Miller's "Introduction"

Because I was assigned the latter portion of the document for my road mapping assignment, I chose to mainly focus on a breakdown of the “introduction,” so to speak, of Miller’s essay, in which she largely refers to numerous theorists, rhetoricians, and critics on the subject of genre. In her initial approach to the entire subject, Miller automatically throws out a plethora, an overload, it seems, for the reader.  Whether it is for credibility/ethos purposes, or simply to include the large amount of sources that she came across in her research, it seems extremely overwhelming for the initial paragraphs. Without giving a true definition or outline of her own theories on genre and use that as a springboard into her research, she seems to lay it all out in front of the reader and then use this knowledge (an extremely surface one at that) to lay down the rest of her claims in the following section(s).  Personally, I was unable to truly absorb and comprehend the vastness of the theories to which she was referring, and I was especially unable to place each theory with a name or duo, as each was complexly and "intertwiningly" referred to as the introduction progressed.

The slight attempts that Miller did make in stating her own claims and outlining some kind of picture as to the development of her piece were extremely poignant and seemed to stick with me as I continued to read (even if I did have to go back and reread/refresh here and there). My reaction to Miller’s thesis was stronger than I would have anticipated; as a writer and “rhetorical thinker,” (a phrase I seem to have just now possibly coined), and even, truly, as an Editing/Writing/Media student, I tend to project my interpretations, and even construct my interpretations, of situations, exigencies, and texts through a socially-focused lens. While the content may not speak to such, I personally feel that we, as human beings, are biologically and evolutionarily upheld as a species through social interaction and interpretation. Therefore, everything has a connotation.  

Miller’s thesis included that her “effort [would] elaborate the approach taken by Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson and support their position that genre study is valuable not because it might permit the creation of some kind of taxonomy, but because it emphasizes some social and historical aspects of rhetoric that other perspectives do not.” (Miller, 151) This is exactly what she is able to unpack in the latter portion of her essay, when lists, names, and disproving theorists with her own moderately vague definitions is no longer the objective.  In order to prove her theorists wrong, she addressed them initially off the bat, in order to get the names out of the way, and “get down to the nitty-gritty,” so to speak.