Form and genre shaping rhetorical action

Generic Criticism (Rhetoric)

Generic Criticism

Generic criticism is rooted in the assumption that certain types of situations provoke similar needs and expectations in audiences and thus call for particular kinds of rhetoric. Rather than seeking to discover how one situation affects one particular rhetorical act, the generic critic seeks to discover commonalities in rhetorical patterns across recurring situations. The purpose of generic criticism is to understand rhetorical practices, sometimes in different time periods and in different places, by identifying the similarities in rhetorical situations and the rhetoric constructed in response to them. The French word genre “connotes sameness in kind, type, or form”1 and is used to refer to a distinct group, type, class, or category of artifacts that share important characteristics that differentiate it from other groups. In rhetorical studies, genres are seen as “rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations”2 or “ways of recognizing, responding to . . . and helping to reproduce recurrent situations.”3 If there is a genre of eulogistic discourse, for example, then speeches of eulogy for Eleanor Roosevelt, Mother Teresa, Prince, and soldiers killed in the Iraq War should be similar in major aspects, addressing as they do a similar situation—the death of someone significant or beloved.

A rhetorical genre is a constellation, fusion, or clustering of three different kinds of elements so that a unique kind of artifact is created. Situational requirements, or the perception of conditions in a situation that call for particular kinds of rhetorical responses, constitute the first generic element. A genre also contains substantive and stylistic characteristics of the rhetoric—these features constitute the second key element of a generic analysis, and they are the characteristics of the rhetoric chosen by the rhetor to respond to the perceived requirements of particular situations. Substantive characteristics are those that constitute the content of the rhetoric, while stylistic characteristics constitute its form.4 The third element of a rhetorical genre, the organizing principle, is the root term or key idea that serves as an umbrella label for the characteristic features of the rhetoric. It is the label for the internal dynamic of the constellation that is formed by the situational, substantive, and stylistic features of the genre.5 Although strategic responses and stylistic choices may appear in isolation in other rhetorical forms, what is distinctive about a genre of rhetoric is the recurrence of the forms together, unified by the same organizing principle. A genre, then, is not simply a set of features that characterizes various rhetorical acts but a set of interdependent features.

We recognize and participate in multiple genres in our communicative lives. Among the genres that are widespread in everyday life are various genres of greetings, farewells, and congratulations. Weather forecasts, advertisements, instruction manuals, the closing arguments at a criminal trial, travel blogs, websites for presidential candidates, and personal home pages are all genres. If you are a graduate student, you participated in the genre of the personal statement required of graduate-student applications in the U.S., and you may be looking forward to writing your thesis, which is another genre. Different communities use different types of genres and thus have different genre repertoires or sets of genres that they routinely enact.6 In academic communities, for example, knowledge production is carried out and documented through the genres of lab reports, grant proposals, conference papers, journal articles, reviews of journal manuscripts, books, and book reviews. Corporations often use generic forms of communication such as expense forms, business letters, training seminars, and annual shareholders’ meetings. They might employ email genres such as the dialogue genre, which embeds old messages into a new message, and the proposal genre, in which the writer proposes or advocates for a particular course of action.

A reciprocity exists between individuals and the genres in which they participate. Genres not only sort and classify rhetoric, but they help shape and generate the types of rhetoric we employ. As Mikhail Bakhtin explains, even “in the most free, the most unconstrained conversation, we cast our speech in definite generic forms, sometimes rigid and trite ones, sometimes more flexible, plastic, and creative ones.”7 As you initiate communication, genres influence you to develop your messages in particular ways—they serve as prescriptive, ready-made patterns of communication that you can use as templates. As Thomas Luckmann suggests, “Once one has ‘chosen’ a genre for a communicative project, it is the genre that ‘chooses’ the parts for its accomplishment.”8 When you are asked to present an award to someone at a banquet or ceremony, for example, you are likely to draw on the content and form of the award-giving genre to prepare your remarks, and your speech will be much like other speeches used to bestow awards. Just as rhetors are being influenced by genres available to them as they create messages, audience members recognize particular messages as belonging to specific genres, and that recognition influences their strategies of comprehension and response.9

Because we are always interacting with genres, we have input into their construction, which means that genres can change—they “can be unstable over time as they develop due to changes in media technology structures, market transformations, or even the intentions and concerns” of rhetors.10 Although members typically reinforce established genres through their communicative actions, they can and sometimes do challenge and modify these genres, either inadvertently or deliberately. When changes to genres are accepted, new genres may develop, which is what happened with the memo genre. It emerged out of modifications in the genre of the business letter, and it then evolved into a new and separate genre.

The roots of the notion of genre and thus of generic criticism can be traced to the writings of Aristotle and other classical Greek rhetoricians. Much of classical rhetorical theory is based on the assumption that situations fall into general types, depending on the objective of the rhetoric. Classical rhetori- cians divided rhetoric into three types of discourse—deliberative or political, forensic or legal, and epideictic or ceremonial. Each of these types has distinc- tive aims—expedience for deliberative speaking, justice for forensic speaking, and honor for epideictic speaking. They have distinctive strategies as well— exhortation and dissuasion for deliberative speaking, accusation and defense for forensic speaking, and praise and blame for epideictic speaking.11 Thus, classification of discourse on the basis of similar characteristics and situations has been part of the tradition of the communication field since its inception.

The first person to use the term generic criticism in the communication discipline was Edwin Black in his critique of neo-Aristotelianism in 1965. He proposed as an alternative to the traditional method of criticism a generic frame that included these tenets: (1) “there is a limited number of situations in which a rhetor can find himself”; (2) “there is a limited number of ways in which a rhetor can and will respond rhetorically to any given situational type”; and (3) “the recurrence of a given situational type through history will provide a critic with information on the rhetorical responses available in that situation.”12 Black suggested that distinctive, recurrent situations exist in which discourse occurs and encouraged critics to analyze historical texts to describe their common features.

Lloyd F. Bitzer’s notion of the rhetorical situation, presented in 1968, also contributed to the development of generic criticism. Bitzer’s focus on recur- ring situations was particularly significant for generic criticism: “From day to day, year to year, comparable situations occur, prompting comparable responses; hence rhetorical forms are born and a special vocabulary, grammar, and style are established.”13 Although his conception of the rhetorical situation generated controversy,14 it contributed in significant ways to the theoretical base for generic criticism.

Another contribution to the development of generic criticism was a conference held in 1976 called “Significant Form” in Rhetorical Criticism. Spon- sored by the Speech Communication Association (now the National Communication Association) and the University of Kansas, the conference was organized around the idea of significant form, which referred to recur- ring patterns in discourse or action. These patterns include the “repeated use of images, metaphors, arguments, structural arrangements, configurations of language or a combination of such elements into what critics have termed ‘genres’ or ‘rhetorics.’”15 The result of the conference was a book, Form and Genre: Shaping Rhetorical Action, edited by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, which provided theoretical discussions of the concept of genre and included samples of generic criticism. Jackson Harrell and Wil A. Linkugel followed with a proposal for the procedures for generic criticism in 1978 with an aim of systematizing research into rhetorical genres.16

Carolyn R. Miller’s “Genre as Social Action,” published in 1984, advanced the discussion of genre in a number of ways. She argued 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.”17 She also entered the debate about the nature of the exigency in the rhetorical situation as it applies to genres, suggesting that a rhetor’s recognition of a situation as calling for a certain response is based on that rhetor’s particular definition of the situation. She extended the scope of genre analysis to include everyday discourse such as the letter of recommendation, the user manual, the lecture, and the ransom note. Miller revisited her essay 30 years later with another essay on genre. Following a brief history of the study of genre in the intervening years, in the second article, she anticipated the ways in which the Internet was changing how genres are “structured, controlled, or determined.”18 She was among the first scholars to study the blog as a potential genre and concluded that “the blog is not a genre but is rather a technological medium that can support multiple genres.”19

The next major contribution to theorizing about genre in the communication discipline came from Barry Brummett in his book Rhetorical Homologies: Form, Culture, Experience (2004). Brummett defines a homology as “a pattern found to be ordering significant particulars of different and disparate experiences”20 and conducts several analyses of homologies that reveal similarities where they would not be expected to be found—across “disparate orders of experience.”21 Brummett, for example, identifies a homology that unites the disparate contexts of Christian martyr stories, Laurel and Hardy films, the African American practice of playing the dozens, and professional wrestling— a pattern he calls ritual injury. Ritual injury is marked by a group or individual’s willingness to endure assault and acts of violence that are inflicted on them ceremoniously and without reciprocating that violence.22 Brummett does not explicitly link the homology to the genre and, in fact, some scholars believe that a homology is different from a genre.23 The difference for them lies in the fact that rhetorical homologies involve different orders of experience, while genres are concerned with situations marked by obvious similarities. Despite these theoretical differences, Brummett makes clear that studies of similar categories of rhetorical forms do not need to be limited to those forms that appear, on the surface, to be the same.

The Sydney School of genre studies, named after its primary institutional base in the University of Sydney’s Department of Linguistics, offers another contribution to genre studies—the study of genres to effect social change. Michael Halliday, who once headed the department, sought to bring linguists and educators together to create a literacy pedagogy appropriate for a multi- cultural society.24 The result was the use of generic analysis to probe systems of belief, ideologies, and values. The work of the members of this school encourages critics to ask questions about genres such as: How do some genres come to be valorized, valued, or privileged? In whose interest is such valorization? What kinds of social organization are put in place or kept in place by such valorization? What does participation in a genre do to and for an individual or a group? What opportunities do the relationships reflected in and structured by a genre afford for humane creative action or, alternatively, for the domination of others? Do genres empower some people while silencing others? What representations of the world are entailed in genres? These questions suggest as an agenda for the next phase of generic studies a critical examination of issues such as the nature of the representations that are sanctioned and normalized in genres and their implications for people’s lives, the degree of accessibility of a genre to potential users, and genre maintenance as power maintenance. More generally, the Australian genre researchers contribute an explicit acknowledgment of the political dimensions of genres to our under- standing of generic criticism.25

Anthony Paré and Graham Smart expanded the study of genre by focusing specifically on rhetorical genres in organizational settings. They define genre as a distinctive profile of regularities across four dimensions: (1) textual features such as styles of texts and modes of argument; (2) the composing process such as information gathering and analysis of information; (3) reading practices such as where, when, and why a document is read; and (4) the social roles performed by writers and readers so that no matter who assumes a particular role—the role of social worker, judge, or project manager, for example—the genre is enacted in much the same way. Paré and Smart believe this view of genres in organizations explains how the effective production of dis- course and knowledge occurs within organizations.26

The method of corpus linguistics in the linguistics discipline, employed by scholars such as Douglas Biber,27 Amy J. Devitt,28 HansJürgen Diller,29 Ste- fan Gries,30 Thomas Kohnen,31 and Brian Paltridge,32 offers another approach to the study of genres. Researchers employ statistical methods using computers to study the language in large corpora (samples) of “real world” or natural texts that were produced in natural communicative settings and that are avail- able in electronic form. Their objective is to identify groups of linguistic features that co-occur with high frequency in various genres, so they might want to find out, for example, how often morphemes occur with particular words or how often particular words occur in certain grammatical constructions.33 They then are able “to define text membership within genres on the basis of how closely their structural and linguistic patterns relate to the genre proto- type.”34 Corpus linguists engage in their work on genres for two reasons: (1) the analysis of existing genre examples provides insights about the defining linguistic characteristics of a genre; and (2) the list of defining characteristics functions as a guide as to whether a new example is or is not part of that genre. Corpus linguistics assumes that formal differences in language correspond to functional differences, so knowledge about the characteristics of genres provides them with insights into how those genres work in the world for those who participate in them.35

Procedures

Using generic criticism, a critic analyzes an artifact in a four-step process: (1) selecting an artifact; (2) analyzing the artifact; (3) formulating a research question; and (4) writing the essay.

Selecting an Artifact

Your choice of an artifact or artifacts for generic criticism depends on the kind of analysis you are doing. As explained in more detail below, generic criticism involves three options—generic description, generic participation, and generic application. If you are interested in generic description, your artifacts should be a variety of texts that appear to respond to a similar situation and, on the surface, to share some rhetorical similarities. These artifacts can come from different time periods and be of various forms—speeches, essays, songs, websites, works of art, and advertisements, for example—if they all seem similar in nature and function. If your goal is generic participation, choose an artifact that seems like it should belong to or has been assigned to a particular genre but does not seem to fit. If you are doing generic application, your artifact should be one that you want to assess in terms of how well it conforms to the genre of which it is a part. This should be an artifact that, for some reason, leads you to question how it is functioning in the context of its genre.

Analyzing the Artifact

Generic criticism involves three different options for a critic—generic description, generic participation, and generic application.36 The first option is generic description, where you examine several artifacts to determine if a genre exists. This is an inductive operation, in which you begin with a consideration of specific features of artifacts and move to a generalization about them in the naming of a genre. The second option, generic participation, is a deductive procedure in which you move from consideration of a general class of rhetoric to consideration of a specific artifact. Here, you test a specific artifact against a genre to discover if it participates in that genre. The third option is generic application—also a deductive procedure—that involves application of a generic model to particular artifacts in order to evaluate or assess them.

Generic Description

In the attempt to describe a genre, a critic examines various artifacts to see if a genre exists. Your purpose in generic description is to define a genre and formulate theoretical constructs about its characteristics if, in fact, you discover that a genre exists. Generic description involves four steps: (1) observing similarities in rhetorical responses to particular situations; (2) collecting artifacts that occur in similar situations; (3) analyzing the artifacts to discover if they share characteristics; and (4) if they do share characteristics, formulating the organizing principle of the genre.

The first step of generic description is your observation that similar situations, perhaps removed from each other in time and place, seem to generate similar rhetorical responses. As you observe similar situations that seem to generate similar kinds of rhetoric, keep in mind that the rhetor’s interpretation or definition determines whether a situation invites a rhetorical response or not—not a material environment or circumstance. As Miller explains, “at the center of action is a process of interpretation. Before we can act, we must interpret the indeterminate material environment; we define, or ‘determine,’ a situation.”37 Some condition does not cause or invite rhetorical action. What causes or invites rhetorical action is a rhetor’s interpretation of the condition as something that is dangerous, unhealthy, or problematic in some way. In other words, the rhetor essentially creates the exigency determined to be central to the genre. As Richard E. Vatz explains, “No situation can have a nature independent of the perception of its interpreter or independent of the rhetoric with which” the rhetor chooses to characterize it.38 Rhetors and critics deter- mine what a situation means and whether it deserves a response or not.

The second step is the collection of a varied sample of artifacts that may represent the genre. For this step, you identify rhetorical acts in which the perceived rhetorical situation appears similar, or search out contexts that seem to be characterized by similar constraints of situation. If you suspect a genre of rhetoric may exist, for example, in which individuals announce their candidacy for office, you would want to collect instances where individuals have announced their intention to run for office—speeches or statements on websites by U.S. presidential candidates, candidates for the state legislature, candidates for the local school board, and candidates for president of the union in a corporation, for example. A study by James S. Measell began in a similar fashion. He noticed that similar rhetorical situations were faced by President Abraham Lincoln and William Pitt, the prime minister of England during the French Revolution. Both Lincoln and Pitt needed to justify “their administrative policy to withhold the privileges of habeas corpus,”39 so Measell wanted to discover whether their rhetoric constituted a genre. Or perhaps you notice that wedding dresses, Christmas trees, and party hats seem to share a number of features and to function in similar ways, and that observation would lead you to analyze them to see if they participate in a genre.

The third step in the process is close analysis of the artifacts collected to discover if there are shared substantive or stylistic features in the various artifacts you have collected. Here, you seek commonalities in how the rhetors dealt with the perceived problem in the situation. In the process of discovering similarities and differences among the rhetorical acts under study, you are not confined to looking for particular kinds of strategies or to using one critical method. Ideally, you allow the artifacts being studied to suggest the important similarities and differences, focusing on those elements that stand out to you as critical. You may discover, for example, that the substantive strategies—those that deal primarily with content or the information conveyed—in one genre are themes about family or the expression of self-sacrifice. Stylistic strategies—those that deal largely with form and with “the pattern that orders the content or the physical manifestation of the message”40—may include elements such as adoption of a belligerent tone or use of ambiguous terminology.

Don’t be surprised, however, if you cannot really distinguish between substantive and stylistic strategies in many artifacts. Because content and form are typically intertwined, distinguishing between them is often difficult. You will discover, then, that many generic analyses do not make a distinction between these two sets of strategies and simply identify strategies in general. You also may choose to focus on units of analysis suggested in other critical methods such as fantasy-theme (chapter 5) or metaphoric criticism (chapter 9). Fantasy-theme criticism could be used at this stage of generic description to search for commonalities in depictions of characters, settings, and actions. Metaphoric criticism could be used to discover similarities among the various artifacts in the use of certain types of metaphors.

Let’s look at a couple of examples of genres to see what the substantive and stylistic features of them might be. The genre of narratives produced by survivors of breast cancer has several standard features. The narrative begins at the moment of the discovery of a lump in the breast, and it has a happy ending—the woman survives, often with some new awareness or insights about her life. The primary character is a woman who is well informed and responsible and who functions as a self-determining agent. She is shown battling the disease with humor and optimism (never despair and discouragement). She is encouraged to shop for certain products to support the cause of breast-cancer research and to engage in activities such as walking, running, or skydiving to contribute to that research. The genre focuses on the individual, who deals with her individual diagnosis, her individual rounds of chemotherapy, her individual struggle, and her individual survival. It does not deal with issues related to collective concerns such as the environmental carcinogens that might cause breast cancer or ways in which communities might prevent it.41

We can see other kinds of substantive and stylistic features in the genre of the email ballot. It is typically composed of three interrelated types of messages. The first is the ballot questionnaire, a message from one group member to others that lists and describes the issue on which group members are asked to vote. The opening message solicits participation, provides instructions on how to vote, provides a number of options for dealing with an issue, and sometimes includes the rhetor’s own preference for one of the options. The second type of message involved in the genre is responses to the ballot. Messages from members describe their voting choices and their reasons for the positions they are taking. Occasionally, they propose alternative ways of dealing with the issue from those initially proposed—suggesting a new location for the holiday party or a different kind of training for employees on a particular topic, for example. The third component is the ballot result, a message from the ballot initiator that summarizes the results of the voting. Also a part of the genre is that the results are not always decided by a raw vote count or a simple majority; the votes of some members of the group or team weigh more than others, and they may even have veto power over a decision made via the email ballot.42

The genre of corporate history provides another example of what might constitute substantive and stylistic strategies of a genre. This genre tells about the past of an organization in web pages, annual reports, promotional pamphlets, or the physical space of the organization’s headquarters. Among the features of the genre are that it focuses on events, which are typically presented in chronological order. The characters featured in the histories are the founder of the organization, the founder’s family, and the employees, and events such as wars or economic crises are often treated as characters as well. Competitors are rarely presented in the histories and are seen as less important to the story of the organization than the external conditions that have impacted the company such as wars or economic crises. The general plot line is a rags-to-riches story, with the organization overcoming obstacles of various kinds. Organizations make abundant use of photographs, archival documents, products, and logos as visual aids and supporting materials in these histories.43

Although she claims to be doing a homological analysis rather than a generic analysis because she is analyzing rhetorical practice across disparate forms, Kathryn M. Olson’s analysis of three forms of impersonal violence pro- vides another example of the kinds of substantive and stylistic features that may emerge from generic description. She asserts that the discourses of sport hunting, hate crimes, and stranger rape share a common interpretive frame- work: (1) the rhetor symbolically constructs and physically initiates an adversarial relationship with non-consenting victims/prey; (2) victims/prey are selected opportunistically and constructed impersonally as relatively inter- changeable class representatives; (3) rhetors distance and impersonalize victims/prey without objectifying them or diminishing their presumed potency or the status that comes from conquering them; and (4) rhetors express a desire to physically assert—and take pleasure in exhibiting—their dominance over the victims.44 Her framework uniting three forms of violence constitutes the substantive and stylistic features that generic description asks you to identify.

In the process of textual analysis to discover substantive and stylistic strategies, you may want to perform subsample comparisons of the artifacts you are investigating to identify subclasses of a genre. You may seek to determine, for example, if a genre of resignation rhetoric exists and, in the process, dis- cover variants of resignation rhetoric, each characterized by a somewhat different set of rhetorical strategies. You may need to distinguish, then, among various characteristics, seeing some as paradigm or prototypical cases of a genre, some as borderline cases, and some as characteristics of a subgenre.45 B. L. Ware and Wil A. Linkugel’s essay on speeches of apology is an example of the delineation of subgenres; they identify four different subgenres of apologetic discourse: absolutive, vindicative, explanative, and justificative.46

If you note sufficient similarities among your artifacts to continue the search for a genre, the fourth step in generic description is to formulate the organizing principle that captures the essence of the strategies common to the artifacts. In her analysis of Seinfeld, Beavis and Butt-head, and The Howard Stern Show as examples of a possible genre of humorous incivility, for example, Laura K. Hahn names “closure to new perspectives” as the organizing principle. What brings the shows’ substantive and stylistic characteristics together, she suggests, is an active resistance to diverse perspectives.47 This act of labeling the organizing principle actually may occur simultaneously with the delineation of substantive and stylistic strategies because the elements identified may come to your attention grouped around an obvious core or principle. Regardless of the order in which the steps occur, at the end of this process, you have formulated a list of rhetorical characteristics that appear to define a genre and an organizing principle that unites them.

You may have difficulty deciding whether or not a particular characteristic is a distinguishing feature of a genre. In such instances, the following questions will help you determine if it is one that contributes to a distinct genre:

• Can rules be named with which other critics or observers would concur in identifying characteristics of rhetorical practice when shown the same examples? Not only must the distinguishing features of a genre be nameable but so should the rules that are guiding you in making distinctions among the features in different artifacts. These rules, of course, do not specify precisely how the rhetorical act is to be performed. A genre is not formulaic because there is always another strategy that a rhetor can use to meet the requirements of the situation. But a genre establishes bounded options for rhetors in situations, and naming the rules that define those options can help clarify whether a characteristic is part of a genre or not.48

• Are the similarities in substantive and stylistic strategies clearly rooted in the situations in which they were generated? In other words, does the way in which the situation is defined require the inclusion of an element like this in the artifact? The mere appearance of one characteristic in several artifacts does not mean it was devised to deal with the same perceived situational constraints. Refer frequently to your description of the perceived situation to establish that the similarities are not simply coincidental but are grounded in the rhetor’s perception of some aspect of that situation.49

• Would the absence of the characteristic in question alter the nature of the artifact? A genre is created from a fusion of characteristics, and all are critical in the dynamic of that fusion. Simply saying that a certain element appears in all of the artifacts under study is not enough. A genre exists only if each element is fused to or intertwined with the other elements so its absence would alter the organizing principle. A genre is given its character by a fusion of forms and not by its individual elements.50

• Does the characteristic contribute to insight about a type of rhetoric or simply lead to the development of a classification scheme? The test of a genre is the degree of understanding it provides about the artifacts. Insight—and not neatness of a classification scheme—is your goal in generic description. If the discovery of similarities among artifacts classifies but does not clarify, it may not be particularly useful.51