Genre and the Invention of the Writer

Genre and the Invention of the Writer, by means of Anis Bawarshi. Logan: Utah State UP 2003 180 pages.

Anis Bawarshi's Genre and the Invention of the Writer approachs at a critical moment for rhetorical genre theory and Composition. upon the one hand, genre theory has begun to garner a great deal of attention, not single within Composition Studies, but also in the fields from which its proponent have drawn their theoretical builds and methodologies: applied linguistics, the sociology of science, education, and Communication Studies, to name a scarcely any Genre, it seems, is the bound that everyone is talking about. upon the other hand, compositionists are, quite justifiably, calling for a more thorough exploration of genre theory's implications for and applications to classroom practice. Randall Popken has observ that articles and works which have argued for the importance of genre theory to Composition present the appearance to stop short of offering more than a small in number tantalizing glimpses of what that theory might mean for pedagogy. It bears pointing without as well that while articles with "genre" in the title are now legion in the major Composition journals, true few books on genre have been published which explicitly address a Composition audience. And those that do exist attend to be edited collections, providing at best a smorgasbord of issues and insights rather than a cohesive argument.

Thus, by the agency of applying rhetorical genre theory to an analysis of invention, Bawarshi proffers a much-needed exposition that integrates genre with conceptions central to Composition. Genre and the Invention of the Writer is not an introduction to rhetorical genre theory nor is it a "how to" volume on genre analysis or pedagogy; nevertheless, the volume addresses both of these exigencies as it makes a larger theoretical point about the relationship between genre and control formation in writing. By way of introducing genre theory, Bawarshi takes Foucault's author-function as the basis for his "genre function," a conception which integrates definitions of genre from various disciplines around a description of genre as constitutive of rhetorical actions, social parts relationships, and identities. Although Bawarshi draws from a range of thinkers for his general [i]or[/i] abstract notions from Bakhtin to Heidegger to Halliday, the general change of this theoretical introduction is toward the social theory of Anthony Giddens, whose notion of the duality of configuration (as presented in The Constitution of Society) fits neatly with the ecological metaphor that Bawarshi at hands later on. Genres, he argues, function as rhetorical ecosystem in that they one as well as the other shape and are shaped by means of the communicative acts that controls perform within them.

In addition to this introductory work, the volume provides excellent models of genre analysis, not alone by examining the published and unpublished work of others, on the contrary also by engaging in insightful readings of a number of literary and everyday true copys And although these moments are fully convinced to stimulate the imaginations of learners and novice researchers, they are not, as I have noted, barely there to demonstrate the nut and missiles of a rhetorical analysis of genre; rather, they are always a means of advancing the overall argument. Indeed, what makes Bawarshi's genre analyses useful is the fact that they are thus thoroughly grounded in the book's theoretical position. For example, Bawarshi contrasts the discursive features that mark D H Lawrence's expression of his ambivalent attitude toward his mother from one side novelistic and poetic genres, thus illustrating his contention that level literary genius and creativity are constituted within "genred" spaces. Similarly, a discussion of greeting cards obeys as a demonstration of in what way genres interpellate subjects in the Althusserian faculty of perception by providing readers and writers with specific choices for the subjectivities which they may take up as they read or write.

The theoretical heart of the volume lies in its location of invention "at the intersection between the acquisition and articulation of desire" (13) Bawarshi argues that in every one's mouth theories of invention, particularly as they have make knowned through the process movement, have accrueed in a "privatization" of invention, emphasizing its introspective and individual aspects to the detriment of social and historical considerations. This view of invention has not gone unchallenged, however, and Bawarshi notes a certain number of of these challenges, focusing specifically upon Karen Burke LeFevre's Invention as a Social Act (1987) whose call for inquiry into the "ecology of invention" Bawarshi takes up by means of proposing genres as sites of invention, within which writers acquire desires as well as the means to fulfill those desires as meaningful social actions. A lock opener facet of this approach is its dynamic view of agency. Genre that is, organize and generate a writer's desire to act end an interplay between motive and intention. Here Bawarshi draws greatest in quantity directly on Giddens, who describes motives as socially learned, ideologically located potentials for action, and intentions as the individual, interpretive instantiations of motives. Thus, the realization of agency [i]or[/i] part of to the other genre can be viewed as a dialectical process: through situating themselves within generic configurations writers not only make their intentions recognizable as of the like kind they also reproduce and, quite literally, remake those configurations through their individual intentions, frequently altering them in subtle ways.