the wide range of academic genres a first-year composition student may have to deal with in the future, are unlikely to force those students to venture so deeply into any one genre as to require slavish imitation. The only first-year composition teachers likely to demand "conformity and submission" to a particular kind of academic discourse are those English-department fixtures, the evangelical disciples of literature, professors whose goal in first-year composition is to teach students to explicate . Writing-in-the-disciplines adherents, unlike teachers of literature-as-composition, generally recognize the folly of forcing students to conform to the conventions of a discourse community they have no desire to join. In his Elements of Criticism, prominent Scottish belles-lettres rhetorician Lord Kames (1696–1782) says the aim of the belles-lettres movement is to "discover a foundation for reasoning upon the taste of an individual" and "design a science of rational criticism." The focus of the Belletristic Rhetoric Theory is on defining the characteristics of rhetorical style such as beauty, sublimity, propriety and wit all of which play a part in affecting the emotion and reasoning capabilities of the audience. Also important to those studying rhetoric and belles-lettres is defining the taste of the audience; this is key to being a truly successful rhetorician or writer. As another belles-lettres rhetorician, Hugh Blair (1718–1800), states in Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, "taste is foundational to rhetoric and necessary for successful spoken and written discourse." See also Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres Arts and letters (disambiguation) Literary fiction References Literary genres he:ספרות יפה