THE IDEA OF GENRE IN THEORY AND PRACTICE: An Overview of the Work in Genre in the Fields of Composition and Rhetoric and New Genre Studies

Genre is an idea with a history perhaps as long as that of thought itself. Early creation myths often speak of a creator who brings form out of a formless chaos—in Scandinavian mythology, a cow licks the form of the first human out of a shapeless ice block; in Judeo-Christian mythology, a creator brings order out of a universe “without form and void,” and then in the next six days populates it with the “kinds” of animal and plant life. But for our limited purposes here, an inquiry into the value of explicit attention to genre in the teaching