We always understand genres, Anne Freadman has usefully explained, as alike, but different from, other genres. Adding to this, a central feature of genre use is its dialogicity (from Mikhail Bakhtin, obviously): uses of genre arise as responses to, or uptakes of, previous genre use, and in turn try to secure what kind (genre) of response it will get; in almost all cases without ever being able to fully secure it beforehand. There's always the free action of the next agent to contend with.
Forensic Linguistics addresses criminal threats, a highly pertinent subject—which is, alas, of increasing importance. However, there's another side to threats which is not as important to Forensic Linguistics but interesting and relevant in other contexts. Many of these other kinds of threats are legal, and some of them are even useful—or fun. But I get ahead of myself.
Threats, research states (the references are in the article above), consist of three elements.
Futurity
Sender's responsibility
Recipient's harm
As in "I (sender) shall (futurity) do (responsibility) this bad thing (harm) to you (recipient)". The purpose of the threat is intimidation. There may be other purposes, but this one is overriding. A threat is usually made illegal by the character of the harm it threatens to cause. If someone threatens you with public rebuke, it may be unpleasant, but it's not usually illegal; if they threaten you with a beating, it's illegal, because the beating is.
As a genre researcher originating from the field of literature I've been interested in how rhetorical genres are recontextualized and used as elements in fictions. This goes for threats too. Fictive threats confirm to other threat except for one thing: They don't exist; or rather they exist as parts of a fiction and as such the proposed harm is also fictive. Thus, they don't really intimidate anyone outside the fiction, or at least they are not meant to, and reporting them to various authorities is a failure of genre. Let us call them not-threats for the sake of the distinction and recalling Freadman's distinct idea of the not-statement which, to be meaningful, must imply a similarity as well as a difference. Thus, it is meaningful to say that a refrigerator is not a deep freezer, but it is almost never meaningful to say that it is not a rhinoceros—true as the statement may be, it conveys very little information.
One more (well-known) piece of information about threats: They are prevalent on social media; very often as part of a pattern of abuse and harassment, and thus usually reportable per Terms & Services on the various SoMe platforms. Also making threats will usually get you kicked off the site—unless, of course, you happen to be a patently useless American president—because then you need to actually attempt (AND fail) to overthrow Western democracy in order to get shut down.
All of this brings me to Blate. This is his portrait.
A really good-looking helmet, would you not say? And also an account on twitter—or a series of accounts as you shall see.
I don't actually know who the operator of the accounts is, and it really doesn't matter. Blate, in his various instantiations, is a person on twitter pretending to be not a secret agent but a Bretwalda, that is an old Saxon king from around the 8th century. Aside from some sharp, but fairly centrist, political commentary, Blate engages in behavior fitting of a fairly badly informed and definitely not very civilized Saxon lord. He fights Danes, in fact many of my interactions with him are about precisely this. Sometimes he resists Danish occupation of English territory, The Danelaw, or anachronistically shells Copenhagen (as in 1807). He also lumps Swedes, Norwegians and Finns as "Danes" while he is at it and calls his (equally fictive) housecarls "TO THE SHIELDWALL" when he sees a "Danish" flag; even if it's white with a light blue cross. Also, he has a long standing battle with another twitter account concerning the right order of jam and cream on a scone. They are approaching 500 almost consecutive days of battle as I write this. The nickname "Blate", btw, is derived from one of his earlier forms where his twitter handle was @BlatantLie.
Not recognizing him as a role-playing account is a failure of genre.
Enter threats. Or rather not-threats. Befitting a warfaring, somewhat uncivilized, Bretwalda he frequently threatens to behead people. Now, given that he is a fictive character acting as Saxon lord, this is hardly very intimidating. And his twitter-correspondents all expect to be challenged to a duel to the death by axe or by scone. Formally speaking, the statements fit the threat as genre; as in "I Bretwalda (sender) shall (futurity) do (responsibility) the beheading thing by scone or battle-axe (harm) to you (recipient)". However, the point isn't intimidation (or rather: the intimidation is fictive), so all his correspondents invite his threats on purpose and take them up as lovely occasions for witticism. These are not-threats. Taking them as threats is a failure of genre.
And yet, SoMe being what it is, sometimes it happens. Somebody, possibly many people, stop by and report the not-threats as threats to twitter. The uptake transforms the not-threat to a threat, even though no one was ever threatened, much less intimidated. And the Bretwalda, just being an long-dead Saxon lord and not a criminal American president, gets suspended. This, of course, is a failure of Twitter's safety team in interpreting the full communicative action and context, the full genre use, of the not-threats, but given just how many reports they have to handle I can see how it happens.
And Blate comes back. Always with his beautiful helmet and his quirky demeanor to do battle against the Danes and for jam before cream on a scone. Until the next time someone fails to recognize the distinction and interplay between two genres that are alike yet so so different. The threat and the not-threat.
The epithome of a high-impact article in my field is Carolyn Miller's "Genre as Social Action" from 1984. It is to a wide extent the center piece of genre research. It is so influential that you cannot simply insert it into an article as "Miller (1984)". You have to call it something along the line of "Miller's groundbreaking/trailblazing/influential/seminal 1984-study".
You don't write that just to pay homage (though homage is indeed due), but more to demonstrate that you know the field well enough to be aware that this is the study you have to pay homage to. It's sort of a rite of passage.
Moreover, with too many texts to read and too little time to read them, it is also an excellent shibboleth to protect your time. If a text on genre does not have Miller on its bibliography, it is well-nigh certain that it's not worth your time to read. Miller may be replaced by a solid line-up of other central genre researchers, Freadman, Devitt, Bakhtin, Bazerman, Schryer, and others (see, for instance, this list), but still, there is a kind of vacuum present in a genre research-article that does not somehow quote Miller.
So, the article is as influential as such things ever get. However, the article's impact wasn't immediate. It would require a thorough bibliometric tracking to trace its full reception history, but insofar as I have been able to determine, "Genre as Social Action" did not conquer the center stage until after the publication of another crucial work, Aviva Freedman and Peter Medway's anthology Genre and the New Rhetoric. It did have quite a lot of happy readers before that, but Freedman and Medway's anthology seems to mark the turning point after which Miller's study had become so crucial it could no longer be simply "Miller (1984)".
So, the question presents itself: When do you know that a study is high-impact? If you measure a study's impact as something taking place within a certain window, how do you know that you actually have the right window? If high-impact is what you are looking for, then to a certain extent you cannot even know when a study is taken up and suddenly gets hurled towards the academic stardom of the "trailblazing" study?
This is particularly relevant since funding bodies, promotion commitees etc will look to promote researcher's who can make an impact, but often this means that anything older than, say five, years, is counted less because it does not reflect the current stature of the researcher, and its impact is already in the past.
But don´t trust the administrators. (Quoth the administrator). Research itself seems to be a much more patient endeavor, and in particular within the Humanities the possibility always remains that somewhere a long time ago, somebody wrote just that article that will blaze your trail, break your ground, or be your seminal influence.
Oh, and if you are interested in narratives, I did a slightly backwards, literary homage to Miller here.
A very learned friend just now asked me a pertient question of cross-disciplinary research communication. She asked:
If you were giving a reading on our rhetorical view of genres for literary doctoral students, what would you consider giving them?
That is indeed a very good question. There is no standard text and no standard curriculum to work from. So what would my curriculum look like. Leaving aside any of my own texts that might apply, this is my suggestion for a minimal reading list:
Bakhtin, M. M.
(1986). The Problem of Speech Genres (V. W. McGee, Trans.). In C. Emerson &
M. Holquist (Eds.), Speech Genres and
Other Late Essays (pp. 60-102). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bazerman, C. (2002). What Activty Systems Are Literary Genres Part
of? Readerly/Writerly Texts, 10(1
& 2), 97-106.
Devitt, A. (2000). Integrating Rhetorical and Literary Theories of
Genre. College English, 6, 698-718.
Devitt, A. (2009). Re-fusing form in genre study. In J. Giltrow
& D. Stein (Eds.), Genres in the
Internet (pp. 27–47). Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Freadman, A. (2002). Uptake. In R. Coe, L. Lingard, & T.
Teslenko (Eds.), The Rhetoric and
Ideology of Genre (pp. 39-53). Cresskill Hampton Press Inc.
Miller, C. (1984). Genre as Social Action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 70(2), 151-167.
Miller, C. (2017). "Where do Genres Come From". In C.
Miller & A. R. Kelly (Eds.), Emerging
Genres in New Media Environments (pp. 1-34). Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Paré, A. (2002). Genre and Identity: Individuals, Institutions, and
Ideology. In R. Coe, L. Lingard, & T. Teslenko (Eds.), The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre (pp. 57-71). Cresskill: Hampton
Press Inc.
The
list is made specifically with literary PhDs in mind. There are three main
considerations involved:
I want my students to read texts central to the RGS-tradition
I want to connect to knowledge they already have
I want them to find their reading relevant and to stay interested
So why these texts? Here are a few of the reasons for each.
Bakhtin's text is the only text in the batch with a claim to literary studies. And his name is known to literary scholars. So it's a good way to connect the two fields. There are, of course, reasons why this text has had a long history in RGS. It is immensely inspiring and full of starting points for discussions of central points in RGS; genre use, genre variance, interlocking of genre, the lingustic basis for genre etc etc.
Bazerman would definitely be represented by another text if I were to just teach RGS, and not RGS to literary PhDs. He, or at least one of his peers, (Russel or Andersen come to mind), should be here to represent the sociologically oriented side of RGS. I choose this one for the literary PhDs, because it deals with literary subject matter, is a quick read, and will annoy them constructively.
Devitt is the RGS researcher who has engaged most prominently with literary studies. Again: other texts might be more viable if I were to just teach RGS, but for literary PhDs I choose these two. The first, because it brilliantly represents the potential for dialogue between literary studies and RGS. (And also displays an actual interest in literature.) The second, challenges some of the basic assumptions in RGS, in a progressive and constructive way. This will accomodate some of the more critical views that a literary PhD would be likely to hold in approaching RGS, and thus open up the conversation
Freadman is quite a headache. You can´t do contemporary RGS without her concept of "uptake". And to do RGS proper you´d want to have PhDs read "Anyone for Tennis?". But getting a grip on "uptake" is hard enough, without having to actually grasp that text. The 2002-article is, of course, less of a heavyweight in terms of influence and originality, but it is much more accessible.
Miller, yeah you have to do Miller. It's just not RGS without "Genre as Social Action". So, grap those recurrent situations for a rhetorically sound definition of humble de facto genre. Then, send a loving thought to Campbell and Jamieson, and go do some social action. The 2017 text is interesting, not just because it's excellent, but also because I have had several literary colleagues recommend it to me already, so has already struc a bell with some literary reseachers. Moreover, I personally like it because Miller returns a little bit to one of my own favorite books on genre, Alastair Fowler's ultra-literary Kinds of Literature which IMHO is long overdue for a renaissance.
Finally, Paré's text. It is one of a batch of texts that work with the dangers inherent in the ideological nature of genre; the way genres control how we think and how we can act, even if this does not reflect reality, or our own best interests. There are several other options on this point, but I like this one, not just because it is a pleasant read, but also because it is very very sharp.
So that would be my bid. Other suggestions are welcome.
