RGS on Genre Formation
RGS thinks of genre as “rhetorically and socially dynamic, ‘stabilized for now’ (Schryer, “Genre and Power”), ideological, performative, intertextual, socio-cognitive, and responsive to and also constructive of situations” (61) and has thus questioned the relevance of explicit genre instruction without a socio-political element, or recognition of “‘interactionally produced worlds’” (Bazerman qtd in Bawarshi and Reiff 61).
Burke → “rhetoric is a form of symbolic action” (61)
Rhetoric is also “contingent and dynamic” on the relationship b/w rhetor and addressee, specifically w/ relation to identity, and flux of identity too (61)
*so how does this link to the specific rhetorical situation of the Twitter Bio?*
Rhetorical situations “call… forth rhetorical discourse” (63)
Bitzer → “‘power of situation to constrain a fitting response’” (qtd in Bawarshi 64); “‘rhetorical forms are born [through recurrence] and a special vocabulary, grammar, and style are established...the tradition itself tends to function as a constraint upon any new response in the form’” (Bitzer qtd in Bawarshi and Reiff 64)
*how does digital rhetorical interact with this notion of constraint? This seems a chicken-egg argument, since rhetorical situations demand generic responses but at what point is a new genre uncovered/established? Become canonic?*
