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 deal socially at stake in what texts are identified with what genres. Cultural Studies approaches are thus concerned with how genre 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.
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