Introducing the Literary Critic: The CARS Model in the Introductions of Academic Papers in Literary Criticism

Abstract

Genre analysis as a “meta-study” is a topic that has been deeply investigated in the field of applied linguistics, one of its more specific areas of interest being research article introductions (RAIs). However, there are still certain kinds of scholarly activity that have received relatively little attention in this regard, such as literary criticism. The paper presents and discusses the results of a small-scale study of the introductions of ten academic essays in this field. The paper’s aim is to see how Swales’ (1990) CARS model can be applied to the rhetorical structure of these RAIs. It is found that at the cost of certain modifications necessitated by the structure of the essays in the corpus, it is not impossible to analyze critical texts produced by scholars belonging in the latter area. The demonstration of this has significance in fulfilling a perceived need for literary criticism to be considered among those disciplines that are worthy of the attention of applied linguistic research.