Composition Forum 37 - Worlding Genres through Lifeworld Analysis: New Directions for Genre Pedagogy and Uptake Awareness

Oct 15, 2026

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“Worlding Genres through Lifeworld Analysis” argues that rhetorical genre studies should decenter genre as artifact and instead examine the conditions that surround and constrain how genres are used—genre uptakes. It extends prior work by introducing lifeworld analysis to track uptake over time and across contexts. A four-year writer-oriented case study follows Ron, linking maker-culture experiences to his school-based genre performance. The analysis motivates an uptake awareness pedagogy for strategic use of temporal, spatial, and perspectival histories.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages14

Reading Time35 min

AccessFree to download

Composition Forum 37, Fall 2017

Worlding Genres through Lifeworld Analysis: New Directions for Genre Pedagogy and Uptake Awareness

Abstract

Genre as Artifact and Uptake Theory

Uptake, Memory, Extra-Textual Factors

Longitudinal, Writer-Oriented Perspective and Pedagogy

Current Issue From the Editors Weblog Editorial Board Editorial Policy Submissions Archives Accessibility Search Composition Forum 37, Fall 2017 Worlding Genres through Lifeworld Analysis: New Directions for Genre Pedagogy and Uptake Awareness Angela Rounsaville Abstract: Recently, rhetorical genre studies scholars have challenged the field to de-center the study of genre as artifact to focus on the conditions that surround, inform, and constrain how those genres get used by writers: the genre uptakes. While prior research has begun to identify many of these consequential influences, these endeavors would benefit, I argue, from an emic, writer-oriented method that follows what writers perceive has impact on genres from a longitudinal and trans-contextual perspective. To that end, I extend previous research by introducing lifeworld analysis to the study and teaching of genre uptake. Lifeworld analysis, I argue, centralizes uptake, uptakes over time, and the background life from which uptakes are formed, as salient for literacy development. To support this claim, I present a lifeworld case study of one student (Ron), an electrical engineering major and participant in local and online maker culture, who I followed over four years of his undergraduate curriculum, from general education and discipline-specific courses into an online and local community makerspace. Ron’s case reveals the interplay between maker-consciousness and encounters with engineering and general education writing, highlighting how maker culture became a core scene of uptake for his performance of school-based genres. This lifeworld analysis shows the porousness and malleability of spheres of writing activity as well as the consequences of such perceived malleability for writers. Ron’s case grounds my introduction of an uptake awareness pedagogy: an attempt to help students recognize and strategically draw from expanded and often taken-for-granted temporal, spatial, and perspectival histories of their prior genre uptakes and those uptake histories. In their recent edited collection Genre and the Performance of Publics, Reiff and Bawarshi challenge scholars to decenter the study of genre as artifact in genre studies. Ushering in a new phase for rhetorical genre studies research, this seemingly counterintuitive call looks to “the interconnections, translations, and pathways between genres” that comprise the “inter-and intrageneric conditions (material, embodied, temporal, affective)” in and through which genres circulate, become meaningful, and are realized as social actions (3) . In “Accounting for Genre Performances,”Bawarshi has similarly argued that “while we know a lot more about what genres are and how genres relate to one another in complex ways, we do not know as much about the complex performances that take place in-between and around genre”(188) . In other words, to de-center genre as artifact is to shift focus from what is “textually available” in genre performance (189) to the conditions that surround, inform, and constrain those genre performances. As a result, the “complex scene[s] of agency”(189) within which writers come to know, develop orientations toward, and experience genres in “real time and space”(190) are amplified. Not only the genres themselves but also the connections between the genres become the focus point for theory, method, and pedagogy. Uptake theory, introduced to genre studies through Anne Freadman’s efforts to explain why people, despite a pool of available genres, respond to some genres and not others, has provided both inspiration and language for exploring genre interstices: spaces between, around, and through which genres travel and accrue memory for writers. For Freadman, uptake theory emphasizes the long memories, sequences, and arrangements of texts and intertextual relations that condition how and for what purposes writers take up genres. Uptake “mediates between genres”(“Uptake” 44) and draws its pow

FAQs

What does the article propose as an alternative focus in genre studies?

It proposes decentering genre as artifact and focusing on the surrounding conditions that inform and constrain how genres are used, especially “genre uptakes.”

How does lifeworld analysis contribute to studying genre uptake?

It centralizes uptake over time and the background life from which uptakes are formed, treating these as salient for literacy development.

Who is Ron, and why is his case important?

Ron is an electrical engineering major involved in local and online maker culture. His four-year case study shows how maker-consciousness and writing encounters shape his uptake and performance of school-based genres.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by jay