Re-framing Genre Theory

Genre Theory: Cultural and Historical Motives Engendering Literary Genre

Brian G. Caraher

Genre theory possesses one of the oldest pedigrees in the history of Western, Eurocentric literary and cultural criticism. Plato's Republic (circa 373 BCE), so well known for its parables and its moralising of poetic censorship in the interests of philosophy and the ideal political state, propounds in the course of its third book an early theory of narrative point of view and the corresponding distinctions to be found in the genres of lyric, epic and dramatic poetry. On narratological, generic and moral grounds Plato's Socrates banishes the genres of epic and dramatic poetry from his conception of the ideal civic republic because their enunciative or performative positions are not closely governed by the Platonic imagination of philosophic truth. However, Plato's Socrates justifies the new genre of philosophic dialogue (as self-reflexively in play in the actual textual form of the Republic) as the prospective generic replacement for epic, tragic and comic forms of poetry. Aristotle's Poetics (circa 330 BCE), a less graceful but also less combatative and transumptive text than Plato's Republic, opines a naturalist, materialist and pragmatic approach to the historical and cultural genesis of Greek poetic genres. Poetics offers a study of actual genres developing historically and in relation to cultural practices and individual innovators. It offers constructive advice on ways to improve generic coherence and affective impact, particularly in relation to Sophoclean tragic drama and Homeric epic. For Aristotle, genres have histories and cultural motives and may evolve and cross-pollenate depending upon a variety of specific social factors and happenstances. Later critical writings of Horace, Scaliger, Sidney and Pope among others, however, tend to codify and systematise classical and neoclassical notions of genre. The developmental, fluid, changing, even combatative sense of genres once found in the work of Plato and Aristotle unfortunately became lost to the reification and conservation of classical genres as templates for later, neoclassical ideals of literary practice.

In 'Shakespeare and the Kinds of Drama', for instance, Stephen Orgel (1979) charts the ways in which Julius Scaliger's and Philip Sidney's fairly rigid allegiances to neoclassical categorisation of Renaissance literary genres handicap affective and cultural valuation of Shakespeare's early modern dramatic hybridisation of 'tragedy' and 'comedy'. As Orgel argues, Shakespeare's hybrid reinvention of early modern 'tragicomedy' articulates some intermixed, dynamic and developing structures for which the neoclassical ideal of tragic form will no longer suffice. The modern proliferation of new genres, particularly from the latter half of the eighteenth century onward, thoroughly problematises neoclassical approaches to genre theory and has generated a substantial literary critical industry attempting to embrace such post-classical entities as the gothic novel, sentimental melodrama, tales of horror, the sensation novel, sentimental poetry, conversation poems, the Romantic ode, the Bildungsroman, the Kunstlerroman, magical realism, detective fiction, theatre of the absurd, theatre of cruelty and so on. Modern genre theory is a complex and often heterodox field of literary historical and scholarly activity. It is also a field rather stunningly neglected or, at best, marginalised by the development of certain strands of post-structuralist theory which promote a problematic antipathy between 'speech' (logocentrism) and 'writing' (écriture) and new historicist theory which destabilises the cultural and rhetorical integrity of literary genres in the interests of recovering archival anecdotes and synecdoches of political power.

However, there has been an emergent body of work in poetics and literary theory which has not only rescued a sense of genre from the often overly restricted constructions of classical and neoclassical schemes of literary genre but has also recuperated aspects of the pragmatic power and cultural work of genres in practice. Heather Dubrow intimated this important new direction in the conclusion to her brief, but influential, study Genre (1982). Moreover, the extraordinary attention that the largely posthumous work of Mikhail Bakhtin (1981, 1986, 1990) on the social and cultural development of genres has received over the last twenty years in Anglophone literary theory bears clear witness to this renewed direction in genre theory. Adena Rosmarin's marvellous The Power of Genre (1985) theorises and analyses closely the schematic, cognitive and cultural work of literary genres, especially dramatic monologues and mask lyrics, in practice. For Rosmarin literary genres offer tentative yet wholly functional schemata for opening and commencing the process of cognitive refinement of literary understanding, particularly for inquiring into the rhetorical and intertextual conflicts which shape both the making and the reception of culturally resonant works. Raymond Gibbs' The Poetics of Mind (1994) and Mark Turner's The Literary Mind (1997) modernise classical notions of rhetorical modes and kinds such as figure, story and parable in concert with discoveries in contemporary cognitive and mental sciences to argue that 'the literary mind' with its fundamental structures of emplotment, projection, figuration and genre is indeed integral to and constitutive of the very nature of human knowledge, understanding and discursive activities. Such ambitious studies posit a fundamental rethinking of the pragmatic power and cultural work of genre.

Northrop Frye's once hugely influential Anatomy of Criticism (1957), now largely relegated to the archives of modern literary criticism, promised an earlier generation of literary theorists a 'new science' of genre criticism which would map genres conceptually onto historical, ethical, mythic and rhetorical critical and cultural practices. Perhaps Frye's critical ambition to reinvent and modernise Aristotle's Poetics in an academic climate marked by disagreements between an older historical mode of literary scholarship (genetic, author-based studies) and a newer mode of formalist analysis (Leavisite, New Critical formalism) actually signalled the poverty of genre theory in the 1950s in coming to terms with developments in modern social sciences and with the historical development of genres in time and cultures. I would like to propose a reversal and inversion of Northrop Frye's cycle of four literary myths in the 'Third Essay' of his Anatomy of Criticism as a way of examining and rehistoricising the literary and cultural status of genre and genre theory. It is a perspective much in keeping with the innovative work of Bakhtinians as well as Rosmarin, Gibbs, Turner and other contemporary theorists of the cognitive and cultural power of genre.

Taking its cue from an...