Miller and Bakhtin

For me, heteroglossia and Miller's explication of what a genre is felt as if they need to be put into conversation with one another.  Miller's genre is shown to be rooted in social exigences that are displaced from both the individual and from a concrete material object.  Therefore the exigence of a rhetorical situation can only be understood by looking at the overall social perspective and what "types" are being used to understand this situation.  In this I see a big similarity to the idea that language contains within itself multiple social discourses or "languages."  The types that Miller describes arise from the growth and understanding of languages.  Therefore shouldn't different genres arise from different social exigences and situations?
 
If the exigence of a rhetorical situation is rooted in social perspective and social perspective creates unique languages then doesn't this in turn limit the genre to one "language?"  This was something that I was trying to understand as I was reading Miller and trying to figure out whether genres can bleed into one another if this is true.  While I understand that genres should be understood as the connecting tissue that blends typified forms that are used to respond to situations;  aren't Bakhtin's languages still isolated from one another?  I'm confused even trying to understand this concept due to abstract it is but I think the point I'm trying to make is this: If language is created through social norms of cultural situations, then the genre cannot be an overall general classification because Miller's "types" are specific only to each "language."

Even if the genre is only the framework of a response to an exigence, the way that a person responds from one social norm will be different than that of another social norm.  I think that the fact that miller doesn't address this is a problem.  While her theory is sound I think that it fragments when taking this into consideration.  Her theory can still operate but it can operate within the different subsets that are operating within Heteroglossia.  I think that while genres can exist based on what Miller is saying I think that multiple social classifications can be added as a prefix to the genre.  Therefore each social language augments the genre into an entirely new genre based on language of certain group.  This is true because the nature of genre is rooted in social phenomena  and not in certain objective material truths.


Works Cited:

Bakhtin, Mikhail M. “Discourse in the Novel.” The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl
Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. 259-331.

Miller, Carolyn. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 151-169.