Disrupting Conventions: When and Why Writers Take Up Innovation

Abstract

Genre scholars have exposed the ideological nature of genres by examining how they promote and normalize certain values, epistemologies, and power relations. Recently, scholars have extended this work to uptake--the ways in which writers take up others' actions, texts, and genres. Doing so has revealed how uptakes become normalized and, thus, conventional, yet less attention has been given to how conventional uptakes can be disrupted through critical interventions. Given that composition pedagogies often seek to disrupt reading and writing practices to encourage critical awareness, a stronger understanding of when and why writers innovate or use convention is necessary and timely. This dissertation explores theoretically when and why writers innovate or follow conventions and also performs a qualitative research study that tests "a pedagogy of uptake awareness and disruption." By doing so, it theoretically contributes to uptake studies and it argues for conventionalizing alternative uptakes in the composition classroom to encourage rhetorical agency.