Genre in Literary Traditions
In this and the next four chapters of Part 1, we will examine the various ways genre has been defined and used (historically and currently) in literary theory, Systemic Functional Linguistics (what is often called the “Sydney school” of genre study), historical/corpus linguistics, English for Specific Purposes, and Rhetorical Genre Studies (what is often termed “North American” genre study), with the goal of tracing how this dynamic, inter-related history has informed current understandings and syntheses (see for example the discussion of the Brazilian tradition in Chapter 5) of genre and its implications for writing instruction and writing program development. Certainly, an entire book, let alone a few chapters, will not be able to capture the complexity of this history in all the areas in which genre theory has played a significant role. Brian Paltridge, for example, has described the important work on genre done in folklore studies and linguistic anthropology, while Rick Altman and Steve Neale have examined genre in film studies. In the following chapters, we will instead describe the range of ways genre has been understood, synthesized, and used, over time, in those areas of study that have had the most impact on the study and teaching of writing: literary, linguistic, and rhetorical/sociological genre traditions. An understanding of these traditions will help situate various genre approaches and reveal their analytical and pedagogical possibilities, which Parts 2 and 3 will take up in more detail.
The traditions we examine illustrate a range of pedagogical and analytical trajectories, from textual trajectories that examine genres’ formal features for purposes of classification, description, and/or teaching to contextual trajectories that examine how genres reflect, shape and enable participants to engage in particular social and linguistic events, including how genres mediate social and linguistic events in ways that reproduce social activities and relations, how genres relate to larger social structures in ways that allow for cross-cultural analysis, and how genres can be used as forms of resistance and change. This range—from taxonomic and descriptive approaches to explanatory approaches to pragmatic approaches to critical approaches that link genres to ideology and power—can be seen at work in literary approaches to genre study, which this chapter takes up.
Of the traditions we examine in Part 1, literary approaches to genre have been the least directly concerned with writing instruction and writing program development. Yet the analytical perspectives they offer, including those about genre and creativity (see Devitt, Writing Genres 163–90), and the ways that they have informed widespread beliefs about genre make literary genre traditions significant to scholarship in linguistic and rhetorical studies of genre. In what follows, we will first examine how literary approaches to genre have traditionally maintained culturally-widespread, bipolar attitudes toward genre as either an exclusively aesthetic object or as a constraint on the artistic spirit, and then we will consider more recent literary genre scholarship that challenges bipolar attitudes and offers a larger landscape for genre action that can include linguistic and socio-rhetorical studies of genres. We will describe what we perceive as five major trajectories of literary genre study: Neoclassical approaches to genre; Structuralist (or literary-historical) approaches to genre; Romantic and post-Romantic concerns about genre; Reader Response approaches to genre; and Cultural Studies approaches to genre. These trajectories will help highlight the range of ways literary theories have defined and made use of genre and their implications for the study and teaching of writing.
Neoclassical Approaches to Genre
In The Fantastic and “The Origin of Genres,” Tzvetan Todorov distinguishes between what he calls “theoretical” and “historical” approaches to genre, a distinction we can see at work in the first two literary traditions we will examine: the Neoclassical and Structuralist. Theoretical approaches define genres based on abstract, analytical categories that critics use to classify texts (Fantastic 13-14). These categories are “theoretical” because, rather than beginning with actual practices and texts, they begin with apriori categories, which are then applied to texts for purposes of classification. An example of such a theoretical approach, which Todorov critiques, is Northrop Frye’s well-known work in Anatomy of Criticism, which classifies literary texts according to archetypal themes and images. Historical approaches, on the other hand, recognize genres as resulting “from an observation of literary reality,” meaning that genres are defined based on an inductive method, whereby critics identify genre categories based on perceived structural patterns in texts, as these texts exist historically within particular literary contexts (Fantastic 13-14). (Todorov’s approach to genre study can be described as historical in this way.) While Todorov does not deny the usefulness of theoretical or “abstract analysis” for the designation of what he prefers to call “types” of genres, he wants to reserve the word “genre” to designate “only those classes of texts that have been historically perceived as such” (“Origin” 198).
What we are calling Neoclassical approaches to genre utilize a theoretical, trans-historical set of categories (or taxonomies) in order to classify literary texts. Such taxonomic approaches start with apriori, macro-categories which are then used to define and clarify kinds of literary texts according to internal thematic and formal relations. As Todorov’s critique suggests, Neoclassical approaches to genre tend to rely on these taxonomies to classify and describe relations between literary texts, rather than examine how genres emerge from and are codified by users within actual contexts of use.
Gérard Genette has described how Neoclassical literary taxonomies have their basis in the famous literary triad of lyric, epic, and dramatic, which is mistakenly attributed to Aristotle but is actually more the product of Romantic and post-Romantic poetics (Genette 6-12).1 According to Genette, “the whole history of the theory of genre [within the literary tradition] is imprinted with these fascinating patterns that inform and deform the often irregular reality of the literary field” (45). This triad has traditionally been used to define the literary landscape: the novel, novella, epic (epical); the tragedy, comedy, bourgeois drama (dramatic); ode, hymn, epigram (lyrical) (49). As a taxonomy, the classical triad has also been used to describe genre change. For example, citing Ernest Bovet’s theory of how the triad evolved naturally to reflect biological and social evolution, Genette writes: “To Bovet, as to Hugo and the German Romantics, the three ‘chief genres’ are not merely forms . . . but rather ‘three basic ways of imagining life and the universe,’ which correspond to three stages of evolution, as much ontogenetic as phylogenetic . . .” (56). So within a given historical era, different periods will mark stages of generic evolution reflecting, say, an “epic world,” a “lyric consciousness,” and a “dramatic milieu” (Genette 62). At other times, the triad has been associated with spatial presence and temporal perspective. Lyric, for instance, is at times defined as subjective, dramatic as objective, and epic as subjective-objective (Genette 38), so that in each formation we have a different notion of presence—each, that is, articulates a different spatial dimension in which a particular literary action takes place.2
As illustrated by the lyric, dramatic, and epic triad, what distinguishes Neoclassical genre approaches is their pursuit of systematic and inclusive rules based on universal validity for classifying and describing kinds of literary texts (Frow 52). As such, we can describe Northrop Frye’s well-known work on genre as Neoclassical insofar as it seeks a transhistorical system of archetypes in order to describe literary texts and their relations. For example, in Anatomy of Criticism, Frye identifies four archetypal mythos: comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony/satire. These narratives are associated with the cycle of the seasons, such that Winter is associated with irony/satire, Spring with comedy, Summer with romance, and Autumn with tragedy. Each of these narratives unfolds within archetypal plots (for example, the movement from one type of society to another within comedy), and each of these plots unfolds within archetypal phases (for example, the movement from complete innocence to tragic flaw to unrelieved shock and horror within tragedy). And the phases themselves are associated with archetypal characters and traits (for example, the quest plot of romance includes archetypal characters such as youthful hero, aged magician, sibylline, monster, nymphs, as well as archetypal imagery such as water, fertility, wooded landscapes, valleys, brooks, friendly companions, and so on). As Frye explains of Neoclassical approaches, “the purpose of criticism by genre is not so much to
