Amy J. Devitt

Generalizing about Genre: New Conceptions of an Old Concept

Our field has become riddled with dichotomies that threaten to undermine our holistic understanding of writing. Form and content (and the related form and function, text and context), product and process, individual and society-these dichotomies too often define our research affiliations, our pedagogies, and our theories. If we are to understand writing as a unified act, as a complex whole, we must find ways to overcome these dichotomies. Recent conceptions of genre as a dynamic and semiotic construct illustrate how to unify form and content, place text within context, balance process and product, and acknowledge the role of both the individual and the social. This reconception of genre may even lead us to a unified theory of writing. The most recent understandings of genre derive from the work of several significant theorists working with different agendas and from different fields: from literature (M. M. Bakhtin, Tzvetan Todorov, Jacques Derrida), linguistics (M. A. K. Halliday, John Swales), and rhetoric (Carolyn Miller, Kathleen Jamieson). However, this work has not yet widely influenced how most scholars and teachers of writing view genre. Our reconception will require releasing old notions of genre as form and text type and embracing new notions of genre as dynamic patterning of human experience, as one of the concepts that enable us to construct our writing world. Basically, the new conception of genre shifts the focus from effects (formal features, text classifications) to sources of those effects. To accommodate our desires for a reunified view of writing, we must shift our thinking about genre from a formal classification system to a rhetorical and essentially semiotic social construct. This article will explain the new conception of genre that is developing and will suggest some effects of this new conception on our thinking about writing.1

Integrating Rhetorical and Literary Theories of Genre

hile many scholars have addressed the critical issues of whether English can or should hang together as a field politically, economically, and culturally, I address in this article the issue of whether we in English studies can hang together topically—that is, whether we can see ourselves as sharing a common object of study. It is obvious that different subdisciplines of English have different methodologies, from hermeneutic to social scientific, that raise different questions and are based in different ideologies. If these subdisciplines have no more in common with one another than do the studies of history and literature, or philosophy and composition, or psychology and linguistics, then the question of whether English constitutes a discipline is strictly a political question and need only be discussed in political terms, a question answerable in terms of political expediency or public perception more than in terms of disciplinarity. If, however, the fields of literature, linguistics, and rhetoric-composition share more in common with one another than they do with other disciplines, then a greater argument can be made that we in English should work to maintain our connections, for our different methodologies and questions can complement and contribute to one another’s research and teaching. What we in English would seem to have in common is the study of discourse, especially of text, although the definition of “text” varies. If that common object of study is significant, then our separate examinations of it should combine to create greater understanding of the complexity of reading and writing. To examine that claim, I will compare and attempt to integrate the scholarship on one part of

Genre, Genres, and the Teaching of Genre

From the placement of this article and from the headings above with the bibliographical citations of three books, readers of this piece know that this is a type of writing commonly called a review essay. From the editors invitation, I knew that what I was to write was a review essay. What does that generic knowledge for writers and readers mean? The significance of this potentially shared understanding is much of what the developing new field of genre study-and these three books-is all about. To understand how writing works, theorists argue, we must understand how genre works, for writing is embedded within genre, writing is never genre-free.

Motives and Habits: Some Thoughts on What Linguists Can Gain from Rhetoric and Composition

I study writing. That is how I defined my expertise after completing my PhD in 1982 in English language and literature at the University of Michigan. I had been trained in what were then called English language studies and composition (along with a traditional literary period), and for me the different areas were different approaches to understanding the same topic: writing. My first full-time position used my training in all three fields, and I continue to teach courses in both the English language and composition to this day. As I worked to publish my research in journals and with publishers specializing in both fields, I discovered, of course, that the two approaches were diverging more all the time, especially as composition developed more distinct disciplinary status (and more distinct disciplinary names, as “composition” developed into “composition studies,” and then to variations of “composition and rhetoric,” and more recently also “writing studies”—terminological multiplicity that represents different emphases; the field is most commonly now called “rhetoric and composition,” the term I will use from here on). To this day, English linguistics influences my work in rhetoric and composition, and rhetoric and composition influences my work in English linguistics. In spite of often disparate methodologies, theories, and journals, English linguistics and rhetoric and composition continue to overlap substantially in their objects of study and, I believe, combine well to open up fuller understandings of writing and, more broadly, language in use. Of course, the two fields do differ substantially in their methodologies, theoretical groundings, and definitions of their objects of study. As a field, rhetoric and composition aims to understand how, what, when, where, and why people compose, with increasingly expansive understandings of what “compose” means, from traditional academic essays to various forms of social media. To illustrate, a recent (June 2015) issue of the major journal published by the field’s professional organization, College