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Belas, O. (2009). “Genre: An Introduction and Overview.” http://olibelas.weebly.com/essays-articles-papers.html. Retrieved [date downloaded/read]
Genre: An Introduction and Overview
Oliver Belas
From the French for “kind” or “sort,” and etymologically derived from the Latin genus, the word “genre” has connotations of biological kind; its use in relation to the arts begins in the late eighteenth century, shortly after the rise of Linnaean taxonomy. Theoretical and critical work on commercial or popular genres – notably detective and science fiction, but also pornography, the erotic thriller, the western, the romance – are relatively recent developments, emerging in number first in the late sixties and early seventies against the backdrop of New Left cultural politics. In literature, genre – for example, detective fiction in Auster (1987) – has been used as a metafictional cast within which questions of individual, collective, and authorial identity, as well as ideas of “textuality” and a textual or linguistic self, are interrogated. Genre issues are implicated to varying degree in all literary study; the more refined and complex the study of literature becomes, the less stable are the idea of genre and genres themselves. In literature studies today, focus has shifted somewhat away from attempts at formal definition: for example, volumes in the Cambridge Companions to Literature series on science and crime fiction, the Gothic novel, imply that such genres should – like modernism, Victorian, and certain single-author studies – be regarded as broad fields of enquiry, rather than stably defined sets of texts.
Though (literary) genre might seem to encapsulate ideas of coherent and distinct groups of texts, neither the level at which distinctions are drawn nor the criteria by which genres are identified are fixed or certain. “Genre” can refer to “large,” overarching forms (Poetry, the Novel, Drama), their historical developments, and/or their common formal and thematic elements; or to subdivisions within certain forms or media – one makes the qualification “genre film/fiction” when speaking, for example, of film noir, westerns, science fiction, detective fiction. In either case, discussion of genre always raises, implicitly or explicitly, questions of the relationship between parts and wholes, or, perhaps more accurately, smaller and larger systems – the relationship of “genre novels” to “The Novel,” or “The Novel” to “Literature.”
Theories of genre sometimes form part of broader investigations of literature as a whole, as in Wellek & Warren (1963) and Frye (1957/1990). Though both works were first published before 1966 – 1949 and 1957 respectively – Wellek & Warren went through second and third editions, while Frye has been republished several times (most recently 2006). Their appearance in Penguin editions (Wellek & Warren 1963; Frye 1990) indicates their influence: both are important points of reference for Todorov (1990); both continue to inform discussions of literary theory and criticism. For Frye, genres are more or less universal, characterised primarily by their intended mode of presentation. Frye thinks of genre as the differences between works meant to be acted in front of, spoken or sung to, or read by their audiences, rather than as formal “textual” difference. Genres for Frye, then, are determined by the relationship of the work to its audience. In his work on commercial or popular fictions in the late sixties, Cawelti distinguishes between genres, understood in Frye’s terms, and formulas, understood as specific cultural embodiments of genres. Cawelti has since loosened and refined this distinction, suggesting different degrees of genre (the archetypal genres of tragedy and comedy, and the culturally or historically more limited genres of the western or romance, for example), and gesturing towards a subtler articulation of genres and formulas (see Cawelti 2004). Wellek & Warren (1963) recognise tragedy and comedy as genres, but not as archetypal genres in Cawelti’s sense. Here, “genres” in Frye and Cawelti are “utlimates”; only historically limited, second order divisions of, say, prose fiction should be called “genres,” they argue. Moretti (2005), in his attempt to outline an abstract model of literary history, has argued that “The Novel” does not exist in any ideal sense, but only as the system of its historically changing genres.
Genres might be conceived of “extrinsically” in terms of cultural history, or “intrinsically” in terms of poetics (see Wellek & Warren 1963); in terms of function (what they “do”) or structure (what they “are”) (see Todorov 1990). But such conceptions as “extrinsic” and “intrinsic” formation are problematic, however, as determining what constitutes a genre involves identifying from “outside” the genre “rules,” trends, characteristics, forms, and so on, that are thought to recur “inside” that genre’s constitutive texts. The apparent coherence of genres, that is, is in many ways an order imposed from the side of criticism, whether the “critic” be an author, academic, journalist, or fan.
Attempts to define genres often run the risk of formalizing taste and/or expressing ideological bias. Thus, the supposedly definitional commentaries on science fiction by Delany (1978) and Suvin (1979) are, arguably, more accurately read as proposing reading rules for grading how “good” works already identified as science fiction are. Indeed, Suvin’s much cited definition of science fiction as a literature of “cognitive estrangement” – simply put, non-realism (estrangement) with recourse to reason (cognition) – has been criticised, notably by Delany, for admitting much that is not science fiction and excluding much that is (Suvin 1979; Delany 1994). Similarly, one might read Moretti’s analysis – in which Moretti attempts to demonstrate the necessary, dialectical relationship between structure and function – of the Sherlock Holmes series as being as much a product of his Marxist theoretical framework as of Doyle’s works (Moretti 1983). Todorov (1990) argues that because no definition of literature – which is the always changing system of its genres – can be found that admits all that is “literary” and nothing that is not, and because neither literature nor non-literature is a single, coherent entity, poetics must be replaced by the analysis of discourse. According to Todorov, the system of genres available in a given language originates in discourse, understood as the hardening of linguistic possibilities or choices into socio-cultural rules or conventions.
Analysis of literary type extends back, of course, to Aristotle (indeed, Frye [1957/1990] remarks that since Aristotle, precise terms and procedures for literary study have not much developed). In the Poetics, Aristotle distinguishes comedy, epic poetry, and tragedy typologically and hierarchically. The purpose of poetry, he states, is to arouse feelings of fear and pity in the audience. According to Aristotle, tragedy does this best of all, and so, by definition, it is the best kind of poetry (Aristotle expands “poetry” and “poet” to refer not to works and practitioners of verse forms only, but to all works and practitioners of mimesis). By distinguishing comedy, epic poetry, and tragedy typologically and hierarchically, and because Aristotle is concerned with what is most effective in and proper to each, the Poetics contains the principle that genres are and must be distinct, pure, unmixed – a critical axiom noted by Wellek & Warren and, in ironic fashion, by Derrida. Derrida (1992b) argues that no text can exist without generic identification – the principle of literary identification presupposes the prior existence of models, rules, and so on – but that no genre can ever be “pure.” On the one hand, genres function like laws, pre- and pro-scribing. At the same time, as a genre incorporates ever more texts it cannot ever be considered closed or replete. For Derrida, genres are fundamentally contaminated by other genres that exist in parasitical relationship with one another, and it is, therefore, a model of “participation” rather than “belonging” that Derrida proposes for thinking about genre. This model of genre is rather close to Derrida’s broader conception of what he dubs the “strange institution called literature,” which is constitutionally always in excess of its own apparent boundaries (Derrida 1992a).
Derrida is not much interested in genre fiction, but ideas of contamination or hybridity are increasingly to be found in dedicated genre studies. Botting (1996) provocatively suggests that, because it is a synthesis of literary and paraliterary genres, the Gothic can perhaps claim to be the only genuinely literary tradition. A recent issue of Science Fiction Studies, containing essays on science fiction and the gendered body, Latour, Castell, Serres, and Kittler, has attempted to move theoretically inflected work on science fiction away from the dominant influences of Jameson, Haraway, and Suvin, emphasising ideas of sociological and discursive networks or assemblages, and topological relation (Luckhurst & Partington [eds.] 2006).
Williams, L.R., (2005) analyses the erotic thriller as a composite genre formed from, among other influences, pornography and film noir. Referring to pornography as “the forgotten genre,” Williams points out that with few significant exceptions little has been done to define pornography, arguably the most controversial of genres. Definition would seem to be necessary for a genre that has been challenged on moral, aesthetic, and legal grounds, yet relatively little attention has been paid to what makes pornography pornography. The genre is often treated as monolithic, the differences between investigations and representations of “alternative” or “marginal” sexual practices and “hardcore” pornography seldom acknowledged. The tendency has been to argue “for” or “against” pornography from moral-ideological positions (anti-censorship versus anti-sexism/exploitation), though historical, philosophical, and cultural work from Williams, L. (1999), Kipnis (1996), O’Toole (1998), Pease (2000), and others, have contributed to a more nuanced body of knowledge that is focussed on the genre itself rather than its sociological implications.
Genre and its ethical significance have also been analysed in scholarship on Holocaust literature. Eaglestone (2008) states that genre is both a way of writing and reading, the meeting point of the two processes. Fiction is shaped in large part by readers’ processes of identification; with testimony the Holocaust has produced a new genre, in part, but not exclusively, because it alters the very processes by which we identify when reading. Testimony, Eaglestone argues, attempts to foreclose identification.
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Aristotle (1982). Poetics (trans. J. Hutton). New York: Norton.
Auster, P. (1987). The New York trilogy: City of glass, Ghosts, The locked room. London: Faber and Faber.
Botting, F. (1996). Gothic. London: Routledge.
Cawelti, J.G. (2004). Mystery, violence, and popular culture. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.
Delany, S. (1978). “About five thousand seven hundred and fifty words.” In Delany, The jewel-hinged jaw: Notes on the language of science fiction, pp. 21-37.
--- (1994). “Science fiction and criticism: The Diacritics interview.” In Delany, Silent interviews: On language, race, science fiction, sex, and some comics. A collection of written interviews. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 186-215.
Derrida, J. (1992a). “‘This strange institution called literature’: An interview with Jacques Derrida.” In Derrida, Acts of literature (ed. D. Attridge). London: Routledge, pp. 33-75.
--- (1992b). “The law of genre.” In Derrida, Acts of literature, pp. 221-252.
Duff, D. (ed.) (2000). Modern Genre Theory. Edinburgh: Pearson Education.
Eaglestone, R. (2008). The Holocaust and the postmodern. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frow, J. (2006). Genre. London: Routledge.
Frye, N (1990). Anatomy of criticism: Four essays. London: Penguin. (Original work published 1957).
Kipnis, L. (1996). Bound and gagged: Pornography and the politics of fantasy in America. New York: Grove Press.
Luckhurst, R. & Partington, G. (eds.) (2006). Science Fiction Studies 33(1).
Moretti, F. (2005). Graphs, maps, trees: Abstract models for a literary history. London: Verso.
--- (1983). “Clues.” In Moretti, Signs taken for wonders: On the sociology of literary forms. London: Verso, pp. 130-156.
O’Toole, L. (1998). Pornocopia: Porn, sex, technology and desire. London: Serpent’s Tail.
Pease, A. (2000). Modernism, mass culture, and the aesthetics of obscenity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Suvin, D. (1979). Metamorphoses of science fiction: On the poetics and history of a literary genre. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Todorov, T. (1990). Genres in discourse (trans. C. Porter). New York: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1978).
Wellek, R. & Warren, A. (1963). Theory of Literature. 3rd edn. Middlesex: Penguin.
Williams, L. (1999). Hard core: Power, pleasure, and the “frenzy of the visible.” Expanded ed. Berkely: University of California Press.
Williams, L.R. (2005). The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Belas, O. (2009). “Genre: An Introduction and Overview.” http://olibelas.weebly.com/essays-articles-papers.html. Retrieved [date downloaded/read]
Genre: An Introduction and Overview
Oliver Belas
From the French for “kind” or “sort,” and etymologically derived from the Latin genus, the word “genre” has connotations of biological kind; its use in relation to the arts begins in the late eighteenth century, shortly after the rise of Linnaean taxonomy. Theoretical and critical work on commercial or popular genres – notably detective and science fiction, but also pornography, the erotic thriller, the western, the romance – are relatively recent developments, emerging in number first in the late sixties and early seventies against the backdrop of New Left cultural politics. In literature, genre – for example, detective fiction in Auster (1987) – has been used as a metafictional cast within which questions of individual, collective, and authorial identity, as well as ideas of “textuality” and a textual or linguistic self, are interrogated. Genre issues are implicated to varying degree in all literary study; the more refined and complex the study of literature becomes, the less stable are the idea of genre and genres themselves. In literature studies today, focus has shifted somewhat away from attempts at formal definition: for example, volumes in the Cambridge Companions to Literature series on science and crime fiction, the Gothic novel, imply that such genres should – like modernism, Victorian, and certain single-author studies – be regarded as broad fields of enquiry, rather than stably defined sets of texts.
Though (literary) genre might seem to encapsulate ideas of coherent and distinct groups of texts, neither the level at which distinctions are drawn nor the criteria by which genres are identified are fixed or certain. “Genre” can refer to “large,” overarching forms (Poetry, the Novel, Drama), their historical developments, and/or their common formal and thematic elements; or to subdivisions within certain forms or media – one makes the qualification “genre film/fiction” when speaking, for example, of film noir, westerns, science fiction, detective fiction. In either case, discussion of genre always raises, implicitly or explicitly, questions of the relationship between parts and wholes, or, perhaps more accurately, smaller and larger systems – the relationship of “genre novels” to “The Novel,” or “The Novel” to “Literature.”
Theories of genre sometimes form part of broader investigations of literature as a whole, as in Wellek & Warren (1963) and Frye (1957/1990). Though both works were first published before 1966 – 1949 and 1957 respectively – Wellek & Warren went through second and third editions, while Frye has been republished several times (most recently 2006). Their appearance in Penguin editions (Wellek & Warren 1963; Frye 1990) indicates their influence: both are important points of reference for Todorov (1990); both continue to inform discussions of literary theory and criticism. For Frye, genres are more or less universal, characterised primarily by their intended mode of presentation. Frye thinks of genre as the differences between works meant to be acted in front of, spoken or sung to, or read by their audiences, rather than as formal “textual” difference. Genres for Frye, then, are determined by the relationship of the work to its audience. In his work on commercial or popular fictions in the late sixties, Cawelti distinguishes between genres, understood in Frye’s terms, and formulas, understood as specific cultural embodiments of genres. Cawelti has since loosened and refined this distinction, suggesting different degrees of genre (the archetypal genres of tragedy and comedy, and the culturally or historically more limited genres of the western or romance, for example), and gesturing towards a subtler articulation of genres and formulas (see Cawelti 2004). Wellek & Warren (1963) recognise tragedy and comedy as genres, but not as archetypal genres in Cawelti’s sense. Here, “genres” in Frye and Cawelti are “utlimates”; only historically limited, second order divisions of, say, prose fiction should be called “genres,” they argue. Moretti (2005), in his attempt to outline an abstract model of literary history, has argued that “The Novel” does not exist in any ideal sense, but only as the system of its historically changing genres.
Genres might be conceived of “extrinsically” in terms of cultural history, or “intrinsically” in terms of poetics (see Wellek & Warren 1963); in terms of function (what they “do”) or structure (what they “are”) (see Todorov 1990). But such conceptions as “extrinsic” and “intrinsic” formation are problematic, however, as determining what constitutes a genre involves identifying from “outside” the genre “rules,” trends, characteristics, forms, and so on, that are thought to recur “inside” that genre’s constitutive texts. The apparent coherence of genres, that is, is in many ways an order imposed from the side of criticism, whether the “critic” be an author, academic, journalist, or fan.
Attempts to define genres often run the risk of formalizing taste and/or expressing ideological bias. Thus, the supposedly definitional commentaries on science fiction by Delany (1978) and Suvin (1979) are, arguably, more accurately read as proposing reading rules for grading how “good” works already identified as science fiction are. Indeed, Suvin’s much cited definition of science fiction as a literature of “cognitive estrangement” – simply put, non-realism (estrangement) with recourse to reason (cognition) – has been criticised, notably by Delany, for admitting much that is not science fiction and excluding much that is (Suvin 1979; Delany 1994). Similarly, one might read Moretti’s analysis – in which Moretti attempts to demonstrate the necessary, dialectical relationship between structure and function – of the Sherlock Holmes series as being as much a product of his Marxist theoretical framework as of Doyle’s works (Moretti 1983). Todorov (1990) argues that because no definition of literature – which is the always changing system of its genres – can be found that admits all that is “literary” and nothing that is not, and because neither literature nor non-literature is a single, coherent entity, poetics must be replaced by the analysis of discourse. According to Todorov, the system of genres available in a given language originates in discourse, understood as the hardening of linguistic possibilities or choices into socio-cultural rules or conventions.
Analysis of literary type extends back, of course, to Aristotle (indeed, Frye [1957/1990] remarks that since Aristotle, precise terms and procedures for literary study have not much developed). In the Poetics, Aristotle distinguishes comedy, epic poetry, and tragedy typologically and hierarchically. The purpose of poetry, he states, is to arouse feelings of fear and pity in the audience. According to Aristotle, tragedy does this best of all, and so, by definition, it is the best kind of poetry (Aristotle expands “poetry” and “poet” to refer not to works and practitioners of verse forms only, but to all works and practitioners of mimesis). By distinguishing comedy, epic poetry, and tragedy typologically and hierarchically, and because Aristotle is concerned with what is most effective in and proper to each, the Poetics contains the principle that genres are and must be distinct, pure, unmixed – a critical axiom noted by Wellek & Warren and, in ironic fashion, by Derrida. Derrida (1992b) argues that no text can exist without generic identification – the principle of literary identification presupposes the prior existence of models, rules, and so on – but that no genre can ever be “pure.” On the one hand, genres function like laws, pre- and pro-scribing. At the same time, as a genre incorporates ever more texts it cannot ever be considered closed or replete. For Derrida, genres are fundamentally contaminated by other genres that exist in parasitical relationship with one another, and it is, therefore, a model of “participation” rather than “belonging” that Derrida proposes for thinking about genre. This model of genre is rather close to Derrida’s broader conception of what he dubs the “strange institution called literature,” which is constitutionally always in excess of its own apparent boundaries (Derrida 1992a).
Derrida is not much interested in genre fiction, but ideas of contamination or hybridity are increasingly to be found in dedicated genre studies. Botting (1996) provocatively suggests that, because it is a synthesis of literary and paraliterary genres, the Gothic can perhaps claim to be the only genuinely literary tradition. A recent issue of Science Fiction Studies, containing essays on science fiction and the gendered body, Latour, Castell, Serres, and Kittler, has attempted to move theoretically inflected work on science fiction away from the dominant influences of Jameson, Haraway, and Suvin, emphasising ideas of sociological and discursive networks or assemblages, and topological relation (Luckhurst & Partington [eds.] 2006).
Williams, L.R., (2005) analyses the erotic thriller as a composite genre formed from, among other influences, pornography and film noir. Referring to pornography as “the forgotten genre,” Williams points out that with few significant exceptions little has been done to define pornography, arguably the most controversial of genres. Definition would seem to be necessary for a genre that has been challenged on moral, aesthetic, and legal grounds, yet relatively little attention has been paid to what makes pornography pornography. The genre is often treated as monolithic, the differences between investigations and representations of “alternative” or “marginal” sexual practices and “hardcore” pornography seldom acknowledged. The tendency has been to argue “for” or “against” pornography from moral-ideological positions (anti-censorship versus anti-sexism/exploitation), though historical, philosophical, and cultural work from Williams, L. (1999), Kipnis (1996), O’Toole (1998), Pease (2000), and others, have contributed to a more nuanced body of knowledge that is focussed on the genre itself rather than its sociological implications.
Genre and its ethical significance have also been analysed in scholarship on Holocaust literature. Eaglestone (2008) states that genre is both a way of writing and reading, the meeting point of the two processes. Fiction is shaped in large part by readers’ processes of identification; with testimony the Holocaust has produced a new genre, in part, but not exclusively, because it alters the very processes by which we identify when reading. Testimony, Eaglestone argues, attempts to foreclose identification.
REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS
Aristotle (1982). Poetics (trans. J. Hutton). New York: Norton.
Auster, P. (1987). The New York trilogy: City of glass, Ghosts, The locked room. London: Faber and Faber.
Botting, F. (1996). Gothic. London: Routledge.
Cawelti, J.G. (2004). Mystery, violence, and popular culture. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press.
Delany, S. (1978). “About five thousand seven hundred and fifty words.” In Delany, The jewel-hinged jaw: Notes on the language of science fiction, pp. 21-37.
--- (1994). “Science fiction and criticism: The Diacritics interview.” In Delany, Silent interviews: On language, race, science fiction, sex, and some comics. A collection of written interviews. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, pp. 186-215.
Derrida, J. (1992a). “‘This strange institution called literature’: An interview with Jacques Derrida.” In Derrida, Acts of literature (ed. D. Attridge). London: Routledge, pp. 33-75.
--- (1992b). “The law of genre.” In Derrida, Acts of literature, pp. 221-252.
Duff, D. (ed.) (2000). Modern Genre Theory. Edinburgh: Pearson Education.
Eaglestone, R. (2008). The Holocaust and the postmodern. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frow, J. (2006). Genre. London: Routledge.
Frye, N (1990). Anatomy of criticism: Four essays. London: Penguin. (Original work published 1957).
Kipnis, L. (1996). Bound and gagged: Pornography and the politics of fantasy in America. New York: Grove Press.
Luckhurst, R. & Partington, G. (eds.) (2006). Science Fiction Studies 33(1).
Moretti, F. (2005). Graphs, maps, trees: Abstract models for a literary history. London: Verso.
--- (1983). “Clues.” In Moretti, Signs taken for wonders: On the sociology of literary forms. London: Verso, pp. 130-156.
O’Toole, L. (1998). Pornocopia: Porn, sex, technology and desire. London: Serpent’s Tail.
Pease, A. (2000). Modernism, mass culture, and the aesthetics of obscenity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Suvin, D. (1979). Metamorphoses of science fiction: On the poetics and history of a literary genre. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Todorov, T. (1990). Genres in discourse (trans. C. Porter). New York: Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1978).
Wellek, R. & Warren, A. (1963). Theory of Literature. 3rd edn. Middlesex: Penguin.
Williams, L. (1999). Hard core: Power, pleasure, and the “frenzy of the visible.” Expanded ed. Berkely: University of California Press.
Williams, L.R. (2005). The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.