number of literary relationships that would not be noticed as long as there were no context established for them” (247-48).
While Neoclassical taxonomies seek to organize relations between literary texts, the main critique of such approaches has been the way they universalize the ideological character of genres rather than seeing genres as emerging from and responding to socio-historically situated exigencies. In terms of their impact on writing instruction, such attitudes toward genre have helped to authorize the creation of decontextualized taxonomies which have resulted in the use of modes of writing such as the still widely-taught “description,” “narration,” “persuasion,” and “exposition.” These artificial modes isolate form from content and presume that all writing (and associated cognitive processes) can be classified and explained by way of universally applicable categories. At the same time, such an abstract view of genre constrains writing teachers and students from treating genres as dynamic, situated actions, in ways articulated in more recent literary, linguistic, and rhetorical genre studies.
Structuralist Approaches to Genre
While Frye’s archetype-based taxonomy invites criticism such as Todorov’s for being theoretical rather than historical, Frye’s work also provides a way of describing how literary texts do not function as free standing entities, but exist in systematic, intertextual relation to one another within a literary universe. In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye proposes an approach to literary criticism rooted not in ideological perspectives, personal taste, and value judgments, but in a systematic study of literary texts, one that sought a “coordinating principle” through which to identify and describe literary texts as parts of a larger whole (16). In tracing the archetypal patterns (rituals, myths) that permeate and help distinguish literary texts, Frye delineated a complex, intertextual literary universe in which literary texts participate and are defined. All literary texts draw on a finite set of available archetypes, configuring these archetypes according to the genres in which the literary text functions. In this way, Frye’s work can also be seen as operating in part within another of the literary approaches to genre: the structuralist approach.
Structuralist (or literary-historical) approaches understand genres as organizing and, to some extent, shaping literary texts and activities within a literary reality. In Metaphors of Genre: The Role of Analogies in Genre Theory, David Fishelov explores the connections between literary reality and genre theory, explaining that the metaphor “genres are social institutions” is commonly used by literary scholars to describe how literary genres coordinate textual relations, organization, and change. Fishelov, for example, explains that as “a professor is expected to comply with certain patterns of action, and to interact with other role-players (e.g. students) according to the structure and functions of an educational institution . . . , a character in a comedy is expected to perform certain acts and to interact with other characters according to the structural principles of the literary ‘institution’ of comedy” (86). So genres are literary institutions that make certain literary activities possible and meaningful, both in terms of the subjects who participate within them and in terms of the writers and readers who produce and interpret them. Structuralist approaches, thus, examine how genres structure literary texts and contexts within what Todorov calls “literary reality” (Fantastic 13-14).
Whereas Neoclassical approaches to genre use transhistorical categories (such as epic, lyric, and dramatic) to classify and clarify literary texts and their relations at 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
