“Making something new”: rethinking genre in the end times

ABSTRACT

Rhetorical Genre Studies has been a productive subfield of communication studies since the 1980s, with the conceptualization of “apocalyptic” as a genre being one influential outcome. Literature on the topic has explored apocalypse as a genre arising to make sense of destabilizing events that fit within no pre-existing symbolic framework. I join this conversation with a slight shift in focus, from the genre itself to the destabilization that occasions it and its potential for rhetorical invention. Picking up on Lauren Berlant’s theorization of the “genre flail,” I argue that the flail can be an ambivalent and productive rhetorical space where reparative and radical rhetorics may gain ground in addition to or beyond apocalyptic and violent alternatives. My case study in end times here is the global climate crisis as depicted in the 2018 film Annihilation. Through rhetorical analysis of the film’s mixed-genre style and ambivalent narrative, I define two possible readings of the film: as diagnostic and as social ecology. These dual readings demonstrate the creativity of genre flail, its potential as a rhetorical zone of innovation, and the importance of interrogating the destructive and reparative genres of practice it produces as potential ways of living-with environmental end times.

KEYWORDS:

• Rhetorical Genre Studies
• Anthropocene
• apocalyptic rhetoric
• science fiction
• genre flail

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dilip Gaonkar for his guidance in revising this manuscript. She is also grateful to the reviewers and entire editorial team for the effort and time put into bringing this article to publication.

Notes

1 Lauren Berlant, “Genre Flailing,” Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry 1, no. 2 (2018): 157.

2 A helpful example of what flailing looks like can be taken from Berlant’s interest in what she calls “critical humorlessness,” as within literary criticism. Humorlessness, she argues, is a rigidity of thought represented equally in political correctness and in antipolitical-correctness conservative backlash. It is not defined by a particular style or politics, but by a “polemic against polemic” (“Genre Flailing,” 159) approach that guards its own precious object (e.g., postcritique) by destroying the objects of others (e.g., the value of traditional literary criticism). Humorlessness is thus one example of the tactics genre flail elicits to attempt to stabilize an object-world.

3 Northtrup Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 95.

4 Carolyn R. Miller, “Genre as Social Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70, no. 2 (1984): 155.

5 Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Rhetorical Hybrids: Fusions of Generic Elements,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68, no. 1 (1982): 146.

6 Miller, “Genre as Social Action.”

7 Katie L. Gibson, “A Rupture in the Courtroom: Collective Rhetoric, Survivor Speech, and the Subversive Limits of the Victim Impact Statement,” Women’s Studies in Communication 44, no. 4 (2021): 518–41; Christine M. Tardy, “A Genre System View of the Funding of Academic Research,” Written Communication 20, no. 1 (2003): 7–36; Wallace McNeish, “From Revelation to Revolution: Apocalypticism in Green Politics,” Environmental Politics 26, no. 6 (2017): 1035–54.

8 Berlant, “Genre Flailing,” 157.

9 Ibid.

10 Here I am using “object” in line with Berlant’s definition, that of the “anchoring interest” (“Genre Flailing,” 162) that organizes action and genre as social practice.

11 Barry Brummett, “Using Apocalyptic Discourse to Exploit Audience Commitments through ‘Transfer,’” Southern Communication Journal 54, no. 1 (1988): 59.

12 This is in keeping with Barry Brummett’s reflection that in “future research,” the apocalyptic may be seen as an umbrella term containing multiple subgenres of crisis response that can be subversive or oppressive in nature (“Premillennial Apocalyptic as a Rhetorical Genre,” Communication Studies 35, no. 2 [1984]: 86). I am following a similar logic but keeping “apocalyptic” to mean the specific genre Brummett names and taking up Berlant’s “genre flail” to describe the umbrella rhetorical phenomenon, which is not a genre but a collection of genre experiments.

13 Berlant, “Genre Flailing,” 157.

14 I am defining “end times” not by the material trappings of apocalypse (i.e., fire and brimstone), but by a widespread sentiment that current ways of living are losing their functionality at an unbearably quick pace. As Brummett writes, the distinguishing factor in the onset of genres like the apocalyptic is “not crisis itself but a failure of received ways of coping with crisis” (“Premillennial Apocalyptic as a Rhetorical Genre,” 87). This is what differentiates the genre flail from reactions to more mundane instances of crisis and disaster. The tornado that levels a town certainly has a monumental impact on the emotional and physical lives of the people who live there; that loss is real and unbearable. But the basic rubrics for living, the genres defining the community predisaster, are not necessarily threatened. In fact, the genre conventions of a given community might strengthen in the wake of disaster: the rhetoric of condolence and charity, the fundraising, the reliance on the importance of the family, the sense of community itself, etc. This is also a matter of scale and privilege. What is an end times for one community may be a tragic loss that still fits within the prevailing genres of the larger culture in which that community exists. This is a fundamental logic under colonialism, for example, wherein the extermination of Indigenous peoples can fit seamlessly within the nationalist genre of manifest destiny.

15 Berlant, “Genre Flailing,” 157.

16 Jennifer M. Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 25.

17 Berlant, “Genre Flailing,” 157.

18 Brian Tallerico, “Annihilation,” Roger Ebert, February 23, 2018, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/annihilation-2018.

19 Todd McCarthy, “‘Annihilation’: Film Review,” The Hollywood Reporter, February 21, 2018, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/annihilation-review-1085770.

20 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London: Routledge, 2012), 245.

21 Tallerico, “Annihilation.”

22 Joshua Gunn and David E. Beard, “On the Apocalyptic Sublime,” Southern Communication Journal 65, no. 4 (2000): 270.

23 Vivian Sobchack, Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 61.

24 Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (1991): 4.

25 Andrew Tudor, “Why Horror? The Peculiar Pleasures of a Popular Genre,” in Horror: The Film Reader, ed. Mark Jancovich (London: Routledge, 2002), digital edition, n.p.

26 Berlant, “Genre Flailing,” 157.

27 Sobchack, Screening Space, 30.

28 Brummett, “Premillennial Apocalyptic as a Rhetorical Genre,” 88.

29 Sobchack, Screening Space, 61.

30 Jinthana Haritaworn, “Decolonizing the Non/Human,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2015): 211.

31 Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 81.

32 McNeish, “From Revelation to Revolution.”

33 Ibid., 1047.

34 Sobchack, Screening Space, 64.

35 Kim Tallbear, “Caretaking Relations, Not American Dreaming,” Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies 6, no. 1 (2019): 24–41.

36 Brummett, “Premillennial Apocalyptic as a Rhetorical Genre,” 85.

37 Sobchack, Screening Space, 30.

38 Barker, The Tactile Eye, 49.

39 Brummett, “Premillennial Apocalyptic as a Rhetorical Genre,” 90.

40 Tallbear, “Caretaking Relations,” 36.

41 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 284 emphases added.

42 Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Performing Critical Interruptions: Stories, Rhetorical Invention, and the Environmental Justice Movement,” Western Journal of Communication 65, no. 1 (2001): 1–25.

43 Kim TallBear, “An Indigenous Reflection on Working beyond the Human/Not Human,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, nos. 2–3 (2015): 230–35; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015); Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

44 Annihilation, written and directed by Alex Garland (Hollywood, CA: Paramount, 2018), DVD; Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).

45 “About,” Jeff VanderMeer, accessed June 1, 2021, https://www.jeffvandermeer.com/.

46 Alex Bhattacharji, “The Visionary Director of ‘Ex Machina’ Addresses the Controversy Surrounding His New Film,” Wall Street Journal Magazine, February 15, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/alex-garland-stands-by-his-vision-for-annihilation-1518706659; “Alex Garland,” IMDB, accessed June 1, 2021, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0307497/.