Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Genre Studiesgathers major works that have contributed to the recent rhetorical reconceptualization of genre. A lively and complex field developed over the past 30 years, rhetorical genre studies is central to many current research and teaching agendas. This collection, which is organized both thematically and chronologically, explores genre research across a range of disciplinary interests, but with a specific focus on rhetoric and composition. With introductions by the co-editors to frame and extend each section, this volume helps readers understand and contextualize both the foundations of the field and the central themes and insights that have emerged. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars working on topics related to composition, rhetoric, professional and technical writing, and applied linguistics

Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Genre Studies gathers major works that have contributed to the recent rhetorical reconceptualization of genre. A lively and complex field developed over the past 30 years, Rhetorical Genre Studies is central to many current research and teaching agendas. This collection, which is organized both thematically and chronologically, explores genre research across a range of disciplinary interests but with a specific focus on rhetoric and composition. With introductions by the co-editors to frame and extend each section, this volume helps readers understand and contextualize both the foundations of the field and the central themes and insights that have emerged. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars working on topics related to composition, rhetoric, professional and technical writing, and applied linguistics.

In Writing Genres, Amy J. Devitt examines genre from rhetorical, 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 to literary genres or to ideas of genres as formal conventions but additionally provides a theoretical definition of genre as rhetorical, dynamic, and flexible, which allows scholars to examine the role of genres in academic, professional, and social communities. Writing Genres demonstrates how genres function within their communities rhetorically and socially, how they develop out of their contexts historically, how genres relate to other types of norms and standards in language, and how genres nonetheless enable creativity. Devitt also advocates a critical genre pedagogy based on these ideas and provides a rationale for first-year writing classes grounded in teaching antecedent genres.

This book is an anthology of landmark essays in rhetorical criticism. In historical usage, a landmark marks a path or a boundary; as a metaphor in social and intellectual history, landmark signifies some act or event that marks a significant achievement or turning point in the progress or decline of human effort. In the history of an academic discipline, the historically established senses of landmark are mixed together, jostling to set out and protect the turfmarkers of academic specialization; aligning footnotes to signify the beacons that have guided thought and, against these "conservative" tendencies, attempting to contribute fresh insights that tempt others along new trails. The editor has chosen essays for this collection that give some sense of the history of rhetorical criticism in this century, especially as it has been practiced in the discipline of speech communication. He also emphasizes materials that may illustrate where the discipline conceives itself to be going -- how it has marked its boundaries; how it has established beacons to invite safety or warn us from the rocks; and how it has sought to preserve a tradition by subjecting it to constant revision and struggle. In the hope of providing some coherence, the scope of this collection is limited to rhetorical criticism as it has been practiced and understood within the discipline of speech communication in North America in this century.

Landmark Essays in Rhetoric of Science: Issues and Methods compiles the essential readings of the vibrant field of rhetoric of science, tracing the growth and core concerns of the field since its development in the 1970s. A companion to Randy Allen Harris’s foundational Landmark Essays in Rhetoric of Science: Case Studies, this volume includes essays by such luminaries as Carolyn R. Miller, Jeanne Fahnestock, and Alan G. Gross, along with an early prophetic article by Charles Sanders Pierce. Harris’s detailed introduction puts the field into its social and intellectual context, and frames the important contributions of each essay, which range from reimagining classical concepts like rhetorical figures and topical invention to Modal Materialism and the Neomodern hybridization of Actor Network Theory with Genre Studies. Race, revolution, and Daoism come up along the way, and the empirical recalcitrance of the moon. This collection serves as a textbook for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in science studies, and is an invaluable resource for researchers concerned with science not as a special, autonomous, sacrosanct enterprise, but as a set of value-saturated, profoundly influential rhetorical practices.

This work brings together the pivotal, scholarly essays responsible for the present resurgence in rhetorical studies. Assembled by one of the most respected senior scholars in the field of rhetoric, the essays chart a course from tradition-based theory of civic rhetoric to ongoing issues of figuration, power, and gender. Together with a lucid introductory essay, these studies help to integrate the still-volatile questions at the core of humanities scholarship in rhetoric. The introductory student as well as the seasoned scholar will gain familiarity and footing in this oldest--and still new--liberal art.

Leading with the provocative observation that writing programs administration lacks “an established set of texts that provides a baseline of shared knowledge... in which to root our ongoing conversations and with which to welcome newcomers,” Landmark Essays on Writing Program Administration focuses on WPA identity to propose one such grouping of texts. This Landmark volume is the cornerstone resource for new Writing Program Administrators and graduate students seeking an ever-important overview of the literature on Writing Program Administration. Drawing broadly across scholarship in writing programs and writing centers, Ritter and Ianetta work to historicize, theorize, and problematize the ever-shifting answers offered to the question: Who—or what—is a WPA?