Constructing knowledge and identity in a professionally-oriented discipline What's at stake in genre variation?

Abstract

AbstractCentral to rhetorical genre theory is the notion of ‘rhetorical situation’ (Bitzer, 1968), which emphasizes context as sociohistorically situated. In the analysis of academic genres, this notion helps us to think of the contexts that genres respond to as dynamic, varying across time and space, rather than as stable and unified disciplinary discourse communities. From this social perspective, academic disciplines are theorized as including a great number and range of rhetorical situations (Paré, 2014), and the idea of genre variation becomes of increasing scholarly interest. In this study, rhetorical genre theory and the concept of ‘rhetorical situation’ provide a framing for the anal..