Genre. Mary Jo Reiff
an abstract level, Structuralist approaches are more concerned with how socio-historically localized genres shape specific literary actions, identifications, and representations.3 In this way, according to Fredric Jameson, “genres are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact” (106). Likewise, Jonathan Culler explains, the activity of writing a poem or a novel “is made possible by the very existence of the genre, which the writer can write against, certainly, whose conventions he may attempt to subvert, but which is none the less the context within which his activity takes place, as surely as the failure to keep a promise is made possible by the institution of promising (116). This genre context is as conceptual as it is discursive, regulating not only certain formal and textual conventions, but also certain ways of organizing and experiencing literary reality. For example, Heinz Schlaffer, describing Walter Benjamin’s understanding of how the “wholeness and distinctiveness of the world of art is created,” writes: “Benjamin’s decisive contribution to genre theory lies in his thought that genres are condensed world-images. . . . Organized by means of ideas, genres are pregnant outlines which contrast with the endlessness and indefiniteness of the real world (qtd. in Beebee 259). Literary genres bound the “endlessness and indefiniteness of the real world” in ways that create particular literary-historical meanings and values.
One specific way that genres structure literary meanings and values is by establishing particular space-time configurations within which texts discursively function. Käte Hamburger, for example, argues that genres structure a particular temporal orientation, so that at the grammatical level, for instance, the “past tense in fiction does not suggest the past tense as we know it but rather a situation in the present; when we read ‘John walked into the room,’ we do not assume, as we would if we encountered the same preterite in another type of writing, that the action being described occurred prior to one in our world” (qtd. in Dubrow 103).
At the same time, genres also structure our perceptions of literary actions, representations, and identifications. For example, Heather Dubrow asks readers to consider the following hypothetical paragraph:
The clock on the mantelpiece said ten thirty, but someone had suggested recently that the clock was wrong. As the figure of the dead woman lay on the bed in the front room, a no less silent figure glided rapidly from the house. The only sounds to be heard were the ticking of that clock and the loud wailing of an infant. (1)
How we make sense of this piece of discourse and the event it represents, Dubrow suggests, points to the significance of genre in structuring literary events. For instance, knowing that the paragraph appears in a novel with the title Murder at Marplethorpe, readers can begin to make certain decisions about the action taking place when they recognize that the novel they are reading belongs to the genre of detective fiction. The inaccuracy of the clock and the fact that the woman lies dead in the front room become meaningful clues in that context. Likewise, the figure gliding away is more likely to be identified as a suspect, in which case the gliding figure and the dead woman assume a certain genre-mediated cause/effect relationship to one another as possible murder victim/suspect. However, if, as Dubrow suggests, the title of the novel was not Murder at Marplethorpe but rather The Personal History of David Marplethorpe, then the way we encounter the same discourse changes. Reading the novel as a Bildungsroman (life novel), we will place a different significance on the dead body or the fact that the clock is inaccurate. Likely, we would not be trying to identify a suspect. The crying baby, as Dubrow suggests, will also take on more relevance, perhaps being the very David Marplethorpe whose life’s story we are about to read. In short, the actors in the discourse embody particular actions, identifications, and representations in relation to one another within the structure of the genre.
In localizing the ideological character of genre and recognizing genre’s role in structuring aesthetic worlds, Structuralist approaches acknowledge the power of genre to shape textual interpretation and production. Yet, as we will discuss later in this chapter and then in our discussion of linguistic and rhetorical genre traditions, by focusing on genres as literary artifacts that structure literary realities, Structuralist genre approaches overlook how all genres, not just literary ones, help organize and generate social practices and realities in ways that prove important for the teaching of writing.
Romantic and Post-Romantic Approaches to Genre
While Structuralist approaches understand genres as structuring textual actions and relations within a literary universe, certain Romantic and post-Romantic approaches have rejected genre’s constitutive power, arguing instead that literary texts achieve their status, in fact, by exceeding genre conventions, which are perceived as prescriptive taxonomies and constraints on textual energy (Frow 26). Such a denial of genre, which asserts that “to be a modern writer and write generically is a contradiction in terms” (Rosmarin 7), can be traced to German Romanticism and the work of Freidrich Schlegel in the late eighteenth century. Schlegel insisted on the singularity of literary texts, with Romantic poetry serving as the ideal example: “only Romantic poetry is infinite as only it is free. . . . the genre of Romantic poetry is the only one that is more than a genre: it is, in a way, the very art of poetry[;] in a certain sense, all poetry is or should be Romantic” (qtd. in Threadgold 112). Following Schlegel a century later, Benedetto Croce argues that classifying any aesthetic work according to genre is a denial of its true nature, which is based in intuition, not logic. Genres, Croce claims, are logical concepts, and as such cannot be applied to literary works, which resist classification and are indeterminate (38). Perhaps the most famous dismissal of genre comes from Maurice Blanchot, who, in Le Livre à venir, writes:
The book alone is important, as it is, far from genre, outside rubrics . . . under which it refuses to be arranged and to which it denies the power to fix its place and to determine its form. A book no longer belongs to a genre; every book arises from literature alone, as if the latter possessed in advance, in its generality, the secrets and the formulas that alone allow book reality to be given to that which is written. (qtd. in Perloff 3)
In Blanchot’s formulation, literature becomes a transcendental domain that exists outside of or beyond genre’s ability to classify, clarify, or structure texts.
Jacques Derrida, for one, has seized upon the apparent contradiction in Blanchot’s formulation of the text’s autonomy and its relationship to Literature. In the “Law of Genre,” Derrida acknowledges that “as soon as the word ‘genre’ is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far behind” (221). Yet he responds to Blanchot with this often-cited hypothesis: “Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging. And not because of an abundant overflowing or a free, anarchic and unclassifiable productivity, but because of the trait of participation itself . . .” (230). In so doing, Derrida preserves what Blanchot recognizes as a text’s indeterminacy while presenting that indeterminacy as emerging from a complex relationship between literary texts and genres. Texts do not belong to a genre, as in a taxonomic relation; texts participate in a genre, or more accurately, several genres at once. “Participation” for Derrida is a key word, as it suggests something more like a performance than a replication or reproduction. Every textual performance repeats, mixes, stretches, and potentially reconstitutes the genre(s) it participates in. As such, for Derrida, genres are not apriori categories that classify or clarify or even structure texts, but rather are continuously reconstituted through textual performances (Threadgold 115). Indeed, for Derrida, one of the marks of literary texts is their ability to “re-mark” (self-consciously, self-reflectively) on their performances: “This re-mark—ever possible for every text, for every corpus of traces—is absolutely necessary for and constitutive of what we call art, poetry or literature” (229). In short, genres are the preconditions for textual performances.
For all that it offers in response to Romantic and Post-Romantic denials of genre and contributes to a dynamic understanding of the relationship between texts and genres, Derrida’s argument still ultimately perceives genre as an imposition on literature (Beebee 8), a necessary imposition, perhaps, but an imposition nonetheless which literary texts must grapple with, mix, and perform