#bawarshi

RGS (Rhetorical Genre Studies)

Carolyn Miller --> “[genres are] forms of social action” (58)

RGS explores “how genres enable their users to carry out situated symbolic actions…[and] to perform social actions and relations, enact social roles, and frame social realities” (59) AND ALSO “how genres, through their use, dynamically maintain, reveal tensions within, and help reproduce social practices and realities” (59)

CONTEXT→ reveals “communicative purpose(s), discourse community membership, genre nomenclature, or even genre chains and occluded genres”(59) → “viewed as an ongoing, intersubjective performance, one that is mediated by genres and other culturally available tools” (Bazerman’s “Textual Performance”) (59)

*With “intersubjective performance” in mind, how does Twitter engage on the level of performance? How do individuals convey identity and voice through manipulation of genre to address the rhetorical situation of their own construction? Is this move possible?*

RGS wants to know about “the role that genres play in how individuals experience, co-construct, and enact social practices and sites of activity” (59); “understanding contexts (and their performance) is both the starting point of genre analysis and its goal” (59)

Genre as action, verb, and noun: genres provide both tools and frameworks for navigating “‘the constant social construction of reality’” (Schryer citer in Bawarshi 60); genres “‘structure our management of time/space’” (same 60) →  Bakhtin’s literary chronotope

Is this extra true for digital genres?

Campbell and Jamieson → “situation demands… should serve as the basis for how we identify and define genres” (65); thus, genres emerge as needed, in dynamic relation to ongoing rhetorical situations and demands (often more static) (65)

Campbell and Jamieson → “‘a genre is composed of a constellation of recognizable forms bound together by an internal dynamic’... ‘[w]hat is distinctive about the acts in a genre is the recurrence of the forms together in constellation’” (20-21 qtd in Bawarshi 65)

C&J → genre is also a “cultural artifact” that marks the ways in which individuals engage with rhetorical culture at large; how these demands are perceived and how communities are formed from the accumulation of rhetorical demand/supply “‘in time and through time’” (C&J 26 qtd in Bawarshi 65); the dynamic nature of genre as reflexive groundswell can (and does) reveal cultural trends outside of the discipline

*how does Twitter reveal cultural trends? Through content? Uptick in insularity of community, RTs, <3s, etc.?*

Miller → meta-awareness of genre and rhetorical situations; “actions are inextricably tied to and based in interpretations” (70) and these interpretations are linked to cultural norming or typifications; “social construction of situation… [and] social construction of exigence” (70), exigence functions as a stripe of “‘social knowledge’” which is shared within a discourse community, thus variable across communities (Miller 30 qtd in Bawarshi 70).

“Our ability to recognize, make sense of, and respond to exigencies is part of our social knowledge, and part of how we come to shared agreements on what situations call for, what they mean, and how to act within them” (71), and, according to Miller, it is genre knowledge that allows us to “recognize situations as recurrent and… [to] provide the typified strategies we use to act within them” (71)

*how does Twitter frame these typifications, and how is genre awareness replicated and enforced by constraint, within communities, etc.?*