Writing Genres

In Writing Genres, Amy J. Devitt examines genre from 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 just to literary genres or to ideas of genres as formal conventions, but additionally provides a theoretical definition of genre as rhetorical, dynamic, and flexible, as well as ideological and constraining, which allows scholars to examine the role of genres in academic, professional, and social communities. This new theoretical approach sees genres as types of rhetorical actions that people perform in everyday interactions. As such, jokes, sweepstakes letters, junk mail, mystery novels, academic research papers, small talk, lectures, and travel brochures are all complex genres of their own. Genres such as these have the power to ease communication or to deceive, to enable someone to speak, or to discourage someone from saying something different. Writing Genres demonstrates how genres function within their communities rhetorically and socially, how they develop out of their contexts historically, how genres related to other types of norms and standards in language, and how genes nonetheless enable creativity. Beginning by defining genre as a typified rhetorical action occurring at the nexus of situation, culture, and other genres, Devitt argues that genre highlights variations in texts and in necessary for creativity, a treatment which opposes the usual view of genre as constraining and homogenizing. Drawing from theorists Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin, and M.A.K. Halliday, as well as Kathleen Hall Jamieson, David Russell, and Carolyn R. Miller, Devitt in turn proposes what rhetorical genre theory could contribute to the study of literature and what challenges literary genres present to rhetorical genre theories.

Amy J. Devitt is Conger-Gabel Teaching Professor of English at the University of Kansas. She is the author of Standardizing Written English: Diffusion in the Case of Scotland, 1520–1659 and numerous articles on writing and theories of genre.