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 com- position, or psychology and linguistics, then the question of whether English consti- tutes 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 com- plement 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 College English, Volume 62, Number 6, July 2000 Amy J. Devitt is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas, where she teaches courses in writing, English language, and rhetoric-composition. Her current research emphasis is on genre the- ory, and she is working on a book-length theoretical overview of genre as well as collaborating on a first- year writing textbook based in understanding genre. Her book, Standardizing Written English: Diffusion in the Case of Scotland 1520–1659, was published by Cambridge University Press, and she has published articles in CCC as well as chapters in several collections. Amy J. Devitt 696 W Copyright © 2000 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.