conventions hail certain texts and readers in “shared and shareable ways, and are built into more or less durable infrastructures” (Frow 102), so that the choice of genre a reader or critic “selects” as an interpretive framework is guided by his or her knowledge of certain social practices. Focusing on genre in the film industry, Rick Altman suggests that “we may fruitfully recognize the extent to which genres appear to be initiated, stabilized and protected by a series of institutions essential to the very existence of genres” (85). These institutions include literary institutions, but also other social institutions such as schools, publishing companies, marketing agencies, and so on, which constitute what John Frow has called “reading regimes” that regulate habits of reading. According to Frow, “it is through our learning of the structure of reading regimes that we acquire the background knowledges, and the knowledge of rules of use and relevance, that allow us to respond appropriately to different generic contexts” (140). The knowledge of “rules of use and relevance” that shape how readers identify, select, value, and experience literary texts is acquired through social practices (including genres), thus linking literary genres to social institutions in more than simply the analogous ways suggested by structuralist approaches.
An important aspect of Cultural Studies approaches to genre is the way they define and use genres to examine dynamic relations between literary texts and historically situated social practices and structures. As Todorov puts it, “Like any other institution, genres bring to light the constitutive features of the society to which they belong;” as such, “a society chooses and codifies the [speech] acts that correspond most closely to its ideology; that is why the existence of certain genres in one society, and their absence in another, are revelatory of that ideology . . .” (200). For example, in Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton, David Quint describes how epic as a genre “encodes and transmits” an “ideology of empire” by shaping human history into narrative (8). As Quint explains, “To the victor belongs epic, with its linear teleology; to the loser belongs romance, with its random or circular wandering. Put another way, the victors experience history as a coherent, end-directed story told by their own power; the losers experience a contingency that they are powerless to shape their own ends” (9). As such, epic carries an “idea of narrative itself” through western history, one that equates power with narrative in a way that eventually becomes ‘universalized’ and codified as the epic becomes part of a larger literary history” (13-15). Far from being simply a Neoclassical category used to classify kinds of literary texts, then, epic reflects and participates in maintaining a view of narrative that has proven to be historically durable. Not only are literary genres linked in dynamic ways to ideology, so too, Peter Hitchcock claims, is the urge to classify genres, which is itself a historical and socio-cultural impulse connected to colonialism and nationalism. “The classificatory ambition in literature,” Hitchcock argues, “is indissoluble from a particular history of self and society” (308). For example, the urge to codify the novel as genre in the 1960s and 70s was a conservative gesture in the face of popularizations of and the rise in subgenres of the novel, especially connected to a rise in decolonization and postcolonial states asserting their autonomy and difference (Hitchcock 309-10). Hitchcock calls for a “mode of analysis that takes genre seriously enough to fathom the conditions under which particular genres may appear and expire . . . while allowing for a law of genre that is not in itself ahistorical” (311; emphasis added). Genre formations and transformations are linked to social formations and transformations in ideological, powerful ways; to take “genre seriously enough,” according to Cultural Studies approaches, means both examining how genres reflect and participate in legitimizing social practices and recognizing how generic distinctions maintain hierarchies of power, value, and culture.
In a way hinted at already, Cultural Studies approaches to genre tend to complicate traditional boundaries between literary and non-literary genres in ways that acknowledge how all genres reflect and shape texts and social actions. As John Frow offers, “Genre theory is, or should be, about the ways in which different structures of meaning and truth are produced in and by the various kinds of writing, talking, painting, filming, and acting by which the universe of discourse is structured” (10). Mikhail Bakhtin has been an especially important figure in describing the complex relations between genres: literary and everyday genres, written and spoken. We will revisit Bakhtin’s work on speech genres in Chapter 6, when we examine rhetorical approaches to genre. Here, we will focus on what we will describe as two axes of genre relations in Bakhtin’s work, horizontal and vertical. Horizontal relations describe the dialogic nature of genres, as one genre becomes a response to another within a sphere of communication. For example, a call for papers leads to proposals which lead to letters of acceptance or rejection, and so on. Vertical relations involve what Bakhtin calls primary and secondary genres (“Problem” 61-62). For Bakhtin, primary genres take form in “unmediated speech communion,” meaning that they maintain an “immediate relation to actual reality and to the real utterances of others” (62). Examples of primary genres include rejoinders in everyday dialogue and private letters (62). Secondary genres (which for Bakhtin include “novels, dramas, all kinds of scientific research, major genres of commentary”) are more complex: “During the process of their formation, [secondary genres] absorb and digest various primary (simple) genres. . . . These primary genres are altered and assume a special character when they enter into complex ones” (62). When we answer the phone with “hello” during an actual phone conversation, for instance, we are using a primary genre, but if that rejoinder and the phone conversation that ensues were recorded and included as part of a cross examination in a trial, then the primary genre becomes recontextualized and altered as part of the secondary genre of cross examination.
The vertical relation in which secondary genres absorb and alter primary genres (as well as other secondary genres) offers insight into how literary and everyday genres interact to form and transform social practices and actions. For one thing, it suggests that literary genres, which are secondary genres, are not pure but are rather made up of other genres, including everyday, vernacular genres such as phone conversations, tax forms, contracts, prayers, and so on. For Bakhtin, the novel offers the clearest example of such a herteroglosia of genres. The novel recontextualizes multiple genres into its symbolic world. According to Bakhtin, “Each of these genres possesses its own verbal and semantic forms for assimilating various aspects of reality. The novel, indeed, utilizes these genres precisely because of their capacity, as well worked-out forms, to assimilate reality in words” (Dialogic 320-21). In so doing, the novel can be understood as re-assimilating realities within realities, so that the realities represented by the various genres the novel incorporates become recontextualized within its own reality. The novel uses the various genre realities to construct its own reality. This process of genre transformation works in two directions. On the one hand, once a literary genre absorbs other genres, say legal genres, it transforms them, so that these genres are no longer defined by what Thomas Beebee calls their cultural “use values” as legal documents that have cultural consequences, such as getting someone put in jail. On the other hand, though, a literary genre can supply an alternative vision of how everyday legal or public genres can be used, thereby transforming their cultural use values. That is, literary genres such as the novel have the potential to “de-form” or destabilize the realities represented by the genres they recontextualize. As Beebee explains, “In terms of my theory of genre as use-value, the purpose of the novel would be to provide a discursive space for different genres to critique one another” (154). In this way, literary genres can reveal cultural ideologies by denaturalizing and reconfiguring relations between everyday genres and their use values.4
For Beebee, “primarily, genre is the precondition for the creation and the reading of texts” (250), because genre provides the ideological context in which a text and its users function, relate to other genres and texts, and attain cultural value: “Genre gives us not understanding in the abstract and passive sense but use in the pragmatic and active sense” (14). It is within this social and rhetorical economy that a genre attains its use-value, making genre one of the bearers, articulators, and reproducers of culture—in short, ideological. In turn, genres are what make texts ideological, endowing them with a social use-value. As ideological-discursive formations, then, genres delimit all discourse into what Beebee calls the “possibilities of its usage” (278). Philippe
