Socio-cultural Approach To Genre Studies
In the 1980s, scholarship in genre theory and criticism has turned towards a socio-cultural approach to the study of genre by actively interrogating the rhetorical situation of a given communication artifact in light of its particular generic form. In this mode of inquiry, the rhetorical artifact is examined as a social response to a set of recurrent rhetorical exigencies rather than a collection of formal, generic elements. In the rhetorical tradition of genre criticism, Carolyn R. Miller's work on the socio-cultural approach to genre theory has been influential. Again in her 1984 book, Miller argues that “rhetorical criticism has not provided firm guidance on what constitutes a genre” and that a “rhetorically sound definition of genre must be centered not on the substance or the form of discourse but on the action it is used to accomplish”. Later, when Miller and Shepherd engaged the socio-cultural approach to genre criticism in “Blogging as Social Action: A Genre Analysis of the Weblog” (2004), they exposed some of the difficulties of applying genre theory to new media. In their analysis, Miller and Shepherd examine the extent to which the weblog might constitute a genre in light of its interaction with current social and cultural trends.
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