Miller on Miller

I feel as though Miller and myself have more than just a last name in common. In the first paragraphs of this text she states that rhetoric in general hasn’t done a great job of providing guidance in the way of genre because there are so many differing definitions its hard to nail down what determining a genre is really even doing.  She quotes theorists like John H. Patton and Thomas M. Conley, citing how they have found that “genre criticism requires too much critical distance between the reader and the text and thus leads to assessments that are not fully responsible.”(151) I think what she is really trying to get at by quoting them is that genre criticism is convoluted by inaccurate assessments because most readers aren’t qualified, or don’t have the ability to maintain that critical distance. She says it’s not important to merely make something different from something else but that “It emphasizes social and historical aspects of rhetoric that other perspectives do not” (151).

I like that she favors a pragmatic approach over the syntactic or semantic because she really avoids all the unneeded clutter in the formation of the criticism.  This is where I really start to feel a personal connection. I battle everyday with what I like to term as “technical clutter” when I’m around children, but as I find myself mostly around adults in the sweaty atmosphere of a martial arts gym I bring it even closer to reality with the phrase “cutting out the bullshit”.  I favor the pragmatic approach because nothing, to me, is more factual than what I can actually connect too in real life.  Miller states “In sum, what I am proposing so far is that in rhetoric the term “genre” be limited to a particular type of discourse classification, a classification bases on rhetorical practice and consequently open rather than closed and organized around situated actions”.  (155)

This is exactly how I would approach a convoluted aspect of the martial arts.  One of my students actually asked me this question tonight, “when I’m sparring my front kick is landing on my opponent, but instead of using the ball of my foot like you taught me, I tend to land with the heel, how can I fix this?” To which I replied, “there is one primary goal to that kick; to create distance between you and your opponent to give yourself space to move, is that happening when you kick?” He replied in the affirmative and I told him that there is no need to change the kick.

He convoluted the details because he lacks the critical distance from the technique and the experience to understand that he is still accomplishing the goals. Defining rhetorical genre is a bit more technical but still finds it rooted to the external events.  What I see her doing here can be summed up by running through this same typical dialogue I find myself running through with my students; what should rhetorical genre (the front kick) be doing? Is it doing it? What complicates it? Here’s why we need to change it (its not creating distance; its not emphasizing rare social and historical aspects) and how to do it based on how I see it working in the real world.  

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