A well-suggested segue from Berkenkotter to another seminal essay. In 1984 Miller was clearly probing the fringes of Composition and Rhetoric for a tangible space in which to work through aspects of both disciplines that were dismissed or under attack from English. I wasn’t aware until just this past re-reading that this essay was based on Miller’s dissertation. That fact illustrates her standing and tenure as a scholar deeply interested in technical communication as an academic discipline AND field of practice.
Here Miller is reacting to Rhetorical Criticism’s failure to define “genre” as something more than a category or a kind of discourse. She is looking at the relations of genre to situation. She wants to limit genre to a specific type of discourse classification “based in rhetorical practice … open … and organized around situated action” (155). As an extension of this typification, Miller is interested in the knowledge created by and through these situated actions and associated practices. “Because human action is based on and guided by meaning, not by material causes, at the center of action is a process of interpretation. Before we can act, we must interpret the intermediate material environment… the new is made familiar through the recognition of relevant similarities; those similarities become constituted as a type” (156-7) – as a genre.
Genre associated with a typified reaction to a typified situation. Specific to my exams, Miller is “proposing how an understanding of genre can help account for the way we encounter, interpret, react to, and create particular texts” (151). This is important for my mapping effort because it sets up later scholarship (some already noted across this space) that considers the role of genre in the actions performed by technical communicators. At the same time, Miller’s argument exposes some of the difficulties of teaching genre in the Comp and Tech Comm classrooms.
While I don’t see any direct relationships (yet) to activity theory, Miller is emphasizing the activities surrounding the creation, use, and re-use of genres – of genre’s role in the rhetorical relationship between situation and discourse. “… a genre [is] a complex of formal and substantive features that create a particular effect in a given situation” (153).
This is a departure from the rule-bound prescriptive treatment of genre found in positivit/current-traditional pedagogies. “… a closed set, usually consisting of few members – a neat taxonomic system that does not reflect rhetorical practice so much as an a priori principle” (153).
Implications for Composition: Genre is typically treated as a means to, “describe a closed, formal system based nominally on intention but described according to form: exposition, argumentation, description, narration” (155) – a simple means to classify discourse.
Miller is casting genre theory through a social constructivist lens. She is working with Burke’s ideas of exigence as rhetorical motive; carrying the actions of these motives – and the circumstances surrounding them – forward to describe genres as, “typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations … of discourses that are incomplete … circumscribed by a relatively complete shift in relational situation” (159).
As I attempt to place genre theory within my map, I’m finding a gap between it and Rhetorical pedagogies – the bridging element – the generic fusion – I think lies within Social Constructionist theories concerned with the production of knowledge. “The understanding of genre that I am advocating is based in rhetorical practice, in the conventions of discourse that a society establishes as ways of acting together … genres serve as keys to understanding how to participate in the actions of a community” (163-65).
Miller reviews Speech Act theory and hierarchical relationships of form, substance, and context to create meaning – as action. I think I understand why and how she uses this to substantiate her argument, but it seems a bit too abstract here. I feel like the bridging element I’m look for needs to be more substantial – “… a coherent pragmatic force” (164). Miller refers to this pragmatic component as a way to understand genre as action. Bazzerman and Spinuzzi, writing much later, deliver some of this pragmatism.
No comments:
Post a Comment