Miller recounts: Corder once told me: ‘All taxonomies leak.’ But instead of constructing a better ship with tighter compartments, he places dynamite into the leaking holes of every available taxonomy and genre category. Exploding cargo-holds disorients readers by disrupting their expectations, which hinge on the stability of well-defined genres. Miller specifically highlights Corder’s defiance of genre expectations within "Hunting Lieutenant Chadbourne", suggesting that “he fuses autobiography, postmodern rhetoric, and nineteenth-century American historiography”. The resulting concoction of mixed modes and blended genres makes the book as much of a history of Lt. Chadbourne as it is Corder’s argument against conventional academic discourse, particularly in the realm of historical research. Miller suggests that “to raid different genres and disciplines is to argue indirectly by prodding readers to ask: ‘What is going on?’”. That is, Corder wishes to challenge the ways that scholars conceive of and write about knowledge and history, and Hunting Lieutenant Chadbourne embodies both his critique and his argument for an alternative approach, one that “invite[s] a reader to share his process of contemplating and weighing. Just as he patiently explores a problem, he implicitly argues, so should a reader”. However, particularly because he eschews pre-established genre structures, “Corder generates momentum by creating the impression of thinking aloud,” which allows him to subvert “standard academic discourse by creating a sense of puzzling over a problem with a reader instead of handing her solutions”.