"This book takes up issues of current concern in composition studies, sociolinguistics, and ESL--issues concerning academic literacy, critical literacy, expressive versus cognitive approaches to the teaching of writing, and the like. It does so in a practical, experiential way, drawing on events in classrooms in universities in South Africa and the United States. The contrast between the South African context and the American, as well as their surprising parallels, highlight certain questions concerning the teaching of literacy in a dramatic way, so that theory and practice are brought together. In contrast to writing programs that follow a textbook or a planned sequence of study, the authors describe a narrative pedagogy that encourages students to find a direction and choose activities suggested by their own concerns and ongoing lives."--Publisher.

In a series of comparative essays on a range of texts embracing both high and popular culture from the early modern era to the contemporary period, The Ideology of Genre counters both formalists and advocates of the &"death of genre,&" arguing instead for the inevitability of genre as discursive mediation. At the same time, Beebee demonstrates that genres are inherently unstable because they are produced intertextually, by a system of differences without positive terms. In short, genre is the way texts get used. To deny that genres exist is to deny, in a sense, the possibility of reading; if genres exist, on the other hand, then they exist not as essences but as differences, and thus those places within and between texts where genres &"collide&" reveal the connections between generic status, interpretive strategy, ideology, and the use-value of language.

Genre studies and genre approaches to literacy instruction continue to develop in many regions and from a widening variety of approaches. Genre has provided a key to understanding the varying literacy cultures of regions, disciplines, professions, and educational settings. GENRE IN A CHANGING WORLD provides a wide-ranging sampler of the remarkable variety of current work. The twenty-four chapters in this volume, reflecting the work of scholars in Europe, Australasia, and North and South America, were selected from the over 400 presentations at SIGET IV (the Fourth International Symposium on Genre Studies) held on the campus of UNISUL in Tubarão, Santa Catarina, Brazil in August 2007—the largest gathering on genre to that date. The chapters also represent a wide variety of approaches, including rhetoric, Systemic Functional Linguistics, media and critical cultural studies, sociology, phenomenology, enunciation theory, the Geneva school of educational sequences, cognitive psychology, relevance theory, sociocultural psychology, activity theory, Gestalt psychology, and schema theory. Sections are devoted to theoretical issues, studies of genres in the professions, studies of genre and media, teaching and learning genre, and writing across the curriculum. The broad selection of material in this volume displays the full range of contemporary genre studies and sets the ground for a next generation of work.

"This book takes up issues of current concern in composition studies, sociolinguistics, and ESL--issues concerning academic literacy, critical literacy, expressive versus cognitive approaches to the teaching of writing, and the like. It does so in a practical, experiential way, drawing on events in classrooms in universities in South Africa and the United States. The contrast between the South African context and the American, as well as their surprising parallels, highlight certain questions concerning the teaching of literacy in a dramatic way, so that theory and practice are brought together. In contrast to writing programs that follow a textbook or a planned sequence of study, the authors describe a narrative pedagogy that encourages students to find a direction and choose activities suggested by their own concerns and ongoing lives."--Publisher.

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.

Traces the rhetorical origins of maternal anxiety in Victorian literature, bringing uptake and genre ecology into literary studies.

Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Genre Studies gathers major works that have contributed to the recent rhetorical reconceptualization of genre. A lively and complex field developed over the past 30 years, Rhetorical Genre Studies is central to many current research and teaching agendas. This collection, which is organized both thematically and chronologically, explores genre research across a range of disciplinary interests but with a specific focus on rhetoric and composition. With introductions by the co-editors to frame and extend each section, this volume helps readers understand and contextualize both the foundations of the field and the central themes and insights that have emerged. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars working on topics related to composition, rhetoric, professional and technical writing, and applied linguistics.

This volume brings together for the first time pragmatic, rhetorical, and literary perspectives on genre, mapping theoretical frontiers and initiating a long overdue conversation amongst these methodologies. The diverse approaches represented in this volume meet on common ground staked by Internet communication: an arena challenging to traditional ideas of genre which assume a conventional stability at odds with the unceasing innovations of online discourse. Drawing on and developing new ideas of genre, the research reported in this volume shows, on the contrary, that genre study is a powerful means of testing commonplaces about the Internet world and, in turn, that the Internet is a fertile field for theorising genre.

Based in current genre theory, this guide helps writers make more informed rhetorical choices and participate more effectively within academic, workplace and public contexts. This text illustrates how to use genres to assess, understand, and write within different scenes or writing situations. Discussions of writing for academic contexts cover writing analysis, argument, and research-based genres. Public and workplace writing is illustrated though discussions of other genres—letters, resumes, proposals, reports.

In a focused and compelling discussion, Anis Bawarshi looks to genre theory for what it can contribute to a refined understanding of invention. In describing what he calls "the genre function," he explores what is at stake for the study and teaching of writing to imagine invention as a way that writers locate themselves, via genres, within various positions and activities. He argues, in fact, that invention is a process in which writers are acted upon by genres as much as they act themselves. Such an approach naturally requires the composition scholar to re-place invention from the writer to the sites of action, the genres, in which the writer participates. This move calls for a thoroughly rhetorical view of invention, roughly in the tradition of Richard Young, Janice Lauer, and those who have followed them. Instead of mastering notions of "good" writing, Bawarshi feels that students gain more from learning how to adapt socially and rhetorically as they move from one "genred" site of action to the next.