Chapter 4 continues to explore genre study within linguistic traditions by focusing on the rich tradition of work done in genre analysis and teaching within English for Specific Purposes. We describe John Swales’s influential work in developing a genre analytical method that accounts for discourse community and communicative purpose, and we trace developments in the field over the last twenty years as they bridge linguistic and rhetorical traditions and address the specialized literacy needs of graduate-level non-native speakers of English.
Chapter 5 examines genre study within rhetorical and sociological traditions, describing how these traditions helped shift the emphasis of genre study from the communicative actions to the social actions genres perform. We distinguish between communicative and sociological genre approaches and then trace how Carolyn Miller’s groundbreaking work in “Genre as Social Action” was informed by research in rhetorical criticism and social phenomenology, which created new possibilities for the study and teaching of genre. The chapter concludes with an overview of the French and Swiss pedagogic traditions and how that tradition, along with linguistic and socio-rhetorical traditions, has been synthesized within Brazilian genre studies.
Chapter 6 describes how scholars in Rhetorical Genre Studies have extended the idea of genre as social and rhetorical action over the past twenty-five years. We identify and explain key developments in genre study, including concepts such as genre sets and systems, uptake, meta-genres, distributed cognition, genre chronotope, and activity systems. As we will describe throughout Part 1, the various traditions and intellectual resources that have been brought to bear on genre study help to clarify the analytical and pedagogical uses to which genres have been applied.
Part 2 of the book (Chapters 7 through 9) examines a wide range of empirical genre research conducted in multiple contexts (academic, workplace, and public), in various countries, for various purposes, utilizing a range of methods. The chapters cover a range of research studies in order to showcase trends in research interests, kinds of study designs and methods used, findings, and areas of future research.Chapter 7 traces genre research within academic contexts, focusing on studies of genre acquisition and development that have shaped debates over the efficacy of explicit genre teaching. The chapter examines studies of genre and early childhood writing development, secondary and college-level studies of genre teaching and learning, studies of genre and advanced literacy, studies of cultural influences on genre acquisition, as well as historical and international studies.
Chapter 8 focuses on genre research in workplace and professional contexts. The chapter includes historical studies of scientific articles, economics textbooks, legal genres, and business communication, as well as international studies from Brazil. As well, the chapter includes a range of studies that examine how genres mediate social activities, power relations, and identities within professional contexts, such as banks, social work agencies, and insurance companies.
Chapter 9 describes future directions in genre research, examining genre research in public and electronic contexts as well as in new media. This chapter as well draws on international and historical studies (for example, letters and land deeds) as well as new genres such as blogs and websites and instant messaging.
Part 3 of the book (Chapters 10 and 11) explores pedagogical approaches to genre. Drawing on the various genre traditions and research studies described in Parts 1 and 2, Chapter 10 examines the range of ways genre scholars have used genre to support writing instruction. Along the way, and drawing on international and U.S. perspectives, we describe the debates over the explicit teaching of genre and situate them within the traditions and pedagogical conditions (secondary, undergraduate, graduate; native, non-native speakers of English) that inform them.
Chapter 11 examines Rhetorical Genre Studies-based pedagogical approaches, with a focus on how to develop students’ genre knowledge within first-year composition courses that transfers across writing situations; how to teach a critical awareness of genre; how to teach students to move from critique to production of alternative genres; and, finally, how to situate genres within the contexts of their use, whether public, professional, or disciplinary contexts.
The overarching goal of all these chapters is to provide readers with an overview of what genre approaches have to offer for the study and teaching of writing. As a result, we hope readers will be better able to account for various genres approaches and be better positioned to make use of genre as a research and teaching tool.
Part 1: Historical Review and Theories of Genre
2 Genre in Literary Traditions
In this and the next four chapters of Part 1, we will examine the various ways genre has been defined and used (historically and currently) in literary theory, Systemic Functional Linguistics (what is often called the “Sydney school” of genre study), historical/corpus linguistics, English for Specific Purposes, and Rhetorical Genre Studies (what is often termed “North American” genre study), with the goal of tracing how this dynamic, inter-related history has informed current understandings and syntheses (see for example the discussion of the Brazilian tradition in Chapter 5) of genre and its implications for writing instruction and writing program development. Certainly, an entire book, let alone a few chapters, will not be able to capture the complexity of this history in all the areas in which genre theory has played a significant role. Brian Paltridge, for example, has described the important work on genre done in folklore studies and linguistic anthropology, while Rick Altman and Steve Neale have examined genre in film studies. In the following chapters, we will instead describe the range of ways genre has been understood, synthesized, and used, over time, in those areas of study that have had the most impact on the study and teaching of writing: literary, linguistic, and rhetorical/sociological genre traditions. An understanding of these traditions will help situate various genre approaches and reveal their analytical and pedagogical possibilities, which Parts 2 and 3 will take up in more detail.
The traditions we examine illustrate a range of pedagogical and analytical trajectories, from textual trajectories that examine genres’ formal features for purposes of classification, description, and/or teaching to contextual trajectories that examine how genres reflect, shape and enable participants to engage in particular social and linguistic events, including how genres mediate social and linguistic events in ways that reproduce social activities and relations, how genres relate to larger social structures in ways that allow for cross-cultural analysis, and how genres can be used as forms of resistance and change. This range—from taxonomic and descriptive approaches to explanatory approaches to pragmatic approaches to critical approaches that link genres to ideology and power—can be seen at work in literary approaches to genre study, which this chapter takes up.
Of the traditions we examine in Part 1, literary approaches to genre have been the least directly concerned with writing instruction and writing program development. Yet the analytical perspectives they offer, including those about genre and creativity (see Devitt, Writing Genres 163–90), and the ways that they have informed widespread beliefs about genre make literary genre traditions significant to scholarship in linguistic and rhetorical studies of genre. In what follows, we will first examine how literary approaches to genre have traditionally maintained culturally-widespread, bipolar attitudes toward genre as either an exclusively aesthetic object or as a constraint on the artistic spirit, and then we will consider more recent literary genre scholarship that challenges bipolar attitudes and offers a larger landscape for genre action that can include linguistic and socio-rhetorical studies of genres. We will describe what we perceive as five major trajectories of literary genre study: Neoclassical approaches to genre; Structuralist (or literary-historical) approaches to genre; Romantic and post-Romantic concerns about genre; Reader Response approaches to genre; and Cultural Studies approaches to