In Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines, Mary Soliday calls on genre theory- which proposes that writing cannot be separated from social situation-to analyze the common assignments given to writing students in the college classroom, and to investigate how new writers and expert readers respond to a variety of types of coursework in different fields. This in-depth study of writing pedagogy looks at many challenges facing both instructors and students in college composition classes, and offers a thorough and refreshing exploration of writing experience, ability, and rhetorical situation. Soliday provides an overview of the contemporary theory and research in Writing across the Curriculum programs, focusing specifically on the implementation of the Writing Fellows Program at the City College of New York. Drawing on her direct observations of colleagues and students at the school, she addresses the everyday challenges that novice writers face, such as developing an appropriate "stance" in one's writing, and the intricacies of choosing and developing content. The volume then goes on to address some of the most pressing questions being asked by teachers of composition: To what extent can writing be separated from its situation? How can rhetorical expertise be shared across fields? And to what degree is writing ability local rather than general? Soliday argues that, while writing is closely connected to situation, general rhetorical principles can still be capably applied if those situations are known. The key to improving writing instruction, she maintains, is to construct contexts that expose writers to the social actions that genres perform for readers. Supplementing the author's case study are six appendixes, complete with concrete examples and helpful teaching tools to establish effective classroom practices and exercises in Writing across the Curriculum programs. Packed with useful information and insight, Everyday Genres is an essential volume for both students and teachers seeking to expand their understanding of the nature of writing.

Works of genre fiction are a source of enjoyment, read during cherished leisure time and in incidental moments of relaxation. This original book takes readers inside three popular genres of fiction, including crime, fantasy, and romance, to reveal how personal tastes, social connections, and industry knowledge shape genre worlds. Attuned to both the pleasure and the profession of producing genre fiction, the authors investigate contemporary developments in the field?the rise of Amazon, self-publishing platforms, transmedia storytelling, and growing global publishing conglomerates?and show how these interact with older practices, from fan conventions to writers? groups. Sitting at the intersection of literary studies, genre studies, fan studies, and studies of the book and publishing cultures, Genre Worlds considers how contemporary genre fiction is produced and circulated on a global scale. Its authors propose an innovative theoretical framework that unfolds genre fiction?s most compelling characteristics: its connected social, industrial, and textual practices. As they demonstrate, genre fiction books are not merely texts; they are also nodes of social and industrial activity involving the production, dissemination, and reception of the texts.

This book is about how genres affect the ways students understand and engage with their disciplines, offering a fresh approach to genre by using affordances as a key aspect in exploring the work of first year undergraduates who were given the task of reworking an essay by using a different genre. Working within a social semiotic frame of reference, it uses the notion of genre as a clear, articulated tool for discussing the relationship between knowledge and representation. It provides pedagogical solutions to contentions around 'genres', 'disciplines', 'academic discourses' and their relation to student learning, identity and power, showing that, given the opportunity to work with different genres, students develop new ways of understanding and engaging with their disciplines. Providing a strong argument for why a wider repertoire of genres is desirable at university, this study opens up new possibilities for student writing, learning and assessment. It will appeal to teachers, subject specialists, researchers and postgraduates interested in higher education studies, academic literacies, writing in the disciplines and applied linguistics.

In Writing Genres, Amy J. Devitt examines genre from rhetorical, social, linguistic, professional, and historical perspectives and explores genre's educational uses, making this volume the most comprehensive view of genre theory today. Writing Genres does not limit itself to literary genres or to ideas of genres as formal conventions but additionally provides a theoretical definition of genre as rhetorical, dynamic, and flexible, which allows scholars to examine the role of genres in academic, professional, and social communities. Writing Genres demonstrates how genres function within their communities rhetorically and socially, how they develop out of their contexts historically, how genres relate to other types of norms and standards in language, and how genres nonetheless enable creativity. Devitt also advocates a critical genre pedagogy based on these ideas and provides a rationale for first-year writing classes grounded in teaching antecedent genres.

In Genres of Listening Xochitl Marsilli-Vargas explores a unique culture of listening and communicating in Buenos Aires. She traces how psychoanalytic listening circulates beyond the clinical setting to become a central element of social interaction and cultural production in the city that has the highest number of practicing psychologists and psychoanalysts in the world. Marsilli-Vargas develops the concept of genres of listening to demonstrate that hearers listen differently, depending on where, how, and to whom they are listening. In particular, she focuses on psychoanalytic listening as a specific genre. Porteños (citizens of Buenos Aires) have developed a “psychoanalytic ear” that emerges during conversational encounters in everyday interactions in which participants offer different interpretations of the hidden meaning the words carry. Marsilli-Vargas does not analyze these interpretations as impositions or interruptions but as productive exchanges. By outlining how psychoanalytic listening operates as a genre, Marsilli-Vargas opens up ways to imagine other modes of listening and forms of social interaction.

Speech Genres and Other Late Essays presents six short works from Bakhtin's Esthetics of Creative Discourse, published in Moscow in 1979. This is the last of Bakhtin's extant manuscripts published in the Soviet Union. All but one of these essays (the one on the Bildungsroman) were written in Bakhtin's later years and thus they bear the stamp of a thinker who has accumulated a huge storehouse of factual material, to which he has devoted a lifetime of analysis, reflection, and reconsideration.

In The Hundreds Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart speculate on writing, affect, politics, and attention to processes of world-making. The experiment of the one hundred word constraint—each piece is one hundred or multiples of one hundred words long—amplifies the resonance of things that are happening in atmospheres, rhythms of encounter, and scenes that shift the social and conceptual ground. What's an encounter with anything once it's seen as an incitement to composition? What's a concept or a theory if they're no longer seen as a truth effect, but a training in absorption, attention, and framing? The Hundreds includes four indexes in which Andrew Causey, Susan Lepselter, Fred Moten, and Stephen Muecke each respond with their own compositional, conceptual, and formal staging of the worlds of the book.

In Writing Genres, Amy J. Devitt examines genre from rhetorical, social, linguistic, professional, and historical perspectives and explores genre's educational uses, making this volume the most comprehensive view of genre theory today. Writing Genres does not limit itself to literary genres or to ideas of genres as formal conventions but additionally provides a theoretical definition of genre as rhetorical, dynamic, and flexible, which allows scholars to examine the role of genres in academic, professional, and social communities. Writing Genres demonstrates how genres function within their communities rhetorically and socially, how they develop out of their contexts historically, how genres relate to other types of norms and standards in language, and how genres nonetheless enable creativity. Devitt also advocates a critical genre pedagogy based on these ideas and provides a rationale for first-year writing classes grounded in teaching antecedent genres.

Genres across the Disciplines presents cutting edge, corpus-based research into student writing in higher education. Genres across the Disciplines is essential reading for those involved in syllabus and materials design for the development of writing in higher education, as well as for those investigating EAP. The book explores creativity and the use of metaphor as students work towards becoming experts in the genres of their discipline. Grounded in the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, the text is rich with authentic examples of assignment tasks, macrostructures, concordances and keywords. Also available separately as a paperback.