Uhe past fifteen years have witnessed a dramatic reconceptualization of genre and its role in the production and interpretation of texts and culture. Led in large part by scholars in functional and applied linguistics (Bhatia; Halliday; Kress; Swales), communication studies (Campbell; Jamieson; Yates), education (Christie; Dias; Medway), and, most recently, rhetoric and composition studies (Bazerman; Berkenkotter; Coe; Devitt; Freedman; Miller; and Russell), this movement has helped transform genre study from a descriptive to an explanatory activity, one that investigates not only text-types and classification systems, but also the linguistic, sociological, and psychological assumptions underlying and shaping these text-types. No longer structuring and classifying a mainly literary textual universe, as Northrop Frye (Anatomy of Criticism) and others in literary studies have traditionally suggested, genres have come to be defined as typified rhetorical ways communicants come to recognize and act in all kinds of situations, literary and nonliterary. As such, genres do not simply help us define and organize kinds of texts; they also help us define and organize kinds of social actions, social actions that these texts rhetorically make possible. It is this notion of genre that I wish to explore in this study in order to investigate the role that genre plays in the constitution not only of texts but of their contexts, including the identities of those who write them and those who are represented within them.
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