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The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stability and Change Richard Coe, Lorelei Lingard, and Tatiana Teslenko, eds. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2002. 388 pp. $32.50 (paperback). ISBN 1572733837.
In The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre, the editors have assembled a collection of new essays about genre, rhetoric, and writing that are relevant for scholars with a diverse range of interests in composition studies, including rhetoric, professional and scientific communication, computers and writing, writing-across-the-disciplines, literacy studies, and literacy education. The engaging editorial introduction recalls Donald Murray's suggestion that writers ask of drafts, "Does it work?" This book instead insists that writers and rhetors and researchers of writing and rhetoric ask questions such as "What does it do?" and "For whom does it work?" and "For whom does it not work?" This volume is a wide-ranging international and interdisciplinary effort that provides an account of the current state of genre study. By this account, it is empirically committed and rhetorically situated like much previous work on genre but increasingly attuned to critical and political dimensions of "genre as social action."
Four sections organize the book. The first, entitled "The Symbolic Action of Genre," features essays by Charles Bazerman and Anne Freadman. The three sections that follow are arranged as "uptakes" (a term that is explored in Freadman's essay) in various contexts. The first of these, which includes contributions by Anthony Pare, Catherine F. Schryer, Joanne Yates and Wanda Orlikowski, Peter Medway, Lorelei Lingard and Richard Haber, and Judy Z. Segal, focuses on the workings of genre in professional discourses. The next section focuses on educational contexts, with contributions by Janet Giltrow, Gillian Fuller and Alison Lee, David R. Russell, and Jim Martin. The final section includes studies of social, philosophical, political, and religious discourses by Peter Knapp, Sigmund Ongstad, Tatiana Teslenko, Nadeane Trowse, and Ryan Knighton. This volume is...