Miller (1994b) asserted that many genre researchers had been looking for communities as groups either unified demographically or geographically (e.g., classrooms, civic task forces, hobby groups, academic conferences, and so on). The rhetorical community, as Miller (1994b) calls it, “works in part through genre . . . as the operational site of joint, reproducible social actions, the nexus between private and public, singular and recurrent, micro and macro” (p. 73) and “it is this inclusion of sameness and difference, of us and them . . . that makes a community rhetorical, for rhetoric in essence requires both agreement and dissent, shared understanding and novelty . . . . In a paradoxical way, a rhetorical community includes ‘the other’” (p. 74). The rhetorical community does not have the same comfortable and homogeneous qualities as Swales’ discourse community—Miller characterizes it “as fundamentally heterogeneous and contentious” (p. 74).
Posted on: Sun, 13 Jul 2014 04:22:40 +0000
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