10.4324 9781315839257 Previewpdf
10.4324 9781315839257 Previewpdf
DAVID DUFF
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General Editor:
STAN SMITH, Research Professor in Literary Studies, Nottingham Trent University
Titles available:
MARY EAGLETON, Feminist Literary Criticism
GARY WALLER, Shakespeare's Comedies
JOHN DRAKAKIS, Shakespearean Tragedy
RICHARD WILSON AND RICHARD DUTTON, New Historicism and Renaissance Drama
PETER WIDDOWSON, D.H. Lawrence
PETER BROOKER, Modernism/Postmodernism
RACHEL BOWLBY, Virginia Woolf
FRANCIS MULHERN, Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism
ANNABEL PATTERSON, John Milton
CYNTHIA CHASE, Romanticism
MICHAEL O'NEILL, Shelley
STEPHANIE TRIGG, Medieval English Poetry
ANTONY EASTHOPE, Contemporary Film Theory
TERRY EAGLETON, Ideology
MAUD ELL MANN, Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism
ANDREW BENNETT, Readers and Reading
MARK CURRIE, Metafiction
BREAN HAMMOND, Pope
STEVEN CONNOR, Charles Dickens
REBECCA STOTT, Tennyson
LYN PYKETT, Reading Fin de Siecle Fictions
ANDREW HADFIELD, Edmund Spenser
SUSANA ONEGA AND JOSE ANGEL GARciA LANDA, Narratology: An Introduction
TESS COSSLETT, Victorian Women Poets
BART MOORE-GILBERT, GARETH STANTON AND WILLY MALEY, Postcolonial Criticism
ANITA PACHECO, Early Women Writers
JOHN DRAKAKIS AND NAOMI CONN LIEBLER, Tragedy
ANDREW MICHAEL ROBERTS, Joseph Conrad
JOHN LUCAS, William Blake
LOIS PARKINSON ZAMORA, Contemporary American Women Writers: Gender,
Class, Ethnicity
THOMAS HEALY, Andrew Marvell
Modern Genre Theory
JANE STABLER, Byron
STEVE ELLIS,Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
RICHARD KROLL, The English Novel, Volume 1,1700 to Fielding
Preface vi
Acknowledgements viii
Key Concepts x
Introduction 1
1 BENEDETTO CROCE Criticism of the Theory of Artistic and
Literary Kinds 25
2 YURY TYNYANOV The Literary Fact 29
3 VLADIMIR PROPP Fairy Tale Transformations 50
4 MIKHAIL BAKHTIN Epic and Novel: Toward a
Methodology for the Study of the Novel 68
5 MIKHAIL BAKHTIN The Problem of Speech Genres 82
6 NORTHROP FRYE The Mythos of Summer: Romance 98
7 IRENEUSZ OPACKI Royal Genres 118
8 HANS ROBERT JAUSS Theory of Genres and Medieval
Literature 127
9 ROSALIE COLIE Genre-Systems and the Functions of
Literature 148
10 FREDRIC JAMESON Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical
Use of Genre Criticism 167
11 TZVETAN TODOROV The Origin of Genres 193
12 GERARD GENETTE The Architext 210
13 JACQUES DERRIDA The Law of Genre 219
14 ALASTAIR FOWLER Transformations of Genre 232
15 MARY EAGLETON Genre and Gender 250
Notes on Authors 263
Further Reading 267
Index 279
v
Preface
David Duff
Aberdeen
March 1999
vii
Acknowledgements
ix
Key Concepts
xvi
Introduction
Russian Formalism
The breakthrough, on the problem of genre as in many other areas of
literary theory, occurred in eastern Europe, in the remarkable work
of the Russian Formalists. Russian Formalist thinking on the question
of genre has not achieved anything like the currency, in the West, of
notions such as defamiliarisation and the dominant, and there are
many lingering misapprehensions about this aspect of Formalism, not
least as a result of deliberate distortions which were put into circulation
in the mid-1920s in order to discredit the Formalists for essentially
political reasons. The most serious of these misapprehensions is the
belief that the Russian Formalists were not interested in literary
history, and that they always insisted, as did the American New
Critics of the 1930s, in isolating the single text as an object of study,
and ignoring its historical or generic determinants. This is simply
false, though it is a view that has been encouraged by the constant
reprinting in Western anthologies of literary theory of a single essay
of Viktor Shklovsky's, whose title is usually translated as 'Art as
Device' or 'Art as Technique'. This is a highly entertaining piece, and
also a kind of manifesto of Formalist methodology, but it belongs
to an early phase in the Formalist project (1917), when Shklovsky
and others were preoccupied with a theoretical struggle against the
Symbolist conception of art as 'thinking in images' (Shklovsky's title
6
Introduction
itself initiates the polemic). According to Boris Eikhenbaum's 1926
essay 'The Theory of the Formal Method' (which is a systematic,
chronological summary of the achievements of the school by one of
its leading practitioners, and probably still the best short introduction
to their work), it was not until 1921 that the Formalists turned their
attention to genre, this interest being reflected in essays such as
Shklovsky's on 'Rozanov', and Yury Tynyanov's on 'Dostoevsky and
GogoI' (subtitled 'Towards a Theory of Parody'), 'The Ode as a
Rhetorical Genre' and 'On Literary Evolution'. The most sustained
treatment of the subject is Tynyanov's seminal essay 'The Literary
Fact' (1924), which appears below in English translation for the first
time (Chapter 2).
What is clear from these essays is that for the Russian Formalists,
in their later phase, genre is the central mechanism of literary history,
and its proper object of study. From nineteenth-century scholars such
as Brunetiere and the Russian Alexander Veselovsky, the Formalists
inherit the problematic of literary evolution, but they turn that
concept on its head by arguing, first of all, that literary evolution is
discontinuous, as expressed in Shklovsky's chess metaphor of the
knight's move (the title of one of his works), and his claim that in the
history of literature the legacy is not transmitted from father to son,
but from uncle to nephew. 20 Secondly, they maintain that the evolution
of a particular genre cannot be understood from the genre-system as
a whole; thirdly, that genre is defined by function as well as form,
and that functions as well as forms evolve (so that, for instance, the
Russian ode performs a different function in the eighteenth century
than in the Romantic period - which is true of the English ode too);
fourthly, that, as Shklovsky puts it, 'a new form arises not in order to
express a new content [as Veselovsky had maintained], but because
the old form has exhausted its possibilities,;21 and fifthly, that there is,
as the Neoclassicists believed, a hierarchy of genres, but - here's the
difference - the hierarchy is always changing. It changes because, in
each literary epoch, different literary schools and literary genres are
in competition with one another, and what often happens is that a
genre which has previously been minor or marginal acquires a new
position of dominance - a process sometimes known as 'the canonisation
of the junior branch,.22
Tynyanov's essay on 'The Literary Fact' will explain and develop
most of these points, but it may be worth emphasising here certain
general features of this approach: for example, the fact that this is, in
essence, a revolutionary as well as an evolutionary model of genre - not
only in that it acknowledges the possibility of radical alterations in
the hierarchy of genres, but because it regards the condition of genre
itself as something like a state of permanent revolution. Genres
7
Modern Genre Theory
'evolve' because the act of belonging to a genre involves both adoption
of and resistance to its conventions; hence the special place of parody
in Formalist thinking, because parody explicitly works by exposing
and subverting conventions. Hence too the notion that the possibilities
of a genre can be exhausted, not least as the result of a ransacking by
an able parodist. It is obvious too how this theory of genre can be
said to extend the notion of defamiliarisation, which was originally
defined (in Shklovsky's 'Art as Technique', for example) in relation to
literary language. The underlying principle is aptly summed up in
the title which Tynyanov gave to a collection of his essays: Archaists
and Innovators - his point being that the great artists, in their use of
genre, are both of these at once.
Such a theory of genre is, then, far from being ahistorical, but it
does incorporate the epistemological stance of structural linguistics,
notably in its concept of the' genre-system'. Russian Formalism, let us
remember, was the first sustained application of Saussure's 'synchronic'
methodology to the study of literature, yet it also retained a diachronic
perspective, a particular genre being defined in relation both to the
genres that surround it, and to the previous manifestations of that
genre. Though this is true, the Formalist theory does, nevertheless,
put in question the relationship between genre and history by postulating
a degree of autonomy in the process of generic change - a process
which Eikhenbaum refers to as 'the dialectical self-creation of new
forms'.1 3 This is probably one of the greatest insights of the Russian
Formalists, but it was also one of their most dangerous, for it was
preCisely because of this apparent devaluation of the role of historical
and sociological determinants in literary evolution that the Formalists,
in the mid-1920s, fell foul of the political authorities, and the school
was eventually suppressed. 24 Eikhenbaum's inclusion of the word
'dialectical' in his description of this process was undoubtedly a
calculated political move, as he attempted to summarise and defend
the work of the Formalists in the climate of an increasingly rigid
Marxist orthodoxy; but it seems that the Formalist theory of literary
history was not dialectical enough, or not perceived to be so, to
satisfy the political censor. Nor indeed to satisfy certain other critics
of Formalism whose objections were not so obviously motivated by
political expediency.
Sociologies of genre
It is in this category that I believe the early work of the Bakhtin school
should be placed, notably the Bakhtin/Medvedev book The Formal
Method in Literary Scholarship (1928). Subtitled' A Critical Introduction
8
Introduction
to Sociological Poetics', this has been called 'the most extended and
scholarly critique of [Russian Formalism] ever undertaken by a
Marxist' ;25 and it certainly contains some trenchant criticisms of earlier
Formalist statements on geme,26 although some of the criticisms -
and indeed some of the proposed adjustments - are anticipated in
the essays of Tynyanov, of which the Bakhtin/Medvedev book does
not take account. 27 What is interesting, from our perspective, is the
book's reaffirmation of the centrality of geme within its vision of a
, sociological poetics', and its foregrounding of the problem of the
ideological dimension of geme. Whatever the justice of the critique,
we can see in retrospect that this particular quarrel with Formalism
is paradigmatic of a long series of debates within Marxism as to the
precise nature of what Bakhtin/Medvedev call the 'sociology of
geme', or the dialectic of literary change. Modem reformulations of
this dialectic include Raymond Williams's influential work on the
history of dramatic forms, the theoretical basis of which is made
explicit in his book Marxism and Literature (1977); Lucien Goldmann's
equally penetrating and (in France, at least) comparably influential
work on the sociology of the novel; the Italian Marxist critic Franco
Moretti's brilliantly suggestive essays on the sociology of literary
forms in Signs Taken for Wonders (1983); John Frow's illuminating
book Marxism and Literary History (1986); and Tony Bennett's astute
analysis of the sociology of gemes in Outside Literature (1990).28 The
most subtle version of Marxist geme theory, though, is the one
outlined in Fredric Jameson's 'Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical
Uses of Geme Criticism', from his book The Political Unconscious
(1981), an essay which submits the entire enterprise of modem geme
theory to a rigorous Marxist critique. A substantial extract is included
in this anthology (Chapter 10).
The most fruitful and far-reaching exploration of geme that takes
the encounter with Russian Formalism as its starting point, however,
is the work of Mikhail Bakhtin himself. Whether or not he wrote the
Medvedev book (this is still disputed), Bakhtin went on to produce
startlingly original and now increasingly influential ideas about a whole
range of matters connected with geme, and above all one particular
geme: the novel. David Lodge may be right in imputing to Bakhtin
,an almost messianic view of the novel as a literary form', 29 and I
certainly share some of the reservations of other scholars about Bakhtin's
downgrading of other gemes ('dead languages', he calls them) in order
to elevate this one; but it is Bakhtin, more than anyone else, who has
appreciated the extent to which traditional geme theory is rendered
obsolete by the advent of the novel, or of how - to use his own
words - 'Faced with the problem of the novel, geme theory must
submit to a radical restructuring' (below, p. 73). That restructuring is
9
Modern Genre Theory
a task that, for Bakhtin, begins in his earliest work, notably the 1924
essay 'Content, Material and Form in Verbal Art'30 (which predates
the Medvedev book and contains his first, arguably more profound
critique of Russian Formalism), and continues right through to his
last writings, the fascinating essays and fragments collected in the
volume Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (1986).
Gary Morson and Caryl Emerson, two of the leading American
translators and scholars of Bakhtin, have recently attributed to him
the creation of a 'Prosaics' (a term of their own invention)/l but
this might equally be called a 'poetics of content', for the theoretical
reorientation that Bakhtin consistently seeks involves a centralising of
the problematic of content - which, for Bakhtin, is almost always defined
in ideological terms. In this respect, Bakhtin's difference of emphasis
from Formalism, especially early Formalism, is considerable, which
may partly reflect the fact that the Formalist enterprise began as an
investigation of poetic language. What Bakhtin does is to shift attention
from the vexed question of the relationships between literary and
ordinary language, and between poetry and prose (issues that were
taken up again and developed by the Prague Structuralists), and to
concentrate instead on the relationship between what he calls 'primary'
and 'secondary genres'. Primary genres include things like letters,
diaries, minutes, everyday stories, as well as the so-called 'speech
genres', namely the different forms of dialogue; secondary genres are
the more complex entities - including the vast majority of literary
genres - that are formed by the combination and transformation of
primary genres. The novel, for Bakhtin, is unique because of its
extreme receptiveness to the primary genres, and because it retains as
its structural principle (at least in certain types of novel) the interplay
of voices that constitute the materials from which it derives. But all
genres, of literature and speech, are not simply sets of devices and
conventions, but 'forms of seeing and interpreting particular aspects
of the world', ways of 'conceptualising reality' that are stored within
the 'genre memory', it being the role of the great artist to awaken the
'semantic possibilities' that lie within a particular genre.
Here I am conflating statements from across the range of Bakhtin's
oeuvre,32 two major samples of which are included below: an extract
from his 1941 essay 'Epic and Novel' (Chapter 4), and part of an essay
from 1952-3 on 'Speech Genres' (Chapter 5). Like other aspects of
Bakhtin's work, his writings on genre are often read out of context. It
is necessary to reconstruct that context to see, for example, that many
of the ideas that we most readily associate with Bakhtin - 'dialogue',
the conflict of genres, the use of sub-literary forms, for example - are
foreshadowed in the work of Shklovsky, Eikhenbaum, Tynyanov and
other of his Formalist predecessors. Several commentators have noted
10
Introduction
too the striking parallels between Bakhtin's essay on 'Epic and Novel'
and Lukacs's early Theory of the Novel (subtitled' A Historio-philosophical
Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature'), another classic work in
the sociology of genres, which Bakhtin began translating in the 1920s. 33
Although space precludes it here, it would be instructive also to set
Bakhtin's ideas alongside those of the American cultural historian
Walter Ong, whose well-known book Orality and Literacy (1982)
contains incisive suggestions about the possible impact on genre
(particular genres, and the concept of genre itself) of the shift from
the predominantly oral culture of the Middle Ages to the book
culture of the Renaissance, and the further shifts that have marked
the growth of literacy and the development of technology.34 These are
also among the many concerns of Kenneth Burke, whose ideological
system elaborated in his early book Attitudes to History (1937)
adumbrates a theory of genre, involving 'frames of acceptance' and
'frames of rejection', that is not unlike Bakhtin's 'forms of seeing
and interpreting', but which insists, as does Burke's later work, on
the genuinely original, if slightly obscure, idea of writing as
'symbolic action,?5
The present anthology does, however, include the work of a more
recent critic who has a more direct connection with Bakhtin, namely
the Franco-Bulgarian theorist Tzvetan Todorov, one of Bakhtin's most
influential interpreters. Along with his fellow expatriate Julia Kristeva,
he was one of the first to bring the work of the Formalists to the
attention of French literary theorists in the mid-1960s, which had
enormous consequences for the development of French structuralism;
and both also performed similar services for Bakhtin. Todorov's essay
'The Origin of Genres' (1976), as well as being an introduction to
Bakhtin's later work, written some time before it became available
in French or English, is a helpful attempt to clarify the relationship
between Bakhtin's notion of 'speech genres' and Anglo-American
speech-act theory, with which Bakhtin himself was unfamiliar. It
also lays bare for the first time some of Bakhtin's profound debts
to German Romantic genre theory.36
Recent developments
The notion of literary competence thus begins to look suspiciously
like a reassertion (projected onto the reader rather than the writer)
of the prescriptive theory of genre that earlier theorists had sought
to dismantle. Derrida's deconstruction of the 'law of genre' might
therefore very plausibly be viewed as a re-enactment of the Romantic
revolt against the Neoclassical conception of genre, a re-enactment
rendered necessary by what Derrida plainly saw as the totalising
claims of modem structuralist thought. That moment of need has
probably now passed, and a degree of consensus is beginning to
emerge about both the possibilities and the limitations of the concept
of genre. It is revealing, for example, that a recent article by Vincent
Leitch purporting to offer a 'post-structuralist conceptualisation of
genre,45 arrives at conclusions not markedly different from those of
the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson; and that the word genre, once
regarded as so flawed and so archaic a concept as to be on the point
of dropping out of the modem critical vocabulary, has recently been
described by one reviewer as 'precisely that theoretical term which
encapsulates, in the problems that it poses, all the uncertainties,
contradictions, and confusions of the post-modern era, whether
in the cultural, intellectual, or political domains'.46
15
Modern Genre Theory
The defensive tone of earlier genre theory seems indeed to have
been replaced by a tone of almost exuberant confidence in the
concept, as witnessed by the rousing title of Adena Rosmarin's book
The Power of Genre (1985)47 and the wordplay of Betty Rosenberg's
title Genreflecting: A Guide to Reading Interests in Genre Fiction (1982).48
In Australia, the group of applied linguists who are exploring the
use of genre in education is now admiringly referred to as the 'genre
school',49 and the term' genre' has now been officially adopted in the
English and Scottish National Curriculum. Meanwhile the theory of
genre continues to playa central role in film studies, partly reflecting
the foundation of that discipline at the height of the structuralist
vogue of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as the ubiquitous use of genre
concepts in the cinema industry itself. A more recent development is
the interest in the category of genre in women's studies, an interest
partly inspired by the proximity of the words genre and gender
(which are one and the same word - genre - in French). As Mary
Eagleton'S helpful essay explains (Chapter 15), this has resulted in a
major rethinking of the history of genres, especially those that appear
to be 'gendered' in terms of their authors or readers, or in the case of
film and other media genres, their audiences.
Equally striking is the adoption of the concept in disciplines such
as political science, history and religious studies. Genre has long been
a focus for comparative studies in literature and, more recently, film,
as well as for interdisciplinary work within the broad base of cultural
studies.50 Now, it serves as a tool for ever more ambitious interdisciplinary
work, which in many cases makes no reference to literary structures
of any kind. In fact, genre has become part of the very metalanguage
of interdisciplinarity, the merging of disciplines being itself a
manifestation of what Clifford Geertz calls the 'blurring of genres'.51
Bakhtin's notion of 'speech genres' permits a still further expansion
of the concept by suggesting that all acts of communication, even
gestural ones, can be modelled in terms of genre, insofar as they are
partly dependent on codes and conventions.
This decisive upturn in the fortunes of genre may, as I have suggested,
be part of a cultural logic of popularisation, or may simply mark the
end of the Romantic polemic. But the apparent consensus may be
misleading. It is likely that genre theories will always, at some level,
compete with author theories, and that authors (or directors) will
continue to insist on the uniqueness and autonomy of their work,
while also wanting (as my epigraph from Martin Amis illustrates) to
exploit the resources - the power - of genre. It is probable too that the
concept of genre will continue to be put in question by more open-
ended models of textuality, both those that stress the instability of all
linguistic systems and those that emphasise the potentially unlimited
16
Introduction
scope of intertextuality (genre is, in effect, a restrictive model of
intertextuality). Distinctions of genre are, moreover, still liable to
be displaced by other analytical categories, as for instance in recent
discussion of 'l'ecriture feminine', or as when Foucault calls upon us to
overlook superficial boundaries 'form' and 'genre' in order to perceive
the circulation of entire discourses such as medicine, political economy
and biology.52 Foucault's 'archaeology of knowledge' still in effect
competes with the 'sociology of genres'.
That the American journal Genre, latterly subtitled Forms of Discourse
and Culture, contrives to combine Foucauldian and Bakhtinian keywords
in its name53 does not alter this fact, nor diminish one of the enduring
problems of genre theory, namely confusion of terminology. To give
just one example, the term mode currently carries at least two
indispensable but incompatible meanings: one that refers to the
manner of representation of a literary work (narrative, dramatic or
lyrical, in the pseudo-Aristotelian triad), and one that refers to the
extension of notionally fixed genres such as tragedy, comedy or elegy
into more plastic categories (tragic, comic, elegiac) that modify and
combine with other genres: a meaning of the term employed by
Alastair Fowler in Chapter 14. It is hard to see how agreement will
ever be reached to differentiate these meanings by separate words,
but the need remains pressing. Equally confusing is the distinction
between 'form' and 'genre'. Is 'generic form' a tautology, or does it
imply a useful distinction between the individual form of a single
work and the' generic form' of a type of work? How, similarly, do we
distinguish between 'inner' and 'outer' form (an opposition that
Wellek and Warren propose54 ), or between 'form' and 'structure'?
Part of the problem is that in 'genology,S5 or genre theory, unlike
in botany and zoology, there is no 'species' term to accompany the
'genus' term genre. The phrase 'species of composition' was common
in the eighteenth century, but this was before the word genre was
in use, and the latter has simply replaced, rather than defined itself
against, the former. We talk today of 'subgenres' and even 'microgenres',56
but this assumes a measure of agreement about relative size or stability
of the type of entity called 'genre' (or 'macrogenre') that in reality
does not exist. No modem language seems to have solved this problem
of nomenclature, and, as we have seen, the confusions extend back at
least as far as Aristotle. This may serve as a warning to the reader
venturing into genre theory for the first time, and perhaps as a stimulus
to the more experienced reader who feels able to elucidate these
terminological confusions (genre theory still awaits its Linnaeus).
On a less negative note, it should be clear from this anthology that
there are many aspects of genre theory which invite further investigation.
For instance, the radical restructuring of which Bakhtin spoke is by
17
Modern Genre Theory
no means complete, and it needs to involve not only a rethinking of
the novel but also a reconsideration of poetry and, above all, drama
(which Bakhtin almost totally ignores57 ). We also need to recall, and
absorb, and refine, the insights of some of the other eastern European
theorists whose work - on genres other than the novel, and on the
phenomenon of genre itself - has been temporarily eclipsed by the
cult of Bakhtin. And we need to return to Romantic genre theory, the
partially acknowledged source of so much modem thinking about
genre, and a much under-explored field in its own right (this is
especially true of the English Romantics, about whose perceptions
of genre much confusion still exists). A better understanding of this
whole intellectual tradition will not only lead to a more productive
dialogue - already a feature of the most interesting work in the field
- between formalist and historicist approaches, but also enable future
genre theorists to avoid the impasse reached by, for instance, the
Chicago school of the 1950s, where - despite initial breakthroughs -
the search for a critical methodology founded on a static, neo-
Aristotelian theory of genre degenerated into reductive acts of
classification and authoritarian reading practices. 58
For many readers, though, the main function of this anthology will
be the empirical application of the terms and concepts it contains. I
will therefore end this introduction by spelling out in more general
terms the sort of literary study that a clearer understanding of genre
might permit. Without reverting to the Neoclassical delusion of a
comprehensive taxonomy of the literary kinds, or succumbing to the
structuralist fantasy of a total science of the literary system, it is
possible to conceive of a type of literary history that has an accurate
perception of the genre spectrum that obtains at any given period;
that is able to identify the dominant genre or genres (what Opacki
calls the 'royal genres'), and to explain how they attained that
position of dominance - as well as how they cross-fertilise, or
impoverish, or conflict with, neighbouring genres; that is able to
show how the genre spectrum may vary from one period to another,
and how the cultural assumptions and aspirations of an era are
reflected in its hierarchy of genres; and that is able to illustrate the
process of change itself through re-orderings of the generic hierarchy,
or the proliferation of new forms, or alterations in the cultural
perception of genre. It would be possible, in this context, to speak
with some precision about the ideological functions of genre, about
the conditions of possibility for the existence of particular genres, and
the reasons for their flourishing or decline. It might also enable us to
assess the performance of an author across a variety of genres, and
determine the significance of his or her choice of certain genres and
not others; while at the same time, at the level of the individual text,
18
Introduction
helping us not only pinpoint innovations in technique, but also locate
the generic sources of the 'power' of which Amis speaks (so often a
product of the interaction of different generic elements, as modem
genre theory teaches us). Some of these goals can be, and have been,
achieved by other means; but there are, undoubtedly, advances to be
made and new insights to be had.
Notes
1. Quoted in JASON COWLEY, 'Portrait: Martin Amis', Prospect (Aug.-Sept. 1997).
2. Preface to The Awkward Age, in HENRY JAMES, The Art of Criticism: Henry James
on the Theory and Practice of Fiction, ed. William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 310.
3. On the role of genre concepts within Postmodernism, see Postmodern Genres,
ed. Marjorie Perloff (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988).
4. In this sense, the implications of the title of PAUL HERNADI'S Beyond Genre:
New Directions in Literary Classification (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1972) have not been borne out. Hernadi's analysis of tendencies in modern
genre theory remains, however, an extremely valuable and informative one.
5. For instance, a recent bibliometric search found evidence of widespread use
of the term and concept of genre between 1980 and 1995 in five social science
disciplines: education, history, political science, psychology and sociology.
The study also showed a marked increase in the use of the term since 1990.
See ENRICO TORTELANO, unpublished PgD/MSc thesis in information studies,
Robert Gordon University, 1996.
6. Critical Fragments, no. 62, in Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde and the Fragments,
trans. with intro. by Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1971), p. 150.
7. See RENE WELLEK, 'Genre Theory, the Lyric and Erlebnis', in his
Discriminations: Further Concepts of Criticism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1970); HERNADI, Beyond Genre, chs 1-3; MARGOT E. ZUTSHI,
Literary Theory in Germany: A Study of Genre and Evaluation Theories, 1945-1965
(Berne: Peter Lang, 1981).
8. Goethe's notes to West-iistlicher Divan (1819), quoted by ERNEST L. STAHL,
'Literary Genres: Some Idiosyncratic Concepts', in Theories of Literary Genre,
ed. Joseph P. Strelka, Yearbook of Comparative Criticism, vol. 8 (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978), p. 86. For more recent
discussions of Goethe's contribution to German Romantic genre theory, see
CYRUS HAMLIN, 'The Origins of a Philosophical Genre Theory in German
Romanticism', European Romantic Review, 5:1 (1994),3-14; and LUBOMIR
DOLOZEL, Occidental Poetics: Tradition and Progress (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1990), ch. 3.
9. EMIL STAIGER, Basic Concepts of Poetics, trans. Janette C. Hudson and Luanne
T. Frank (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991). First
published in German in 1946. The modern tradition in German genre theory,
and Staiger'S place within it, is analysed by KLAUS WEISSENBERGER, 'A
Morphological Genre Theory: An Answer to a Pluralism of Forms', in Theories
of Literary Genre, ed. Strelka. See also ZUTSHI, Literary Theory in Germany.
19
Modern Genre Theory
10. Relevant passages can be found in vol. II of G.W.F. HEGEL, Aesthetics: Lectures
on Fine Arts, trans. T.M. Knox, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975).
11. The influence of Hegel on Lukacs's theory of genre is examined by HERNADI,
Beyond Genre, pp. 114-31. .
12. See DAVID FISHELOV, Metaphors of Genre: The Role of Analogies in Genre Theory
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993); and, for the
history of the concept, RENE WELLEK, 'The Concept of Evolution in Literary
History', in Wellek, Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols, Jr (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975).
13. Literary Notebooks 1797-1801, quoted in PETER SZONDI, 'Friedrich Schlegel's
Theory of Poetical Genres: A Reconstruction from the Posthumous Fragments',
in SZONDI, On Textual Understanding and Other Essays, trans. Harvey
Mendelsohn (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 93. Szondi's
own distinguished contribution to genre theory is analysed by TIMOTHY
BAHTI, 'Fate in the Past: Peter Szondi's Reading of German Romantic Genre
Theory', boundary 2, 11:3 (1983), 11-25.
14. Athenaeum Fragments, no. 434, in Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde and the Fragments,
p.237.
15. The formation and influence of the Jena circle are analysed in detail in ERNST
BEHLER, German Romantic Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993). For a more comprehensive account of the critical currents of the
period, see RENE WELLEK, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950, vol. 2: The
Romantic Age (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955).
16. A useful selection of such statements can be found in LILIAN R. FURST, ed.,
European Romanticism: Self -Definition (London: Methuen, 1980), Section 3:
'Romantic Art: Form and Genre'.
17. BENEDETTO CROCE, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic,
trans. Douglas Ainslie, 2nd edn (London: Peter Owen, 1953), p. 449.
18. MAURICE BLANCHOT, 'The Disappearance of Literature' (1953), in The Blanchot
Reader, ed. Michael Holland (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 141.
19. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn, the earliest use of the
word in English to denote a type of literary work was in 1770; but this was
an isolated instance, and it was not until the end of the nineteenth century
that its use became widespread. In 1910, IRVING BABBITT in his Preface to The
New Laokoon (p. vii) remarks that 'The word genre seems to be gaining some
currency in English'; and it confirms my point that he does so in a book
which itself foregrounds the problem of genre (the subtitle is An Essay on the
Confusion of the Arts). In French, the literary sense of genre dates from the
mid-seventeenth century, though the word itself, which has many other
meanings and applications, originates from the twelfth century.
20. 'Literature without a Plot: Rozanov', in VIKTOR SHKLOVSKY, Theory of Prose,
trans. Benjamin Sher (Elmwood Park, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990),
p.190.
21. 'The Relationship between Devices of Plot Construction and General Devices
of Style', in SHKLOVSKY, Theory of Prose, p. 20.
22. For a selection of Russian Formalist statements on genre and related concepts,
see the invaluable 'Contextual Glossary of Formalist Theory' in Russian Poetics
in Translation, vol. 4: Formalist Theory, ed. L.M. O'Toole and Ann Shukman
(Oxford: Holdan, 1977), pp. 13-48. A useful synthesis of Russian Formalist
ideas on genre also forms part of BORIS TOMASHEVSKY'S Theory of Literature:
20
Introduction
Poetics (1928); for a translation of the relevant section, see TOMASHEVSKY,
'Literary Genres', trans. L.M. O'Toole, in Russian Poetics in Translation, vol. 5:
Formalism: History, Comparison, Genre, ed. L.M. O'Toole and A. Shukman
(Oxford: Holdan, 1978), pp. 52-93.
23. BORIS EIKHENBAUM, 'The Theory of the "Formal Method''', in Russian Formalist
Criticism: Four Essays, ed. and trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. 135.
24. See VICTOR ERLICH, Russian Formalism: History - Doctrine, 3rd edn (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 118-39. The course of this
polemic can be charted in the contemporary documents assembled in The
Futurists, the Formalists, and the Marxist Critique, ed. Christopher Pike (London:
Ink Links, 1979). The most famous attack was that of LEON TROTSKY, who
devoted a chapter of his classic book Literature and Revolution (1924) to a
critique of the Formalist school; for a sensitive treatment of the theoretical
issues involved, see ToNY BENNETT, Formalism and Marxism (London:
Methuen, 1979), ch. 2.
25. ERLICH, Russian Formalism: History - Doctrine, p. 114.
26. See MIKHAIL BAKHTIN/PAVEL MEDVEDEV, The Formal Method in Literary
Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), ch. 7.
27. One example is the notion of a genre's 'orientation to reality' as distinct from
its orientation to the literary system: the distinction is central to Bakhtin's
critique, but is already operative in, for instance, Tynyanov's essay on 'The
Ode as a Rhetorical Genre'.
28. RAYMOND WILLIAMS, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977); LUCIEN GOLDMANN, Towards a Sociology of the Novel (London: Tavistock,
1975) and his Method in the Sociology of Literature, ed. William Q. Boelhower
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1980); FRANCO MORETTI, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in
the Sociology of Literary Forms, trans. David Forgacs (London: Verso, 1983);
JOHN FROW, Marxism and Literary History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); ToNY
BENNETT, Outside Literature (London: Routledge, 1990). For a useful survey
of this impressive intellectual tradition, see ALAN SWINGEWOOD, Sociological
Poetics and Aesthetic Theory (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986).
29. DAVID LODGE, 'After Bakhtin', in The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between
Language and Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 97.
30. In Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael
Holquist and Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).
31. GARY MORSON and CARYL EMERSON, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990).
32. In addition to the texts already mentioned and those reprinted below, the
relevant sources are MIKHAIL BAKHTIN, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, 2nd
edn, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1984), ch. 4; and 'Response to a Question from the Novy Mir Editorial
Staff' (1970) and 'From Notes Made in 1970-71', both in M.M. BAKHTIN,
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist,
trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), pp. 1-9, 132-
58. For critical commentaries on Bakhtinian genre theory, see the titles listed
in my headnotes to Chapters 4 and 5.
33. KATERINA CLARK and MICHAEL HOLQUIST, Mikhail Bakhtin (Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap, 1984), pp. 99, 271. See also MICHEL AUCOUTURIER, 'The Theory of the
21
Modern Genre Theory
Novel in Russia in the 1930s: Lukacs and Bakhtin', in The Russian Novel from
Pushkin to Pasternak, ed. John Garrard (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1983).
34. WALTER ONG, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York:
Routledge, 1982), esp. ch. 6.
35. KENNETH BURKE, Attitudes Toward History (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1937, rev. edn 1959), ch. 2: 'Poetic Categories'. See also BURKE'S The
Philosophy of Literary Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). The
relevance of Burke's work to genre theory is addressed in FREDRIC JAMESON,
'Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis', Critical
Inquiry, 4 (1978), 507-23. Jameson's own conception of narrative as 'a socially
symbolic act' (the subtitle of The Political Unconscious) is in many ways an
extension of Burke's.
36. TODOROV extends this investigation in his important book Mikhail Bakhtin: The
Dialogical Principal, trans. Wlad Godzich (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1984), esp. ch. 6.
37. Propp's debt to and divergence from Formalist methodology are analysed by
ANN SHUKMAN, 'The Legacy of Propp', Essays in Poetics, 1:2 (1976), 82-94.
38. The same statement ('Gestaltenlehre ist Verwandlungslehre') appears as an
epigraph to MIKHAIL PETROVSKY'S essay 'The Morphology of the Folktale'
(1927). For the background to contemporary literary interest in the concept of
morphology, see PETER STEINER, Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 80-98; V.N. TOPOROV, 'A Few Remarks
on Propp's Morphology of the Folktale' in Russian Formalism: A Retrospective
Glance, ed. Robert Louis Jackson and Stephen Rudy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
Center for International and Area Studies, 1985), pp. 252-71; and DOLOZEL,
Occidental Poetics, ch. 6. The omission of the Goethean epigraphs from the
original English translation of Propp's Morphology of the Folktale was regarded
as an 'inadmissible liberty' by Propp, who claimed that they revealed the
methodological basis of his work, and its essential originality. Propp also
maintained that the suppression of the epigraphs contributed to what he
believed was the serious misunderstanding of his work displayed by Levi-
Strauss in the review to which I have already alluded. Propp's somewhat
acrimonious response to Levi-Strauss, which elicited a tactful reply from the
latter, is reprinted under the title 'Study of the Folktale: Structure and
History' in Dispositio, 1:3 (1976), 277-92. For Levi-Strauss's commentary
and reply, see CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS, Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, trans.
Monique Layton (New York: Basic Books, 1976), pp. 115-45.
39. Reprinted in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed.
Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Cambridge, Mass.: Massachusetts
Institute of Technology Press, 1971).
40. On the continuities and discontinuities between Russian Formalism and
Czech Structuralism, see PETER STEINER, 'The Roots of Structuralist Esthetics',
in The Prague School: Selected Writings, 1929-1946, ed. Peter Steiner (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1982), pp. 174-219; JURIJ STRIEDTER, Literary
Structure, Evolution and Value: Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism
Reconsidered (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); and
F.W. GALAN, Historic Structures: The Prague School Project, 1928-1946
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984).
41. Relevant works are listed in my Further Reading section. The standard
commentary on Lotman and the Tartu school is ANN SHUKMAN, Literature and
Semiotics: A Study of the Writings of Yu. M. Lotman (Amsterdam: North-Holland
Publishing Company, 1977); his theory of genre is discussed on pp. 153-7.
22
Introduction
42. NORTHROP FRYE, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1957), p. 104.
43. JONATHAN CULLER, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study
of Literature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 113-30.
44. ED. HIRSCH, Jr, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, 1967), ch. 3: 'The Concept of Genre'. For further discussion of the
relevance of Wittgenstein's notion of 'language games' and 'family
resemblances' to genre theory, see MAURICE MANDELBAUM, 'Family
Resemblances and Generalisation Concerning the Arts', American Philosophical
Quarterly, 2:3 (1965), 219-28; and ALASTAIR FOWLER, Kinds of Literature: An
Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1982), pp. 41-2.
45. VINCENT B. LEITCH, '(De)Coding (Generic) Discourse', Genre, 24:1 (1991),
83-98.
46. GUNTHER KRESS, review of Vijay K. Bhatia, Analysing Genre: Language Use in
Professional Settings (London: Longman, 1993), Times Higher Education
Supplement, 15 April 1994.
47. ADENA ROSMARIN, The Power of Genre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1985).
48. BETTY ROSENBERG, GenrefIecting: A Guide to Reading Interests in Genre Fiction
(Littleton, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 1982).
49. This term is used to describe the 'systemic-functional' school of linguistics
developed by Michael Halliday at the University of Sydney in IAN REID,
'A Generic Frame for Debates about Genre', in The Place of Genre in Learning:
Current Debates, ed. I. Reid (Deakin University: Centre for Studies in Literary
Education, 1987), p. 1. Pedagogy is only one of the areas of applied linguistics
in which genre theory has been used: VIJAY BHATIA'S book Analysing Genre,
cited above, extends the concept of genre to such items as sales promotion
letters and job applications. KRESS'S own book Social Semiotics (Oxford: Polity
Press, 1988), co-authored with ROBERT HODGE, proposes an even wider
extension of the techniques of genre analysis, while HODGE'S Literature as
Discourse: Textual Strategies in English and History (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1990) develops the notion of 'social semiotics' within these two disciplines in
particular. The theoretical basis of such work - at least its linguistic aspects -
is cogently summarised under the entry for 'genre analysis' in KRISTEN
MALMKYER, ed., The Linguistics Encyclopedia (London: Routledge, 1991).
50. For these various developments, see the titles listed in the final section of my
guide to Further Reading.
51. CLIFFORD GEERTZ, 'Blurred Genres: the Refiguration of Social Thought',
American Scholar, 49:1 (1980),65-79.
52. MICHEL FOUCAULT, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith
(London: Tavistock, 1972), p. 22.
53. The new subtitle was adopted in 1992, in order, the editors of the journal
inform us, to 'emphasise more fully the intricate relations between genre and
the social, institutional, cultural, and political texts that constitute its discursive
and cultural forms' (1 quote from the announcement of the forthcoming
change in vol. 24:2, Summer 1991, p. 221). As well as advertising the eclectic
methodology characteristic of 'new historicism' (a term apparently coined in
this journal), this reglossing of the term 'genre' indicates very clearly the
intellectual expansion of the concept.
23
Modern Genre Theory
54. RENE WELLEK and AUSTIN WARREN, Theory of Literature, 3rd edn
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 23l.
55. A term coined by PAUL VAN TIEGHEM in 'La question des genres litteraires',
He1icon, 1 (1938),95-101 (99). WELLEK and WARREN in their Theory of
Literature (p. 236) coin the English form, though it is rarely used.
56. For a definition of 'microgenres' and 'macrogenres', see JEAN MOLINO, 'Les
genres litteraires', Poetique, 24:93 (1993), 3-27.
57. For an elaboration of this charge, see JENNIFER WISE, 'Marginalising Drama:
Bakhtin's Theory of Genre', Essays in Theatre, 8:1 (1989), 15-22.
58. For a succinct statement of method by the Chicago school, see ELDER OLSON,
'An Outline of Poetic Theory', in Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, ed.
RS. Crane et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952). For a shrewd
assessment of the strengths and limitations of this approach to genre, see
JOHN REICHERT, 'More than Kin and Less than Kind: The Limits of Genre
Theory', in Theories of Literary Genre, ed. Strelka.
24