Genre Systems at Work: DSM-IV and Rhetorical Recontextualization in Psychotherapy Paperwork

In this article, I describe four interrelated analytical concepts useful for studying the discursive practices of professional writers: intertextuality, interdiscursivity, genre systems, and recontextualization. Drawing on structuration theory and neo-Vygotskyan activity theory to provide a framewor...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Written communication 2001-07, Vol.18 (3), p.326-349
Main Author: BERKENKOTTER, CAROL
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anthropological Linguistics
Applied Linguistics
Business writing
Case Records
Ethnography
Flow Charts
Mental Disorders
Mental Health
Modeling (Psychology)
Paperwork
Psychiatry
Psychology
Psychotherapy
Resistance (Psychology)
Social Structure
Speech
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Summary:In this article, I describe four interrelated analytical concepts useful for studying the discursive practices of professional writers: intertextuality, interdiscursivity, genre systems, and recontextualization. Drawing on structuration theory and neo-Vygotskyan activity theory to provide a framework for the above concepts, I present three theoretical assumptions: (a) genre systems play an intermediate role between institutional structural properties and individual communicative action, (b) a central means for identifying texts in a genre system is their intertextual activity, and (c) the concept of “genre systems” enables the analyst to foreground the discursively salient components of human activity systems. An elaboration of each of these assumptions is followed by an illustration of genre systems at work in one psychotherapist's session notes and the process I call rhetorical recontextualization.
ISSN:0741-0883
1552-8472
DOI:10.1177/0741088301018003004