, critics have begun applying formalist and socio-cultural concepts to new media artifacts that tend to resist classification in traditional genre categories.

Emphasis on Formal Features in Speech Genres

The first group of rhetorical critics, following the example of theorists like M. M. Bakhtin, used formal features to analyze texts. For these critics, language is formed through a series of utterances that reflect specific conditions and goals of certain linguistic aspects. These aspects include thematic content, style, and compositional structure which form speech genres. Speech genres are diverse because of the various possibilities of human activity. In “The Problem of Speech Genres,” Mikhail Bakhtin draws attention to the very significant difference between primary (simple) and secondary (complex) speech genres (1986, p. 62). According to Bahktin, primary speech genres form secondary speech genres and examples of secondary speech genres include novels, dramas, all kinds of scientific research, and major genres of commentary. Since these secondary genres involve complex and comparatively highly developed and organized cultural communication that is artistic and scientific, they absorb and digest various primary genres that have not taken form in mediated speech communion. Bakhtin continues to explain that there are three factors of the whole utterance which include semantic exhaustiveness of the theme, the speaker’s plan or speech will, and the typical compositional and generic forms of finalization (p. 77). The first factor refers to the way utterances are used within speech which is linked to the second factor of how the speaker determines to use the utterance. Finally, the third factor explains that all our utterances have definite and stable typical forms of construction, but that these forms can change when needed. As Bahktin writes, “These genres are so diverse because they differ depending on the situation, social position, and personal interrelations of the participants in the communication” (p. 79).

Socio-cultural Approach to Genre Studies

In the 1980’s, scholarship in genre theory and criticism has turned towards a socio-cultural approach to the study of genre by actively interrogating the rhetorical situation of a given communication artifact in light of its particular generic form. In this mode of inquiry, the rhetorical artifact is examined as a social response to a set of recurrent rhetorical exigencies rather than a collection of formal, generic elements. In the rhetorical tradition of genre criticism, Carolyn R. Miller's work on the socio-cultural approach to genre theory has been influential. In “Genre as Social Action” (1984), Miller argues that “rhetorical criticism has not provided firm guidance on what constitutes a genre” (p. 151) and that a “rhetorically sound definition of genre must be centered not on the substance or the form of discourse but on the action it is used to accomplish” (p. 151). Later, when Miller and her colleague Dawn Shepherd engaged the socio-cultural approach to genre criticism in “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog” (2004), they exposed some of the difficulties of applying genre theory to new media. In their analysis, Miller and Shepherd examine the extent to which the weblog might constitute a genre in light of its interaction with current social and cultural trends.

Genres Studies in New Media

Recently scholars and researchers in rhetoric, linguistics, and information sciences have begun to explore the relationships between new media and socio-contextual genre theories (like those of Carolyn Miller, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Charles Bazerman). These researchers have expressed concerns about the appropriateness of traditional genre theory for new media communication. Some scholars have argued that since genre theory was originally developed to describe written texts, the theory needs to be modified to account for nonlinguistic communication. Linguist and semiotician Gunter Kress suggested that much of the vocabulary of generic analysis is ill-equipped to address non-written communication, arguing that “there are no genre-terms for describing what [a] drawing is or does…” (1996, p. 110). Similarly, rhetoricians Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd have argued traditional written genre theory doesn’t appropriately address the visual features of a genre’s format. (See Blogging as Social Action.) Rhetoricians Carolyn Miller and Dawn Shepherd and Information Scientists Kevin Crowston and Marie Williams (2000) have also pointed out that new media genres may develop and formalize more quickly than traditional written genres. Andrew Dillon and Barbara A. Gushrowski (2000), in “Genres and the Web: Is the Personal Home Page the First Uniquely Digital Genre,” argue that the personal home page is functioning as a new and discrete genre, and they explore the entirely digital nature of home pages, suggesting that home pages “have no obvious paper equivalent” (p. 203). Additionally recent work in new media genre theory has explored how new communication technologies allows for forms of “genre hybridity.” Clay Spinuzzi, for example, explores what can happen when multiple related genres are remediated into a single new media artifact (2003).

References Used

▪ Bakhtin, M. M.(1986). The problem of speech genres. Speech genres and other late essays.Trans. McGee, V. W. Eds. Emerson, C. & Holquist, M. Austin: University of Texas Press. 62-102.
▪ Crowston, K. & Williams, M. (2000). Reproduced and emergent genres of communication on the world wide web. The Information Society 16, 201-215.
▪ Dillon, A. & Grushrowski, B.A. (2000). Genres and the web: Is the personal home page the first uniquely digital genre? Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(2), 202-205.
▪ Jasinski, J.(2001). Genre. Sourcebook on Rhetoric. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
▪ Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the new media age. London: Routledge.
▪ Kress, G. & Van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Multimodal discourse. London: Routledge.
▪ Miller, C. R. (1984). Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech 70(May), 151-67.
▪ Miller, C. R. & Shepherd, D.(2004). Blogging as social action: a genre analysis of the weblog. Into the blogosphere: rhetoric ,community, and culture of weblogs. Eds. Gurak, L. G., Antonijevic, S., Johnson, L., Ratliff, C. & Reyman, J. Retrieved 10 April 2005 from http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/
▪ Prince, M. B. (2003). Mauvais genres. New Literary History. 34(3), 452.
▪ Spinuzzi, C. (2003). Tracing genres through organizations: A sociocultural approach to information design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

See also

Genre Studies

External links