"PragerU as Genre: How Ideologies Typify Speech"
Download PDF About the AuthorChristopher Luis Shosted is a student at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA. He will graduate in May of 2020 with a B.A. in English and a certification in writing arts. Since enrolling at Moravian College in 2018, Christopher has focused on understanding the drives behind rhetorics that harm marginalized groups. He plans to continue his education through a Master’s and Ph.D program where he wishes to put rhetorical theory in conversation with literary studies. Contents |
Theories on GenreA rhetorical genre is more than a collection of typified action, speech, or writing. A genre is a genre based on the recurrent social situations rhetors face and the exigencies that those situations are in response to. While those genres may aid in individual understandings of discrete utterances or artifacts within those situations, there are significant cognitive processes that contribute to the creation of genres themselves. Carolyn Miller in her 1984 essay “Genre as Social Action” proposes that genre exists as a part of a hierarchy of meaning-making processes (162). This definition of genre is useful because it allows inferences to be made about how an audience extrapolates meaning from a rhetorical work. The typified structure of a genre guides an audience toward a desired response. For a genre to typify speech, it must be in response to recurrent rhetorical situation. This situation can be anything, so long as it is common enough. An electrician can be faced with a situation of warning other electricians quickly of the dangers of a live wire, so they shout out “It’s hot!” Within the genre of electrician-to-electrician discourse the exigence of a potential electrocution is enough to warrant a recurrent situation of warning others of that danger. That leads to specialization of language that at once is brief and evokes a common warning that everyone has encountered in the past. As Miller writes, “Situations are social constructs that are the result, not of ‘perception,’ but of ‘definition.’ Because human action is based on and guided by meaning, not by material causes, at the center of action is a process of interpretation” (158). To understand a genre, the rhetorician must understand not only the exigence, but the interpretation of that exigence by the rhetor. The interpretation of an exigence is tied to Charles Bazerman’s description of social facts. A social fact is similar to ideology, but whereas an ideology is a lens through which we interpret the world around us, a social fact is information once it passes through that lens. Bazerman writes, “social facts bear on subjects that are primarily matters of social understanding, such as whether or not a mayor has authority to make certain decisions and act in a certain way. That authority is based on a series of historically developed political, legal, and social understandings, arrangements, and institutions” (312). The response to an exigence has ties to ideology, therefore, a rhetor’s ideology can be inferred through analysis of the response. In the case of a genre, the recurrent situations imply widespread, even hegemonic ideologies that prevail throughout those who practice and consume that genre. Social facts influence our responses to exigencies, therefore if a rhetor’s goal is to change the behavior of an audience, it requires a changing of the social facts held by an audience. Ideologically motivated rhetoric requires the rhetor to make claims addressing problematic social facts and support an argument regarding why those social facts are false. In addition to typifying speech, genres continually promote themselves, in part, because typified speech leads to typified responses (Bazerman 316). Genres offer a layer of subtext through the area they occupy on Miller’s hierarchy. An audience intuits what genre discourse belongs to and adjusts their response accordingly. Bazerman notes that speech acts involve three stages: a phase of locution and proposition, the message intended within that locution (known as the illocutionary act), and the consequences, or perlocutionary effect, that the act had on the audience (314). Genre offers a fast-lane between the illocutionary act and perlocutionary effect. Proper knowledge of genre allows a rhetor to augur the consequences of their rhetoric, though these predictions are not uniform. While discursive acts do fit into particular genres, they also act in concert with other genres in genre sets and genre systems as a form of social activity (Bazerman 317-319). Within the frame of social activity, genres dictate roles and appropriate responses. The mere use of a genre suggests that the speaker possesses a certain amount of knowledge and authority that comes with that genre’s use. According to Bazerman, an individual will engage with multiple genres in the capacity of their role, and those genres will comprise a set as well as operate within an organized system of discourse generated by others (318). An understanding of the genre system that an artifact is composed within allows the researcher to better determine the context and exigencies that shaped the rhetorical action itself, or as Bazerman states: “In defining the system of genres people engage in you also identify a framework which organizes their work, attention, and accomplishment” (319). For research purposes, a genre is understood holistically in terms of where it appears, how it prompts further rhetorical action, and what those relationships mean for the genre in question. It is easy to think of genres as the nexuses where a rhetor melds exigence, situation, ideology, and purpose to create an utterance, yet an algorithmic understanding of genres lacks a way to understand their fluidity and the ways rhetors adapt and re-establish them. Anne Freadman in her essay “Anyone for Tennis” refers to this as the “recipe theory of genre” (46). She instead advocates for an understanding of genres rooted in the use of “like-statements” to understand the class of a genre, and also “not-statements” to understand the meaningful distinctions between discursive actions (49-50). These differences include the settings the texts are situated in and the discursive features they possess. But while a researcher with a critical eye could spot these differences, there is substantial room for error as texts circulate through public spaces. The problem with understanding genre is that determining what genre a particular rhetorical work belongs to is subjective. For example, in 1964 the Supreme Court of the United States heard the case of Jacobellis v. Ohio, which alleged that the French film The Lovers was pornographic and therefore violated federal obscenity laws. The court ruled that the film was not obscene, and Justice Potter Stewart wrote in his concurring opinion that: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [of pornography], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that” (italics added). While Justice Stewart may have deemed the film to not be pornographic, it does not negate the actions of the Ohio government who prosecuted the plaintiff for distributing what they deemed to be obscene material. This court case hinged on determining what genre The Lovers belonged to – pornography or art. Within the “I know it when I see it” test exists a large room for error. An audience intuits what genre a rhetorical work belongs to, but which features determine that genre can be difficult to define beyond a personal level. The result of this is that a rhetorical work can masquerade as another genre if the rhetor chooses to deceive their audience. |