| Over the last quarter-century, genre studies has profited from and contributed to the widespread interest of critical social theorists in the production and maintenance and transformation of social structures. Much contemporary genre theory, however, is limited in its usefulness by persistent functionalist thinking about motive, intention, and constraint. In advancing theories of the social, many conversations about the circulation of textual forms conflate outcome with intention, or consequence with design, and thus over-attribute agency to writers and structure to genre. Drawing on recent work in spatial theory and composition studies' growing interest in what some compositionists call writers' "discursive resources," I propose in this dissertation a way of talking about genre uptake that does justice to the complexity of genre-structure and to writers' agency in composing within such structures. I test the viability of this way of talking about genre in three case-studies of genre uptake: a writing classroom, an administrative reform, and part of a "community outreach" initiative of the Milwaukee Department of City Development. Based on my findings, I conclude by outlining a rhetorical methodology for institutional transformation through genre intervention. |
