Genres Fall Apart
Recuperating the Centrifugal in Rhetorical Genre Analysis
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21560573 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Rebecca Lorimer Leonard (0009-0007-6998-8546, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA, corresponding author), Angela Rounsaville (0000-0002-3660-9200, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 760-779 |
| Publication date | 2026-07-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Written Communication (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0741-0883 • E-ISSN: 1552-8472 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/07410883261440228 |
| OpenAlex | W7161721401 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 27 |
Transnational and multilingual writing data are characterized by mobile practices that rarely hold still for study. As individuals form and re-form communities in the process of migration, their language and literacy paths increasingly diversify forms of language sociality, goals, or expectations. In such cases, a priori community knowledge around genre use becomes tenuous or nonexistent. Yet, many default methodological orientations in Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) have tended to emphasize agreement, recognizability, and community cohesion, focusing analysis especially on textual typicality. This article attends to this methodological issue by resurfacing and extending a discussion of the centrifugal nature of genre. To demonstrate this shift, the article enacts a genre analysis of a multilingual community-based writing workshop, showing how centripetal and centrifugal forces run through workshop participants’ creation of a language portrait. Ultimately, the article shows that tracking genre’s stabilizing and destabilizing forces, particularly from a human perspective, provides an analytic guide to writing practices as they fragment and re-coalesce. It further demonstrates how centering the human handling of genre can orient writing researchers to the instability that is often the reality of transnational and multilingual writing
Discourse analysis · Discourse community · Genre analysis · Literacy · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Writing process · Written language · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Multilingual Education and Policy · Translation Studies and Practices
Translingual Practice
The Sociolinguistics of Globalization
Mobility Work in Composition
Writing Toward a Decolonial Option
Writing Storybooks as Storytelling
Rethinking Translingualism in College Composition Classrooms
Investigating Texts in their Social Contexts
Genre Repertoires from Below
The Linguistic Repertoire Revisited
Genre as social action
| Highly cited | No |
|---|