Given the richness of the concept of genre, it is no wonder that many approaches to understanding and teaching genre have developed, in many regions of the world. This volume provides an informed and thoughtful introduction to all of these approaches and provides means for understanding their relation as well as pursuing deeper study of each. I am deeply appreciative for the work of the authors and am confident you will find their work useful as you explore the meaning of genre for yourselves as writers, as teachers of writing, and as students of the wonder of human communicative accomplishment.
Acknowledgments
As we developed this book, we benefited greatly from the vibrant intellectual community of scholars in Rhetorical Genre Studies, many of whom are featured in this book. We especially thank Chuck Bazerman, the editor of this series and a renowned genre scholar, for his generous feedback and invaluable, expert advice. His careful reading and insightful responses have made this a much better book, helping us to tighten the manuscript and pushing us to consider and to integrate additional perspectives on genre, including international perspectives.
A special thanks to our friend, colleague, and mentor, Amy Devitt, whose seminar in genre theory at the University of Kansas in 1994 initiated and inspired our interest in genre and whose rich body of scholarship on genre and collaborative endeavors with us (conference presentations, articles, and a textbook on genre) have informed and enriched our understanding of genre.
In addition, we have had the good fortune of working with truly exceptional graduate students who have contributed to and deepened our investigations and understanding of genre over the years, with a special thanks to the students in the Spring 2008 genre theory seminar (English 564) at the University of Washington. We are also indebted to our research teams at the University of Tennessee and the University of Washington, without whose collaboration we could not have carried out a large, cross-institutional empirical study of genre learning: Bill Doyle, Cathryn Cabral, Sergio Casillas, Rachel Goldberg, Jennifer Halpin, Megan Kelly, Melanie Kill, Shannon Mondor, and Angela Rounsaville.
We would also like to thank Rebecca Longster for her skilled copy-editing and careful and thorough reading of our manuscript and David Blakesley for his guidance through this project and for his superb editing and production of the book. A special thanks also to Melanie Kill, who generously contributed a comprehensive glossary and annotated bibliography.
Additionally, we are grateful for the institutional support we have received from our department heads, Chuck Maland and Gary Handwerk, as well as our colleagues at the University of Tennessee and University of Washington. Our project was funded in part by the Office of Research Exhibit, Performance, and Publication Expenses (EPPE) Fund, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the John C. Hodges Better English Fund at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, for which we are thankful.
We are especially grateful to our families for their patience and encouragement as we completed this project. For Mary Jo, a special thanks to Dan; and for Anis, a special thanks to Amy, and to Daliah and Aden.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we thank each other. We completed this project while both of us were serving as Writing Program Administrators and directing large programs. But despite the challenges of finding the time and energy to pursue this project, the collaborative process kept us going, creating a shared commitment and intellectual energy that would have been much more difficult to muster on our own. This shared intellectual vision—along with a lot of laughter and good humor—inspired and motivated us to persevere.
1 Introduction and Overview
Over the past thirty years, researchers working across a range of disciplines and contexts have revolutionized the way we think of genre, challenging the idea that genres are simple categorizations of text types and offering instead an understanding of genre that connects kinds of texts to kinds of social actions. As a result, genres have become increasingly defined as ways of recognizing, responding to, acting meaningfully and consequentially within, and helping to reproduce recurrent situations. This idea of genres as typified rhetorical ways of interacting within recurring situations (Miller, “Genre as Social Action”) has had a profound impact on the study and teaching of writing. Researchers and teachers working across borders (North America, Australia, Brazil, France and Switzerland), across disciplines (applied linguistics, TESOL, rhetoric, composition studies, technical communication, critical discourse analysis, sociology, education, literary theory), and across grade levels and contexts (primary, secondary, post-secondary as well as professional and public writing) have explored the analytical and pedagogical implications of genre in ways that reveal genres as significant variables in literacy acquisition. In order to consider what a genre approach to the study and teaching of writing means and how it can best be implemented, this book examines the various traditions that have shaped our understanding of genre, and how these traditions have informed work in genre research and pedagogy.
Despite the wealth of genre scholarship over the last thirty years, the term genre itself remains fraught with confusion, competing with popular theories of genre as text type and as an artificial system of classification. Part of the confusion has to do with whether genres merely sort and classify the experiences, events, and actions they represent (and are therefore conceived of as labels or containers for meaning), or whether genres reflect, help shape, and even generate what they represent in culturally defined ways (and therefore play a critical role in meaning-making). Interestingly, these competing views of genre are reflected in the etymology of the word genre, which is borrowed from French. On the one hand, genre can be traced, through its related word gender, to the Latin word genus, which refers to “kind” or “a class of things.” On the other hand, genre, again through its related word gender, can be traced to the Latin cognate gener, meaning to generate. The range of ways genre has been defined and used throughout its history reflects its etymology. At various times and in various areas of study, genre has been defined and used mainly as a classificatory tool, a way of sorting and organizing kinds of texts and other cultural objects. But more recently and, again, across various areas of study, genre has come to be defined less as a means of organizing kinds of texts and more as a powerful, ideologically active, and historically changing shaper of texts, meanings, and social actions. From this perspective, genres are understood as forms of cultural knowledge that conceptually frame and mediate how we understand and typically act within various situations. This view recognizes genres as both organizing and generating kinds of texts and social actions, in complex, dynamic relation to one another.
Such a dynamic view of genre calls for studying and teaching genres beyond only their formal features. Instead, it calls for recognizing how formal features, rather than being arbitrary, are connected to social purposes and to ways of being and knowing in relationship to these purposes. It calls for understanding how and why a genre’s formal features come to exist the way they do, and how and why they make possible certain social actions/relations and not others. In short, it calls for understanding genre knowledge as including not only knowledge of formal features but also knowledge of what and whose purposes genres serve; how to negotiate one’s intentions in relation to genres’ social expectations and motives; when and why and where to use genres; what reader/writer relationships genres maintain; and how genres relate to other genres in the coordination of social life.
How to implement this deeper understanding of genre and activate this kind of genre knowledge has varied across genre approaches, informed as these have been by different traditions and intellectual resources as well as by different pedagogical imperatives and conditions. Part 1 of the book will examine these approaches in more detail as they emerge, over time, in different areas of study, from literary theory to systemic functional linguistics (what is often called the “Sydney school” of genre theory) to historical/corpus linguistics to English for Specific Purposes to Rhetorical Genre Studies (what is often termed the “North American” approach to genre theory)