The Author-Function, The Genre Function, and The Rhetoric of Scholarly Webtexts

In this article, I compare Michel Foucault's (1994) author-function and Anis Bawarshi's (2000) genre function as explanations for the use, categorization, and value of scholarly webtexts. I focus much of my analysis on Anne Frances Wysocki's (2002) “A Bookling Monument” because it is explicitly designed to destabilize our reading practices. I also situate Wysocki's webtext along a spectrum with Charles Lowe's (2004) “Copyright, Access, and Digital Texts” and Collin Gifford Brooke's (2002) “Perspective: Notes Toward the Remediation of Style.” In using the author-function and the genre function as lenses on these pieces, I aim to articulate multiple possible modes of being for scholarly webtexts and their users. In the process, I illustrate the ways these concepts speak to the status and social function of authorial ownership and originality; multimodal complexity; and formal reflexivity. Ultimately, I argue that bringing traditional concepts like authorship and genre to bear on scholarly webtexts not only reveals the values of the Computers and Writing community but also presents a unique opportunity to continue testing the uses and limits of our rhetorical theories.