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 themselves against. For this reason, as John Frow argues, Derrida’s argument “participates in . . . a familiar post-Romantic resistance to genre understood as a prescriptive taxonomy and as a constraint on textual energy” (26). What matters in the end is the singularity of the literary text, which exceeds the genre(s) it performs. Such resistance to genre has had implications for writing instruction, in the form of debates over constraint and choice, convention and creativity. These dichotomies have created a false set of choices for student writers and their instructors, where students’ “authentic” voices and visions are perceived to be in tension with the “constraining” forces of genre conventions. As Amy Devitt has argued, however, and as we will discuss in Part 3, genres offer teachers and students a way of seeing constraint and choice, convention and creativity as interconnected (see Devitt, “Integrating Rhetorical and Literary Theories of Genre” as well as Chapter 6 of Writing Genres).
Reader Response Approaches to Genre
Reader Response approaches to genre follow Derrida in presenting a complex relationship between texts and genres. Yet whereas Derrida recognizes a literary text as a performance of genre, reader response approaches recognize genre as a performance of a reader, particularly the literary critic, upon a text. In The Power of Genre, Adena Rosmarin identifies genre’s power in just this way: “The genre is the critic’s heuristic tool, his chosen or defined way of persuading his audience to see the literary text in all its previously inexplicable and ‘literary’ fullness and then to relate this text to those that are similar or, more precisely, to those that may be similarly explained” (25). Within such an approach, genre becomes an argument a critic makes about a text. Such an argument does not necessarily alter the text, being more of a localized and even temporary explanation of a text that may itself be subject to multiple genre explanations or performances. As Rosmarin explains, “The critic who explicitly uses genre as an explanatory tool neither claims nor needs to claim that literary texts should or will be written in its terms, but that, at the present moment and for his implied audience, criticism can best justify the value of a particular literary text by using these terms” (50-51). The same text can be subject to different genre explanations without compromising its integrity, so that, along with Rosmarin, a critic could say, “let us explore what ‘Andrea del Sarto’ [a poem by Robert Browning] is like when we read it as a dramatic monologue . . .” (46). Such an approach acknowledges genre’s constitutive power, albeit as an interpretive tool, involved in literary consumption, not literary production.
E.D. Hirsch has likewise argued for a view of genres as interpretive frameworks, claiming that a reader’s “preliminary generic conceptions” are “constitutive of everything that he subsequently understands” and remains so until that conception is challenged or changed (Hirsch 74). Genres thus function as conventionalized predictions or guesses readers make about texts. Summarizing such an approach to genre, John Frow writes: “genre is not a property of a text but is a function of reading. Genre is a category we impute to texts, and under different circumstances this imputation may change” (102). Such an approach begins to offer a more dynamic view of genre that leads into Cultural Studies approaches, which we describe next, and it has offered a way of teaching reading in terms of what reading theorist Frank Smith has called “specifications,” which enable a reader to identify, make predictions about, and negotiate a text. Yet by psychologizing genre as the performance of a reader and perceiving it as an interpretive tool, Reader Response approaches to genre have overlooked the social scope of genre and its role in the production as well as interpretation of texts.
Cultural Studies Approaches to Genre
While traditional literary approaches have contributed to culturally-widespread, bipolar attitudes toward genre as either an exclusively aesthetic object or as a constraint on the artistic spirit, the final tradition we will examine (Cultural Studies approaches to genre) challenges such bipolar attitudes and offers a larger landscape for genre action. Cultural Studies genre approaches seek to examine the dynamic relationship between genres, literary texts, and socio-culture—In particular, the way genres organize, generate, normalize, and help reproduce literary as well as non-literary social actions in dynamic, ongoing, culturally defined and defining ways.
In reaction to Reader Response approaches to genre, for instance, a Cultural Studies approach would be interested in how and which genres become available as legitimate options for readers or critics to use. Hirsch and Rosmarin, for example, do not account for the socially regulated ways that readers and critics impute genres to texts, suggesting instead that genres are interpretive frameworks readers simply select. In fact, however, there is a great
