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The Mass Cultural Genre System
Most genre theory has focused on the choices writers make when composing texts or that readers make, or ought to make, in interpreting them. But the practice of attributing genre to narrative fiction also clusters heavily in two institutional locations, commercial publishing and the academy. On these two sites, practices of reading dovetail with acts of selection, publication, and dissemination coordinated with complex and multiform motives. The relation between these two institutional locations is a feature of contemporary genre systems that most twentieth-century theory turned its back upon, failing to even notice it, much less ask about its significance or implications. Recent contributions to media studies like Altman’s Film/Genre and Mittel’s Genre and Television have begun to repair this neglect by elaborating theories of genre attentive to the practices of the Hollywood studios and corporate broadcast television. What I am attempting here is a more general description of the mass cultural genre system that proceeds on the premise that the commercial and academic genre systems will be better understood in relation to one another than either one in isolation. My account takes its point of departure from the emergence of mass culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and will pay attention throughout to the relations between the mass cultural and the academic genre systems. I begin by asking not what kind of definitional or conceptual work these systems accomplish, but what sort of organizational tasks they perform. How do they intervene in organizing the distribution and reception of narrative fiction?
While literary genre theory has for the most part related genres to one another by means of formal and thematic, or as Altman puts it, syntactic and semantic, criteria, an opening to the institutional functions of genre differentiation can be afforded by recent rhetorical approaches to genre theory, which have been exploring the ways that complex organizational tasks often involve an array of interlocking and codependent genres. For instance, the organization of an academic conference might involve calls for papers, proposals, abstracts, the exchanging of drafts and feedback, and many other formal and informal genres in the course of its affairs. Summarizing and elaborating on this work, Clay Spinuzzi sorts out several different sorts of assemblages that such rhetorically interlocking genres can form. By a “system” of genres Spinuzzi designates a group of genres that are related to one another through a community’s use of them in a sequential and stable fashion to accomplish organizational or communicative tasks, like the organization of a professional meeting or the writing of a grant. More interesting to Spinuzzi, and more relevant to the sense of system I mean to explore here, are genre “repertoires,” a concept which recognizes that genres overlap, change over time, and demand improvisation, and that they are not simply means of communication but also ways of mediating social interaction and managing “distributed cognition” (Spinuzzi 4). Most robust of all Spinuzzi’s assemblages is the genre “ecology” (cf. the “information ecologies” of Bowker and Starr), which includes the properties of the genre repertoire but adds that within the framework of the genre ecology, “genres are not simply performed or communicated, they represent the ‘thinking out’ of a community as it cyclically performs an activity” (Spinuzzi 5). According to Spinuzzi, “genre ecologies are constantly importing, hybridizing, and evolving genres,” and in the framework of the genre ecology he sees “genres as collective achievements that act just as much as they are acted upon” (6).
Although I choose to keep the term “system” rather than “ecology,” the notion of a literary genre system proposed in this study resembles Spinuzzi’s notion of a genre ecology in a number of striking ways. Both the mass cultural and the academic-classical systems are means of mediating distributed cognition. Not only do the genres in these systems overlap, change over time, and demand improvisation of their users, but both systems also import and hybridize genres, albeit with quite different temporal rhythms. One can certainly argue that the genres involved are collective actions that act as much as they are acted upon. Most intriguing of all is Spinuzzi’s suggestion that the performance and communication of the genres within a genre ecology represent the thinking out of a collective activity. The mass cultural genre system plays a key role in organizing the production, distribution, and reception of storytelling within the milieu of mass culture, and although the activity of constructing narratives certainly does not exhaust the forms of verbal artistry, eloquence, and persuasion that are mediated by the mass cultural or the academic-classical genre systems, it would be difficult indeed to overestimate or overstate the importance of the collective activities and desires that are mediated and put at stake by storytelling alone.
But mass culture does not organize storytelling for storytelling’s sake. It turns some stories into entertainment, others into news. The collective activities of buying and selling coalesce in mass culture with the rhetorical projects of publicizing and promoting, and this rhetorical-commercial matrix inevitably tangles itself in political relations as well. In what follows, I will argue that the commercial advertisement is the keystone of the mass cultural genre system, and that its calculated instrumentalization of the aesthetic pervades not only narrative production, both high and low, but also political discourse in the form of advertising’s first cousin, propaganda. I will also be arguing, however, that this instrumentalization of the aesthetic is far from determining the quality or the critical power of all the products of the culture industry. I will borrow from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks the distinction between organic and traditional intellectuals in order to compare the 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