what is genre?

Literary genres are patterns or structures of meaning-making that operate on the composition and the reading of texts. Genre enables quick recognition by the reader of the context and shape of a particular text by making appeal to generally recognized conventions about texts and their meaning. A reader may not even be consciously aware of the genre of the text that she is reading; and yet, she arrives at the text with an already pre-existing set of expectations – as the German theorist Hans-Robert Jauss would term it, a ‘horizon of expectations’[1]. She knows already that the text will operate within a set of conventions, within which it will be possible to make sense of what is being said in it.

The notion of genre is best distinguished from the mode by which a text is presented (i.e. drama, novel, lyric, film) – though it may include consideration of the formal characteristics by which a text is organized. But thematic aspects are also important for the consideration of genre. Thus, ‘drama’ is not a genre (in the sense I mean it here), although ‘tragedy’ is; and it may be that tragedy most readily lends itself to dramatic presentation. The novel has become a literary form by which all manner of narratives are presented. As a mode of presentation, the novel has enabled the development of certain kinds of thematic content – which leads to the transformation of existing genres and the development of new subgenres.

There may be some transgressing or playing with the conventions that comprise a genre. Indeed, this is frequently the case, and in many instances it is one of the striking things about an individual text. That Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock is an epic about a trivial subject, that is, the lady Arabella’s lock of hair – when Pope and his readers know that epic poems are meant to be about grand subjects. But this act of transgression usually serves to underscore the norms that frame the text, rather than to undermine them. The breaking of the rules is only intelligible as a transgressive act if there is between author and readers a recognition that there are indeed rules in the first place. 

A genre is not simply a frame, functioning as the frame around a work of art in gallery. There is some overlap: the frame is an invitation to consider a certain item in a certain way – as a work of art. The frame says what is within my borders is meaningful. The difference is that a genre is not simply a locating device for a certain text, but actively shapes its content. It both situates and shapes the text itself. And that is not all of course: because the performance of a genre in each literary text contributes to the formation and reformation and transformation of that genre. In Jacques Derrida’s words, it ‘participates’ in the genre. It does not simply ‘belong’ to it. A text of a particular genre is both shaped by and shapes that genre. It contributes back to it, by extending it, blending it with others, and particularizing it. 

Genres form a web of texts – connecting texts to other texts. They orient the reading (and writing) of texts to the context of other textual practices. They form ‘traditions’ of text-making, in which patterns are played out in each successively written text, sometime over hundreds and even thousands of years, and across languages. Now, traditions are highly selective. Each age is selective in the account it gives of the past, with its renewed emphases on certain previously discovered authors and so on. T.S. Eliot’s rediscovery of the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century for example is testimony to the way in which these traditions operate somewhat haphazardly – out of chronological order. That is: forming a list of texts in the order that they were composed will in fact be a misleading way to account for the way in which they have shaped the genre in which they participate. The greatest impact of a relatively old text on a particular genre may yet lie in the future. Jonathan Culler writes:

To write a poem or a novel is immediately to engage with a literary tradition or at the very least with a certain idea of the poem or the novel. The activity is made possible by the existence of the genre, which the author 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.[2]

In his recent work on genre, the US theorist Anis S. Bawarshi suggests the metaphor of the ‘ecosystem’. As an organic system, the ecosystem is not simply structured but also structuring. This is apt for use with literary genres because

it suggests that generic boundaries are not simply classificatory constraints within which writers and speakers function; rather, these boundaries are social and rhetorical conditions which make possible certain commitments, relations, and actions.[3]

Genres both sustain and are sustained by writers and readers; the habits of producing and reading texts are both generated and preserved by the set of conditions named in a genre. Genres are not, as Bawarshi insists, simply static. They are dynamic: ‘organic’, as the metaphor of the ecosystem suggests.

The essential point here is that the study of genre reveals that texts are shaped by contexts in often complex ways, and in turn give shape to their contexts. Genre points to the fact that, like language itself, texts are dialogical: they are part of an ongoing conversation with other texts, in which meaning is made and re-made and extended. In fact, all writing (we could say) is, first, reading.

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[1] Hans Robert Jauss and Timothy Bahti, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).

[2] Jonathan D. Culler, Structuralist Poetics : Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 116.

[3] Anis S. Bawarshi, Genre and the Invention of the Writer : Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2003), p. 8.