Rhetorical genre theory

This dissertation examines the sweeping changes in the themes, rhetoric, and forms of prose writing that occurred during China’s late-eighth and early-ninth centuries. I argue that the literary innovations of this period reflect ways in which writers adapted their textual practices to rapidly changing material, social, and economic conditions. Over the course of the eighth and ninth centuries, new technologies for the production of paper significantly lowered the costs of literacy education and literary reproduction. Progressively more efficient and motivated systems of textual circulation allowed writers to address more diverse audiences faster than ever before. Finally, the evolution of public and private markets for literary products during this period opened new avenues for realizing financial gain through writing. Through close examination of patronage, official ritual sacrifice, and the literary marketplace, I demonstrate that these material, social, and economic changes profoundly affected mid-Tang literary practices. In cover letters, writers experimented with different ways of coercing prospective patrons to help them by making the addressees seem petty in the eyes of others should they refuse. Prayers for rain could be used to advertise the quality of one’s performance in provincial office, communicate social critique, or even send warnings to political enemies. And literary reputations could be traded upon to land lucrative commissions composing prefaces or tomb inscriptions for those desiring lasting fame. Through inquiry into how changing material, social, and economic conditions across the late-eighth and early-ninth centuries shaped and influenced textual practices, the dissertation contributes to contemporary understanding of a complex and innovative period in Chinese literary history and at the same time clarifies a methodological approach to understanding literary change applicable to the literatures of other places and times.

This article traces the uncomfortable relationship that Writing Studies has had with the concept of learning transfer. It reviews attitudes to learning transfer in writing theory influenced by rhetorical genre studies, activity theory and situated learning, It then reviews learning transfer theory itself, a field seldom referred to explicitly in Writing Studies. It concludes with a synthesis in which transfer theory is brought to bear on Writing Studies, suggesting directions for the development of research and pedagogical practices related to business and technical communication.

Stance is a growing focus of academic writing research and an important aspect of writing development in higher education. Research on student writing has explored stance across different levels, language backgrounds, and disciplines, but has rarely focused on stance features across genres. This article explores stance marker use between two important genre families in higher education—persuasive argumentative writing, and analytic explanatory writing—based on corpus linguistic analysis of late-undergraduate and early-graduate-level writing in the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP). The specific stance markers in the study, both epistemic and textual cues, have been shown to distinguish student writing across levels; this study extends the analysis to consider the comparative use of these markers across genres. The findings show two stance expectations persistent across genres as well as significant distinctions between argumentative and explanatory writing vis-à-vis stance markers that intensify and contrast.

Recent announcements by Michael Sam, Jason Collins, Robbie
Rogers, and others belong to a longer tradition that I label the
gay male athlete coming out narrative. I chart this rhetorical genre
in three waves, corresponding to the historical moment in which
each narrative was published and the rhetorical tactics that each
set of authors use to reconcile their identities as gay athletes and
argue for the existence and suitability of gay men in professional
sports. Of particular note are contemporary third-wave narratives
which introduce the actively out, visible, gay male body becoming
aware of his place in history as a rhetorical opportunity for social
intervention. Even as I recognize the limits of athletes’ ability to
represent the diversity of interests, values, and politics of the
broader LGBTQ movement, I argue that these narratives should
become part of what Charles E. Morris III calls “the diverse domain
of the usable past.” These narratives indicate the importance of
understanding genre evolution alongside individual biography,
historical context, and shifting values within broader attempts at
social transformation.

Looking at examples of dramas from Polish jesuit colleges around 1700 we see frequent use of new, non-classicist ways of dramatic representation, e.g. neglecting the unity of dramatic
action, the use of bipartite structure Protasis-Apodosis, or in their mise-en-scène, as in the laterna magica. Traditonal explanations of those phenomena as residue of earlier historical
developments or even as results of artistic incompetence can be abandoned if we manage to understand their literary and theatrical aesthetic properly.

Within composition studies, transfer and rhetorical genre studies have found an especially productive partnership for exploring together whether and in what ways students transfer writing-related knowledge from one context to another. This article continues this synthesis by turning to Anne Freadman’s notion of uptake to suggest a more robust understanding
of transfer for writing. As I will show, uptake foregrounds the role that heterogeneity, selection, and problem-solving play in how literate learners encounter and make sense of new writing tasks at the convergence of prior genre knowledge and current, local genred events. This micro
discursive space of uptake is an important site for thinking about transfer in that it is partially through this process that prior genres meet, are transformed, rejected, or imported whole cloth into new rhetorical situations. Ultimately, this article argues that, through uptake, high road transfer is reconceived as a dynamic, problem-solving endeavor where writers can be encouraged to proactively sort through and make selections in and amongst prior genre knowledge.

Juxtaposing two conversations in writing studies—that which studies how genres mediate public activities and that which theorizes composition’s relation to political economy—this article develops the notion of a political economy of genre. Amid a widespread crisis, the need for financially struggling citizens to produce effective hardship discourse triggered significant public participation: citizens both composed within the genre and published what has been called meta-genre to compose the genre itself. Yet while hardship letters embodied practices that promote rhetorical possibility and create agency, they were also used to maintain institutional power dynamics and enforce negative subjectivities. Tracing the political economies of the hardship letter, this study fosters new understandings of writing and rhetorical agency at this neoliberal moment.

Imagine if a discourse analyst were to examine a representative sample of scholarship in a particular field, uncovering a set of valued and stable (though tacit and unspoken) conventions that shape the ways scholars in that field write—conventions that usually remain implicit in classroom contexts. What would happen if undergraduate students were taught these conventions explicitly? What would be the advantages and disadvantages for students’ learning? For the instructors teaching the course? Such are the driving questions behind Laura Wilder’s Rhetorical Strategies and Genre Conventions in Literary Studies: Teaching and Writing in the Disciplines.

Wilder, Laura. Rhetorical Strategies and Genre Conventions in Literary Studies: Teaching and Writing in the Disciplines. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. 238 pages. $39.95. 978-0-8093-3093-5

Scholars have recently begun to conceive of literacy practices as drawing from resources that are simultaneously situated and extracontextual. In particular, studies of transnational literacy affirm the importance of both locality and movement in literacy studies. Continuing this inquiry into the situated and dispersed nature of transnational literacy, the author investigates the distinct effects that shuttling between national contexts have on the accumulation and use of genre knowledge. Specifically, through a case study of one Third Culture Kid student writer, the author reports on how her genre knowledge develops in response to transnational relocations between Italy and the United States and the way this transnational genre knowledge informs her writing of a high-stakes in-school genre. This case illustrates the value of rhetorical genre studies for understanding the situated and dispersed nature of transnational literacy and begins to outline the distinctiveness of transnational boundary-crossing practices. Keywords transnational literacy, rhetorical genre studies, literacy as situated and dispersed, transcontextual analysis, genre knowledge

Since Carolyn Miller’s Genre as Social Action, North American Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) has facilitated analysis of how typified rhetorical actions constitute the contexts and communities in which writers write. In first-year writing (FYW) specifically, RGS approaches have focused on macro-level textual constructs, like the audience and evidence expectations of different genres, and have bolstered valuable attention to genre awareness and transfer. In its attention to context and macro-level features, however, RGS has focused less on recurring linguistic patterns in written genres, which has contributed to two gaps in genre-based approaches to FYW: few large-scale analyses of first-year written genres, and little attention to language patterns in genre-based FYW pedagogy and research. This article aims to interrogate these gaps and offer a way beyond them, in three parts. First, it historicizes the institutional separation of U.S. rhetoric-composition and linguistics. Second, i...

This poem was invited and written on the occasion of the retirement of S. Michael Halloran, my dissertation director, advisor, father, friend.  It is written in the villanelle form, but does not stop at the usual quatrain in a sixth and final stanza, but continues on for another eight stanzas, ending on a quatrain only after the poem has more than twice exceeded its normal length. The relation between form and content in this villanelle is not accidental.

Note: I don't exactly know why I write villanelle's for colleagues who retire (see the villanelles I wrote for Gerald Barrax, and Art Young). However, I'm sure it has something to do with its lyrical quality, which can be rendered both celebratory and elegiac. The villanelle is one of my favorite poetic forms, and I have written many, including several that are unpublished as of yet and so will not appear on academia.edu.

This article reads John L. Austin rhetorically and achieves two things thereby. First, it grasps the tensions subtending Austin's speech-act theory. These tensions arguably stem from Austin's distinct engagements with his brief to consider how saying something is to do something. Second, this article assesses the usefulness of Austin's notion of perlocution to the description of discursive events. I take such description to be a concern of the interpretive humanities in general and of rhetoric in particular. To gauge perlocution's utility, I compare its descriptive purchase with that of illocution, signalling some productive affinities between Austin and the purposive, processual conception of semiosis developed by Charles S. Peirce.