The "looser" approach to genre research you mention is represented in a
recent special issue of MCA (below), and my review essay in that issue
gives a bunch of other directions to go to find research in what has been
called the "North American genre" approach (to distinguish it from the
Australian Hallidayan tradition you mention and the Critical Discourse
Analysis tradition centered in the UK, mostly).
Russell, David R., & Charles Bazerman, eds. (1997). The Activity of
Writing/The Writing of Activity. A special issue of Mind, Culture, and
Activity v. 4. (You can get it from Erlbaum or on Amazon.com)
The article you found on my web site has been published in a rather
different form as:
"Rethinking Genre in School and Society: An Activity Theory Analysis,"
Written Communication 14 (1997): 504-554.
Cheers,
David
>I would like to ask for some help from XMCA folk who are interested in
>lingustics, and genre research in particular.
>
>I have been noticing some intriguing genre patterns in my research data
>that don't seem to be easily analysed using Hasan's rather strict
>definition of genre structure and membership (as in Hasan, 1990). So, I
>have been scrounging around trying to get up to speed on recent working
>exploring the notion that genre type instances may be recognized more by
>their functional use in specific contexts (as David Russell suggested
>recently, 1997), rather than by any strict set of structural patterns. I
>suspect that this "looser", less structural, definition of genre might
>better explain some of the patterns I am seeing in my own data.
>
>Anyone on XMCA have a line on any recent writings on this topic?
>
>M. A.K. Halliday & R. Hasan. (1990). Language, context, and text.
>(Currently out of print) http://www.amazon.com
>
>Russell, D. R. (1997). Rethinking genre in school and society: An
>activity theory analysis. (on David's web site:
>http://www.iastate.edu/~drrussel/at%26genre/at%26gentre.html)
>
>--glenn
>
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>
>Glenn D. Humphreys
>P.O. Box 11
>Echo Bay, Ontario
>Canada, P0S 1C0
>Telephone: (705) 248-1226
>Internet: glenhump who-is-at soonet.ca
>Fax (Phone/Email to arrange fax transmission): (705) 248-1226
David R. Russell
Associate Professor
English Department
Iowa State University
Ames, IA 50011 USA
(515) 294-4724
Fax (515) 294-6814
drrussel who-is-at iastate.edu