Notes from Bawarshi's Genre and the Invention of the Writer

Introduction: A Meditation on Beginnings

Guided by an understanding of writing as a social activity, composition scholarship has become less concerned with inquiring into generalizable cognitive processes and more concerned with inquiring into the localized, textured conditions in which cognition and social activities are organized. (5)

how different genres constitute writers into different subject formations (11)

the position of the writer as someone who not only writes, but who is also "written" or produced by the genres that he or she writes. (11)

I locate invention at the intersection between the acquisition and articulation of desire--the site at which writers obtain, negotiate, and enact specific social commitments, orientations, and relations... (11)

To write is to position oneself within genres--to assume and enact certain situated commitments, identities, relations, and practices. (14)

I offer genre analysis as a way for students to access, position themselves within, and participate critically in genred discursive spaces and the commitments, relations, identities, and activities embedded within them. (14)

Chapter 3: Inventing the Writer in Composition Studies

...genre theory helps us extend the sphere of agency in the study and teaching of writing to include not only what writers do when they write, but what happens to writers that makes them do what they do. Extending the sphere of agency in this way allows us to explore Kenneth Burke's expression "the motivation to act" in the fullness of its complexity, as a process of simultaneously acting and being acted upon. Such a formulation recognizes the writer as a "double agent," one who is both an agent of his or her desires and actions and an agent on behalf of already existing desires and actions. Invention occurs at the intersection of this dialectic between the social and the individual. (50)

Generally speaking, process-based research and pedagogy in composition studies have privileged the writer as the primary agent of invention. (50)

When composition pedagogies position writers as the primary or originating agents of invention, they deny writers access to the agency in which they necessarily participate. In doing so, such pedagogies perpetuate what Howard, following LeFevre (1987), Crowley (1990), and Lunsford and Ede (1994), calls the "normative model of the inspired, autonomous author [which] so pervades contemporary composition pedagogy that it even informs models for classroom collaboration (1999, 57).

In reclaiming invention as a teachable subject, thus, the process movement shifted the focus of writing instruction from the text and toward the writer. This shift from text to writer resulted in the destabilization of the text, since the text became treated as an ongoing production rather than as a freestanding product. The text now had a history that could be traced to its writer's mind and analyzed through the processes of its production. The process movement, hence, rejected the modernist stability of the new critical literary text as something somehow already composed only to be interpreted and evaluated, and embraced a view of the text as something contingent, something that is always in the process of being composed. Yet for all its challenges to the text as a fixed, stable, and final product, for all its emphasis on revision, open-endedness, and recursivity, the process movement remains a decidedly modernist practice when it comes to its preservation of the writer as the self-possessed, identifiable agent of invention. The process movement...has not provided a sociology of texts that accounts as fully for their social and socializing presence, as recent work in post-process theory has argued (see Kent, 1999). (54-55)

So many of our contemporary perceptions of invention assume the writer as its starting point that the way we understand and teach invention today is premised on an epistemology that has well nigh destroyed it. Even by the 1960s when the process movement in composition studies tipped the rhetorical balance from product back to production and hence rescued invention by one again giving it a central role in the teaching of writing, it maintained the partial view ofthe writer as the primary agent of invention rather than as an agent who participates within a larger discursive and ideological agency. Yet whereas current-traditional rhetorics dismissed it as unteachable because inherent, process-based rhetorics recognized invention as generative (as the stage of the writing process in which writers construct knowledge rather than recall it), and developed a range of strategies for helping writers, alone or in collaboration with others, to learn through writing. In so doing, the process movement defined the writer's growth as the subject of writing instruction. (60)

Process-based view of invention...largely continue to imagine the inventing writer as a cognitive free agent. While overlooking the systems of linguistic and social interaction that necessarily inform even early-stage cognitive processes, such a view of the writer has nonetheless helped writing teachers productively acknowledge and encourage the writer's agency. It has helped make the writer a more active and conscious participant in the writing process, one who makes decisions, shapes meaning and reformulates it while writing, and performs different activities at different stages of writing. But by focusing mainly on teh writer as the agent of his or her cognitive processes, the writing process movement has provided only a partial view of invention. While the writer is certainly an agent of writing, to locate him or her as the prime agent is to ignore the agency that is already at work on the writer as he or she makes decisions, shapes meaning, and reformulates it. So while the writer may be the most visible agent of his or her writing processes, these processes take place within and against a larger sphere of agency that shapes them. (68)

work in composition studies that examines invention as a situated activity... (68)

a larger system of agency in which the writer as agent participates. (69)

As I described them in chapter 2, genres are sites of action, which locate writers within specific relations, practices, commitments, and subjectivities. Within such discursive ecologies, writers not only acquire and articulate specific desires, but they also participate in, resist, and enact the relations and activities bound up in and deployed through these desires. (71)

Positing genre in addition to the writer as the locus of invention suggests that invention is not only a process of introspection but also a process of socialization, a process of positioning oneself within and managing one's way through a set of relations, commitments, practices, and subjectivities. (76)

Each genre, then, represents a different topic or commonplace, a situated and typified way of rhetorically organizing, conceptualizing, relating to, and acting in our real or imagined environments. (76)

We need to pay more specific attention to the situated discursive conditions within and against which communication and communicators take place and are made possible--the conditions that prompt us to invent. Genres provide access to and help us to understand and describe these conditions, since genres do not just ideologically structure the way individuals conceptualize situations; they also provide individuals with the discursive means for acting within situations, so that genres maintain the social motives which individuals interpret and enact as intentions. (77)