Noone would bring this matter up for the sake of producing some free-floating genre theory in the middle of July. What is called for is an explication of theory which, supposedly, is already there. My implied genre theory simply needs to be taken seriously - by me, as I do realize that the genre perspective is fundamental to my approach.
It is a critical point in itself that I adopt a genre perspective on rhetorical artefacts which rather seem to call for something like auteur theory. I have singled out two writing auteurs, Wallraff and Thompson, who have each established their own personal brands of journalism: wallraffing and gonzo journalism. Hitherto they have been recognized for having as much in common as a somehow alternative approach to reporting which in both cases includes participant observation. Individually they have been hailed as original while the many colleagues that they've somehow inspired are often ridiculed as poor wannabes. And what I've done is ----- okay, I'll just be quoting my own English summary now:
This dissertation [Writer Who Make a Scene] argues for establishing spectacular personal reportage as a subgenre [of creative nonfiction] based on wallraffing and gonzo journalism as rhetorical patterns which include a common ethos based on a belief in the individual (and revealed) rhetorical agency of the reporter.
Through close readings [...] of texts by Wallraff and Thompson alongside texts by some of their prominent Danish successors (Michael Elsborg, Allan Nagel, Mads Brügger, Jakob S. Boeskov, Morten Sabroe, Claus Beck-Nielsen, Michael Jeppesen, and Flemming Chr. Nielsen), the dissertation highlights a number of rhetorical pitfalls regarding the writer’s presentation of self and enactment of agency.
Generally, however, an argument is made for recognizing this subgenre as a potential stronghold for rhetorical agency in the print media. More specifically, [...] the texts are read as performances of critical and mediatory epideictic work-in-progress. Each writer sets out to experimentally establish some common ground between the social situation in the field on the one hand and the rhetorical situation on the other. They seek, sometimes almost desperately, to affirm and exemplify basic standards of journalism or human interaction, in a substandard world.
All of the reporters in question pose as being more independent, alternative, sensitive and creative than reporters in general, and studying them as belonging to the same tradition and genre makes it possible for me to point out what is in fact traditional and typical about them and what counts as a more or less interesting variation or transformation of the personal&spectacular form. The genre perspective has supplied me with some sort of standard for making critical judgments - and I am being normative in my readings.
What has perhaps prevented me from discussing genre theory as such is precisely the overlap with my discussion of both rhetorical imitation and rhetorical tradition (in the latter I take my cue from Michael Leff's Tradition and Agency in Humanistic Rhetoric). Both of these discussions are similarly concerned with the writers' way of dealing with their rhetorical precursors and their being constituted by some sort of formal tradition.
So now I'm back to vague.
What if someone asked: What is a genre?
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