universidade federal de santa catarina pós-graduação em letras ...

19CHAPTER 2GENRE STUDIES AND ACADEMIC DISCOURSE2.0 IntroductionChapter 1 presented the purpose and organization of this study. It was pointed outthat the study is concerned with the comparative analysis of book reviews in the contextsof three disciplinary cultures in the academy, namely, linguistics, chemistry, andeconomics. Thus this is an attempt to define the abstract representation of text structureof the genre and to verify if and how it responds to variation in context, connecting textand context through the study of how book reviewers use the same genre in eachdiscipline.As the present analysis is basically a theoretical and descriptive discussion,concentrated on the relationship between the academic context of production and thetext itself, it does not aim to explore in depth the pedagogical or the psycholinguisticconsiderations of writing and reading tasks or processes. However, the present chapterwill begin by setting the scene where the study of academic genres gained prominenceas an approach to writing scholarship and instruction that resorted to other areas such asEnglish for Specific Purposes (ESP), Applied Linguistics, Rhetoric, and DiscourseAnalysis. The remaining of the chapter will review the literature on genre theories and tofurther explain the basic concepts used in the genre-analytical tradition that this studypurports to follow.2.1 Origins of Genre Analysis in English for Specific Purposes