Integrating Rhetorical and Literary Theories of Genre

hile many scholars have addressed the critical issues of whether English can or should hang together as a field politically, economically, and culturally, I address in this article the issue of whether we in English studies can hang together topically—that is, whether we can see ourselves as sharing a common object of study. It is obvious that different subdisciplines of English have different methodologies, from hermeneutic to social scientific, that raise different questions and are based in different ideologies. If these subdisciplines have no more in common with one another than do the studies of history and literature, or philosophy and composition, or psychology and linguistics, then the question of whether English constitutes a discipline is strictly a political question and need only be discussed in political terms, a question answerable in terms of political expediency or public perception more than in terms of disciplinarity. If, however, the fields of literature, linguistics, and rhetoric-composition share more in common with one another than they do with other disciplines, then a greater argument can be made that we in English should work to maintain our connections, for our different methodologies and questions can complement and contribute to one another’s research and teaching. What we in English would seem to have in common is the study of discourse, especially of text, although the definition of “text” varies. If that common object of study is significant, then our separate examinations of it should combine to create greater understanding of the complexity of reading and writing. To examine that claim, I will compare and attempt to integrate the scholarship on one part of