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Doug, One idea that comes to mind re your question of what happens to the individual speaker and persona in a social theory of writing: Bakhtin posits the notion of individuals interacting with (negotiating, reinventing, putting their own spin on) a society's existing genres. Here the individual does appear to retain a certain autonomy: there's a reciprocity between individual intention and expression, on the one hand, and conventionalized social uses of language, on the other. Graham Smart