This book examines genres as instances of social processes, enacting a range of important institutional practices, hence also shaping people's subjectivities. Genres represent purposive and staged ways of building means in a culture. The book's particular claim to originality is that, using systemic functional grammar, it demonstrates how given genres build or enact social practice, how educational setting provide contexts in which some apprenticeship into such genres occurs, and how theorizing about such matters helps build a theory of social action, revealing how powerful is the systemic functional analysis in addressing questions concerning the social construction of reality. The discussion is built around extensive analysis of instances of texts collected in a number of worksites and school settings. While most are instances of written genres, some are spoken, most notably the chapter that is devoted to the discussion of the spoken classroom texts in which the teaching and learning of the written genres take place.

This book examines genres as instances of social processes, enacting a range of important institutional practices, hence also shaping people's subjectivities. Genres represent purposive and staged ways of building means in a culture. The book's particular claim to originality is that, using systemic functional grammar, it demonstrates how given genres build or enact social practice, how educational setting provide contexts in which some apprenticeship into such genres occurs, and how theorizing about such matters helps build a theory of social action, revealing how powerful is the systemic functional analysis in addressing questions concerning the social construction of reality. The discussion is built around extensive analysis of instances of texts collected in a number of worksites and school settings. While most are instances of written genres, some are spoken, most notably the chapter that is devoted to the discussion of the spoken classroom texts in which the teaching and learning of the written genres take place.

Genre across the Curriculum will function as a "good" textbook, one not for the student, but for the teacher, and one with an eye on the context of writing. Here you will find models of practice, descriptions written by teachers who have integrated the teaching of genre into their pedagogy in ways that both support and empower the student writer. While authors here look at courses across disciplines and across a range of genres, they are similar in presenting genre as situated within specific classrooms, disciplines, and institutions. Their assignments embody the pedagogy of a particular teacher, and student responses here embody students' prior experiences with writing. In each chapter, the authors define a particular genre, define the learning goals implicit in assigning that genre, explain how they help their students work through the assignment, and, finally, discuss how they evaluate the writing their students do in response to their teaching.

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.

In recent decades, genre studies has focused attention on how genres mediate social activities within workplace and academic settings. Genre and the Performance of Publics moves beyond institutional settings to explore public contexts that are less hierarchical, broadening the theory of how genres contribute to the interconnected and dynamic performances of public life. Chapters examine how genres develop within publics and how genres tend to mediate performances in public domains, setting up a discussion between public sphere scholarship and rhetorical genre studies. The volume extends the understanding of genres as not only social ways of organizing texts or mediating relationships within institutions but as dynamic performances themselves. By exploring how genres shape the formation of publics, Genre and the Performance of Publicsbrings rhetoric/composition and public sphere studies into dialogue and enhances the understanding of public genre performances in ways that contribute to research on and teaching of public discourse.

In this broad-reaching, multi-disciplinary collection, leading scholars investigate how the digital medium has altered the way we read and write text. In doing so, it challenges the very notion of scholarship as it has traditionally been imagined. Incorporating scientific, socio-historical, materialist and theoretical approaches, this rich body of work explores topics ranging from how computers have affected our relationship to language, whether the book has become an obsolete object, the nature of online journalism, and the psychology of authorship. The essays offer a significant contribution to the growing debate on how digitization is shaping our collective identity, for better or worse. Text and Genre in Reconstruction will appeal to scholars in both the humanities and sciences and provides essential reading for anyone interested in the changing relationship between reader and text in the digital age.

Herbert Lindenberger was one of the first literary critics to call for some kind of return to historical thinking in literary criticism. His ten essays cover canon formation, the historical status of genres, and the ways that art and criticism are embedded within institutional frameworks. Lindenberger argues that, "what we label 'historical' assumes strikingly different shapes in different historical situations" and that present shape empowers new kind of knowledge. He writes, "We may well discover that our century-old form of organization within the humanities no longer fits the type of knowledge we are producing." The lively and topical essays of The History in Literature demonstrate Lindenberger's capacious and diverse knowledge, his incisive wit, and his formidable critical skills.