The Idea of an Essay, Volume 2

55 within its form. A primary component of genre’s definition is its response to a repeated rhetorical situation, which Bitzer defines as “a natural context of persons, events, objects, relations, and an exigence which strongly invites utterance” (5). Thus, a rhetorical situation is a condition that comes about through people, relationships, events, etc., which require some sort of oral or written response. For example, the death of a president creates a situation that requires a eulogy in response to the death. Upon further explanation of the response required by the situation, Bitzer states that “Rhetorical discourse comes into existence as a response to a situation, in the same sense that an answer comes into existence in response to a question, or a solution in response to a problem” (5). In essence, Bitzer is saying that a rhetorical situation is what brings genre into existence. Each rhetorical situation has an exigence, a need marked by urgency, which requires an apt response, just as the death of a president (the situation) requires a eulogy (the fitting response). As these situations are often repetitive, discourse communities have established specific, traditional, pragmatic and methodical responses to them. These fitting responses are genres. Thus, far from simply being a classification as some people might understandably argue “after all, the word genre, borrowed from the French, means “sort” or “kind” ” (Bawarshi 7), genres are firstly, an appropriate response to a specific situation. Having established that genres are fitting responses, it is then possible to refute another of the myths believed about genre’s definition. Some people believe that genre is identified purely by its form. For example, Stanley Fish asks, “How do you recognize a poem when you see one? The commonsense answer, to which many literary critics and linguists are committed, is that the act of recognition is triggered by the observable presence of distinguishing features. That is, you know a poem when you see one because its language displays the characteristics that you know to be proper to poems” (para 6). However, genre is defined by the interpretation of the reader. Fish illustrates this by using an experiment he did on some of his students who were studying religious poetry as an example. He put up a random list of names on the board, told his students it was a poem, and instructed them to devise its meaning: which they did elaborately. Fish uses this example as evidence that