work done by the mass cultural genre system, a form of intellectual activity that emerges spontaneously within advanced capitalist relations and is therefore organic to it, to the work done by the traditional genre system located and maintained in the schools. Finally, I will attempt to map out the topography of the mass cultural genre system in terms of the effects of seriality, stratification, and the formation of subcultures that characterize its terrain. I begin by returning to the problem of conceptualizing the organizational function of a system of genres.
Genre Systems and Institutional Practices
Attempts to describe a system of literary genres have not often approached this project as a question about organizing the social functions of narrative. The most influential twentieth-century formulation of a system of literary genres, Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, took no interest in questions about social organization. Frye’s formal, thematic, and stylistic anatomy postulates an overarching, transcendent organization of literary types the principle of which is immanent in the logic and significance of literature itself. Thus his genre system has no clear historical boundaries and is not tied to any specific social milieu, an impulse echoed in Darko Suvin’s contention that the “literature of cognitive estrangement” thrives in times of social disruption per se, rather than in any specific moment of political or historical change. In sharp contrast to Frye’s grand sweep and universalizing impulses, which impose on the history of literature the synchrony of a kind of grand museum exhibition, Hans Robert Jauss’s carefully historicized, meticulous study of the medieval genre system in “Theory of Genres and Medieval Literature” insists that historical contingencies have caused literary genres to be organized in different ways for different purposes according to different values at different times and places.1 Jauss’s approach does not explicitly tackle the organizing social function of the medieval genre system, but it opens the possibility of doing so.
As Jauss articulates the many differences between the system of medieval genres and both classical and modern ones, he argues that the development of literary forms is neither continuous nor teleological: “No perceptible historical continuity exists between the forms and genres of the Middle Ages and the literature of our present. Here the reception of the ancient poetics and canon of genres in the Renaissance unmistakably cut through the threads of the formation of tradition. The rediscovery of medieval literature by romantic philology produced only the ideology of new continuities in the form of the essential unity of each national literature” (108). Literary forms do not simply grow and develop out of one another, and the logic of form, content, and style is not adequate to account for the discontinuous terrain of their history. The notion of a system of genres is for Jauss inherent in the broader concept of the horizon of expectations that frames literary reception, so that “the relationship between the individual text and the series of texts formative of a genre presents itself as a process of the continual founding and altering of horizons” (88). These horizons of expectation are not exclusively literary: “the work of art is [to be] understood as a sign and carrier of meaning for a social reality, and the aesthetic is defined as a principle of mediation and a mode of organization for extra-aesthetic meanings” (108). Although Jauss assigns the impetus for the early modern reordering of the genre system to scholarly reanimation of the literature of classical antiquity, his attention to the ever-shifting horizons of expectation and the organization of extra-aesthetic meanings might just as consistently include the impact of the printing press or the changing relations of church and state in the transition from feudalism to centralized absolutist monarchies. Both contributed to the secularization of literacy, shifting it from a predominantly clerical to an increasingly aristocratic and capitalistic, financial and bureaucratic set of functions. The question might well be raised, then, of how changes in the system of genres responded to these shifting technological and social horizons of expectation.
Certainly the emergence of science fiction has often been explained as a response to the shifting horizon of technological possibility. One of the most frequently reiterated commonplaces about science fiction is that it concerns itself with the social effects of technological change and emerges in the context of industrial technological innovation, and no doubt the reason this is so frequently repeated is that it is so obviously correct. For instance, in Roger Luckhurst’s recent history of science fiction he lists as one of the conditions of the genre’s emergence “the context of a culture being visibly transformed by technological and scientific innovations” in the later nineteenth century (Science Fiction, 16). But Luckhurst lists three other conditions for the emergence of science fiction that are very much to the point in the present context: “1) The extension of literacy and primary education to the majority of the population of England and America, including the working classes; 2) the displacement of the older forms of mass literature, the ‘penny dreadful’ and the ‘dime novel’, with new cheap magazine formats that force formal innovation, and drive the invention of modern genre categories like detective or spy fiction as well as SF; 3) the arrival of scientific and technical institutions that provide a training for a lower-middle-class generation as scientific workers, teachers, and engineers, and that comes to confront traditional loci of cultural authority” (Science Fiction, 16). Luckhurst’s second condition corresponds directly to the subject of this book. One of the major questions being raised here is how the new magazine formats “force formal innovation, and drive the invention of modern genre categories.” But there is a prior question implied in this one, the problem of what encouraged the development of these new magazine formats in the first place. The changes in the distribution of print, the speed of communication, and the technology of broadcast media that made possible mass culture were a no less momentous redistribution of literacy and its effects than those caused by the invention of the printing press itself. The question is what role the new, mass cultural genre system might have played in organizing, or managing, this redistribution of literacy.
I propose to approach this question by examining the emergence of the mass cultural genre system in relation to the one that prevailed in the set of institutions traditionally and directly charged with the social function of organizing and managing the distribution of literacy: the schools. The first and the third of Luckhurst’s conditions point to the expansion of the reading audience taking place on two levels of the educational system. Alongside the expansion of literacy at the most basic level of the ability to read, there is a more selective development in “scientific and technical institutions” of the specialized literacies required for technical and managerial tasks. Both the increasing number of people receiving primary education and the increased emphasis on technical training at the advanced level are part and parcel of “a culture being visibly transformed by technological and scientific innovations” insofar as these social phenomena respond to the needs of a growing industrial economy. While the growth of the reading public would seem to be one of the preconditions for the formation of mass culture in general, Luckhurst’s emphasis on the training of technicians (“scientific workers”) and engineers points more directly to the emerging audience for science fiction. That the younger readers aspiring toward this technical-managerial literacy composed a significant part of the reading audience for early science fiction seems a reasonable guess, given the didactic ambitions and extraordinary success of Verne’s Voyages extraordinaires, and likewise fits well with the “Edisonades” and boy geniuses of the transition from the dime novel into the pulp magazines.2 This relation to a specialized body of generic content seems typical of mass cultural genres. Just as science fiction specializes in the subject matter of science and technology, detective fiction focuses on law and police work, the western on the settlement of the American western frontier, and romance on the social and emotional dynamics of courtship and sexuality (Attebery and Hollinger xi). The way this specificity of content fits into the larger mass cultural genre system is an issue we will need to return to later. First, however, let me return to the relation of technical training to developments in the larger educational apparatus and the academic genre system.
The development of advanced scientific and technical training takes place within an expansion of higher education through the growth of the redbrick universities in the United Kingdom and the emergence of the first great state universities in the United States. More than just opening up new venues and less exclusive opportunities to attain higher education,
