Paul Cobley, London Metropolitan University
The French term “genre” is derived from the same Latin root as “general”, “genus”, “gender”, “genesis”, “generate”, “genius” and “gene”. In modern French, as well as meaning “literary genre”, it also means “of the same sort”, “kind”, “gender”, especially linguistically, and “genus”, biological kind. Etymologically and pragmatically the word originates in the idea of discerning a broader pattern or category in elementary phenomena. In the sphere of texts and communications, genre might be said to be a recognised pattern of discourse, a tacit or explicit convention about what kinds of words and representations belong together. At the level of everyday communication there exist such genres as “speeches”, “informal conversations”, “business letters”, “telephone enquiries”, “insults”, “shopping lists”, “technical instructions”, “arguments”, and a whole host of other kinds of genre, a fact which has become increasingly clear to analysts of language and communication (e.g. Martin 1992; Bhatia 1992). For Bakhtin, these types of communicative phenomena could be classified as “primary genres” (1986: 65). However, the understanding of genre as permeating everyday communicative practices is historically preceded by the use of the term to understand genres of artistic production. Many of these are written genres, although there is also “genre painting” for example; many of them are narrative genres, although there are genres in poetry which are not strictly driven by narrative; and many are fictional in their orientation, although non-fictional narrative genres such as the “confessional” abound.
It is important to note that the apprehension of genre in an artistic context usually comprises two understandings of the term. Genre is often understood as an established category of composition, characterised by distinctive language and subject matter. Among these genres would be poetry, drama and the novel, but also the short story and non-fiction genres such as autobiography (usually narrative) and essays (usually non-narrative) (Crystal 1997: 73). Bakhtin is an example of an influential theorist who holds that the novel itself – irrespective of the many types of novel that exist – is a genre (Bakhtin 1981). The second understanding of the term proceeds from the idea of genre as a category of composition, or goes directly to the analysis of specific types of text within broad categories of composition such as the novel, poetry, film or television. In the ancient world, this second understanding was already in force since tragedy and comedy were already recognized as genres (of drama), existing alongside definitions of other types such as epic, which were categorized according to composition – containing mimesis and the poet’s voice, as Plato famously asserted (Cornford 1945: 81) – as well as key themes such as heroism. In each view, the genre seems to derive from a number of basic textual patterns generating many different texts.
From around the middle of the nineteenth century, the development of new modes of enunciation (new media), and their facilitation of mass consumption of narrative, has meant that genres have proliferated on an unprecedented scale. Such genres include gothic and sentimental romances, historical novels, imperial novels, thrillers and science fiction, and then more recently soap opera and fantasy in the realm of fiction, and other non-fictional narrative genres such as news, advertising and documentary (Williams 1974: 59). Furthermore, such genres are distributed across a range of media: print, radio, television, film, the internet. Commonly, it is believed that each of these genres comprises a “formula” that constitutes its basic character as a genre, and that this formula is different from other formulae that give rise to other genres. Every consumer of texts therefore has a rough idea of what “genre” means: a shorthand classification, determining whether a particular text is expected to conform to previous experiences of texts on the part of the consumer.
Establishing an understanding of genre with reference to the identification of an underlying textual formula or pattern has been the concern of most theorising about genre which effectively altered little for two thousand years after Aristotle. Mainly as a result of Aristotle’s legacy, genre theory has not only sought to lay bare textual formulae; it has also been largely prescriptive. Aristotle’s fragmentary observations in the Poetics (c. 330 BCE) framed the classic genres in terms of best practice, using them as a means for guiding the act of composition or providing a body of reference for post hoc evaluation. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the next burst of writing about principles of composition was equally prescriptive. Renaissance poets and dramatists in the two centuries after 1450 implemented the “rediscovery” of the classical world in their own spheres of interest, poets such as Sir Philip Sidney in his Defence of Poesie (1595) invoking a wealth of classical authorities to both defend poetry and to put forth a humanist prescription for what poetry should be. In the classical and Renaissance periods, both genre theorists and genre consumers were operating with a limited number of modes of enunciation and a limited number of genres. The many speech genres that existed were often appraised in terms of rhetoric in both periods, but genre tended to be associated with originally written forms or those forms that had made their way into writing and now often appeared first in writing, such as poetry.
From the Renaissance onwards, print technology in Europe facilitated the publication of diaries, confessions, romances and novels, not to mention ballads and news-sheets. In the sphere of literature, the novel fragmented into a multi-generic entity by the end of the nineteenth century, catering for a range of different readerships. The twentieth-century proliferation of genres has allowed the term to achieve a common-sense usage by novel readers, moviegoers, TV viewers and others, whilst philosophical understanding of genre has been developed by theorists who have analysed textual organization and patterns of social meaning.
Initial critical understanding was formed around the synchronic (i.e. ahistorical) studies undertaken by the Russian Formalists such Vladimir Propp (1895-1970) whose Morphology of the Folktale (1928) was widely influential. It is by no means a coincidence that Propp’s immense contribution to the theory of genre takes place within his early formulation of a conception of the text as independent of authors or essential meanings. Famously, in the Morphology of the Folktale, Propp analysed 100 Russian folk stories, examining their underlying commonalities, particularly the basic function of actions in each story. Propp identified 31 functions characterizing the tales: for example, “One of the members of a family absents himself from home” “An interdiction is addressed to the hero” “The interdiction is violated” through to “The villain is punished” and “The hero marries and ascends the throne”. Each of these functions is, of course, carried out by one or more of the dramatis personae. Propp therefore proceeded to isolate the seven basic roles of characters in his sample, listing the particular sphere of action to which each belonged: the hero, the villain, the princess (sought-for) and her father, the dispatcher, the donor, the helper, and the false hero. Propp, however, was careful not to be too rigid: sometimes, it was found, a character took on more than one role or a single role was played by more than one character.
Propp’s exemplary disquisition on taxonomy was followed by a concluding comment on how modern literature would seem as susceptible to his approach as the highly formalized stories which he analysed. This provided the spur to future text study. The synchronic bearing encouraged a focus on the “text itself”, bracketing concerns with authorship and the “intentional fallacy”. Unsurprisingly, this provided fertile ground for the germination of the concept of genre. Such a concentration on the text can be seen in the work of I. A. Richards (including his collaboration with C. K. Ogden in the 1920s) in Britain; it is evident in the New Criticism which rose to prominence in the United States in the years after the Second World War; it characterizes the approach to texts which was, broadly, employed by Frye, Innis and McLuhan in Canada (the latter having studied with Richards in the 1930s). These literary approaches to textuality were complemented by re-formulations of linguistics elsewhere in the world, including the work of the structuralists in France; the Prague Linguistic Circle in Czechoslovakia (which had grown out of Russian Formalism); and the Copenhagen School in Denmark, all of whom made direct or indirect reference to the concept of genre.
All of these schools, as well as being called “synchronic” in their bearing, could also be understood as “formalist” (with a small ‘f’). As such, they were preoccupied with the formal characteristic of texts as opposed to the material consequences or pragmatic environments of texts. Nevertheless, some formalists, from the left and the right of the political spectrum, still attempted to read off ‘social effects’ from different kinds of texts (e.g. Adorno and Horkheimer 1973; Leavis 1930). Such arguments proceeded from the idea that there were kinds of text which were associated very closely with the imperatives of “mass culture” that is to say, it was believed that the “mass culture industry” produced genres which were essentially palliative in their “effects”. “Mass culture theory”, then, was resolute in its criticism of industrial classifications of texts and suspicious of genres which required anything less than acute and learned personal engagement with them.
In addition to their suspicion of genre’s relationship with consumer choice, “synchronic” theorists continued to rely on the formula-based understanding of genre. Furthermore, they continued to take literary and other print works as their exemplar of the working of genres (see, for example, Propp 1968, Frye 1957, Hirsch 1967, Dubrow 1982, Fowler 1982). A major sea change occurred when universities in Britain, North America and Australia began to embrace film as a legitimate object of study. The genre analysis carried out by film theory was initially based on the observations of film critics, some of which were academic, some of which were journalistic and some of which problematically straddled the two (e.g. Warshow 1962, [1948]). As film theory matured, more searching questions were asked of “secondary genres” such as whether they were constituted by visual elements (iconography), or by stock situations, or by plot determinants, whether the industry repeated formulae by audience fiat, and whether “auteurs” were responsible for the construction of meaning in genre films. Many genre theorists looking at film and print genres such as the western, the thriller and the adventure story, were indebted to Propp (translated 1958; in book form 1968) who suggested that some texts have not so much a formula as a structure that can be repeated time and again with different contents while generally carrying the same meaning (cf. Todorov 1973). The problem of change regarding the “content” of generic texts, a problem that threatened to overturn the apple cart of genre theory, seemed to be resolved: “structure” always carried meaning that ultimately shaped the “content”, no matter what that “content” might be (see Cawelti 1975; Palmer 1978; Wright 1975).
What eventually dawned on genre theorists as they encountered the immensity of the production of popular narratives, however, was that generic texts are not necessarily stale repetitions of old formulae. The “content” of texts is crucially important – not just to the producers of generic texts, but to consumers. Much of the recognition of the importance of context was spurred by investigations in literature and communications into the responses of readers and audiences, work that flourished in the final decades of the twentieth century (see, for example Morley 1980, 1986, 1992; Ang 1984, 1991, 1996; Radway 1984; Seiter et al 1989; Liebes and Katz 1993; Gillespie 1995; Nightingale 1996). Such work is crucial to genre: it has been argued that even where there is an “implied reader” – a preferred way of reading a text constructed by intentional inscriptions on the part of the enunciator - the real reader can choose to read differently and this “different” reading or construction of meaning will derive from determinants outside texts, including aspects of people’s lives (Hermes 2002). All texts carry a multiplicity of meanings or polysemy and are open to interpretation; but even reader-theories assumed that generic texts were somehow exempt from this and sometimes seemed to suggest that they were, in fact, eternally limited in meaning. The film theorist, Rick Altman, argues that generic texts invite a form of reading which is “short-circuited” (1986: 4). However, Altman is one of a number of contemporary genre-theorists who stress the importance of “reader-orientated” understandings of genre, and he explicitly acknowledges the reader in the process of short-circuiting. For Altman (1999), a cultural commodity such as a genre is “made” through the action of readers who harbour expectations about it. Moreover, such expectations are not just created by publicity surrounding a narrative; nor are they unproblematically the products of existing belief. Instead, they are the products of values, attitudes, knowledge, emotions and pleasure (cf. Jost 1998: 106).
Many genre theorists, bridging the gap between formalist and materialist perspective, now hold that generic meaning is derived partly from competence in reading other narratives in the genre, but also from a more diffuse set of knowledges brought to the reading of a specific narrative (Cobley 2000, 2001; Makinen 2001). Whereas the “formula” of a genre was previously thought to be what defined it, and that an analysis of the “text” of a genre could be carried out on a neutral basis divorced from any interested readings, genre now tends to be understood more as “idea” or an “expectation” harboured by readers. Indeed, if one looks at most definitions of genre, it seems that this reader-orientated fundamental is always implicit in such definitions, no matter how much they go out of their way to deny it. This is a fact which also bears on the assumption that genres are self-contained. The contention is a difficult one to maintain, even though it is often implemented for the practical purposes of analysing texts. The task of demonstrating that most modern popular genres are hybrid in nature, on the other hand, is somewhat easier (cf. Cobley 2000: 26-30), but not so often carried out effectively in the analysis of texts. Nevertheless, some recent theorists have been successful in almost abolishing strict boundaries between genres in favour of concentrating on the “nomadic” tendencies (Radway 1988; cf. Goffman 1981) in popular reading as a broad phenomenon (see Bloom 1996 and McCracken 1998). Yet such work also indicates that, in the multimedia environment of the present, despite suggestions that genres are more soluble than they have ever been, awareness of genre constitutes one of the crucial components of media literacy.
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Citation: Cobley, Paul. "Genre, Genre Theory". The Literary Encyclopedia. 31 October 2005.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=464, accessed 30 July 2010.]