Writing Genres begins theoretically and then shifts to examine Devitt's archive of genres. Chapter three, for instance, is a lucid overview of Devitt's study of the genres of tax accounting. In a 1986 study, she examined genres in circulation in the Big Eight accounting firms of Kansas City. The firms did not have to physically consolidate (although this happened in subsequent years) for their genres to be consolidated, and while the genres the accountants used were steeped in industry values, Devitt argues that the accountants made choices to construct their shared communities. "That there are generic conventions to which readers expect conformity is not negative, that those conventions identify members and nonmembers is not negative. Like other standards, genre is used by society to accomplish its ends. A benevolent society may use those standards, including genre, benevolently; a fascist society may use those standards fascistically" (87). Here, one sees the neutral value Devitt places on genre: genres are what users make of them.

If Devitt's chapter on genre change is ambitious, her chapter on genre and literature is gutsy. While genre theorists have produced extensive work on such workplace and everyday genres as the resume, caseworker intake notes, the syllabus, and even the greeting card, scholarship has generally sidestepped literary texts. Particularly given the textual variety that characterizes works of literature, the intangible and changing nature of literature's rhetorical situation (if such a thing can even be imagined), and the multiple audiences and contexts literature involves over time, the apparatus of genre theory has trouble making sense of literature. Devitt discusses this omission, identifying literary applications of rhetorical genre theory that are needed in the field. "If scholars working in rhetorical genre theory choose not to adapt their genre theory to literary genres . . . [genre theory] may continue to emphasize function, community, similarity, and singularity in ways that exclude its application to many literary genres" (190).

The stakes of Devitt's book are ultimately strongest in her argument for integrating a nuanced and critical understanding of genre into first-year composition. Of late, first-year writing courses have been subject to many well-reasoned attacks (see Crowley, 1998), so Devitt's use of genre to intervene and try to preserve first-year writing will be of interest to many writing teachers and writing program administrators. Teaching the kind of genre awareness Devitt's book enacts in its own chapters, she proposes, "may enable writers to learn newly encountered genres when they are immersed in a context for which they need those genres but to learn the needed genres with greater rhetorical understanding and with more conscious acceptance of or resistance to the genres' ideologies" (192). Teaching genre awareness, then, is about students learning to make informed decisions in each new situation they encounter. Resistant responses could result from such genre awareness, as could informed acts of participation in scenes of disciplinary writing. This argument makes first-year writing necessarily prefatory to other scenes of college writing.

Like any ambitious text that takes risks, this is not a book without weaknesses. While I found Devitt's repeated pairings of genre and choice, genre and freedom, and genre and creativity to be an important correction to deterministic views of genre, I worry at times that this is an over-correction. Devitt's reliance on J.M. Balkin's work on ideology (158-162) strikes me as an unwarranted departure from Foucauldian notions of ideology that have been consistently used in prior work in the field, most notably in the collection The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre (2002). For me, departing from that focus on power and the nature of dominative ideological discourse formations means short-circuiting further inquiry into how genre systems, by their very nature of being largely taken-for-granted, can be dangerous propagators of the status quo. I worry that Devitt may be too eager to advance her non-deterministic view of genre at the expense of remembering how certain genres work to circulate dominative and often unquestioned assumptions and rules for acting, thinking, and being. In the activity system of the classroom, for instance, teachers circulate genres of the syllabus, course website, and assignment, and then call into circulation genres of the student paper, blog, or final exam. This familiar genre set may enable the free, creative classroom moments Devitt alludes to, but the same genres may also perpetuate the most basic systems of control regulating teachers and students: panoptic tools of discipline and surveillance that remain under-questioned and reproduced in part because of genre. Finally, as a teacher of first-year writing myself, I fail to see why Devitt's program of teaching genre awareness needs to happen in the first-year writing course. Why not place genre awareness training in courses located in the disciplines using tangible examples? Why not in high school? In efforts to justify first-year writing, a genre-awareness pedagogy may play a role, but given the many political and economic issues involved in the debate over whether to preserve or abolish this required course, saving first-year writing from the coordinated and informed attacks against it will take more, I think, than curricular reform.

With that said, this book is a powerful review of the literature and clear articulation of the theory on genre. It includes an ambitious series of engagements with genre in multiple contexts and settings. And by linking genre to both literature and first-year writing, Devitt openly invites otherwise un-united scholars of texts to come together to discuss this powerful set of theories about a discourse formation, genre, that is always structuring and structured by our lives.

Notes