Genre. Mary Jo Reiff
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for the study and teaching of writing.
Neoclassical Approaches to Genre
In The Fantastic and “The Origin of Genres,” Tzvetan Todorov distinguishes between what he calls “theoretical” and “historical” approaches to genre, a distinction we can see at work in the first two literary traditions we will examine: the Neoclassical and Structuralist. Theoretical approaches define genres based on abstract, analytical categories that critics use to classify texts (Fantastic 13-14). These categories are “theoretical” because, rather than beginning with actual practices and texts, they begin with apriori categories, which are then applied to texts for purposes of classification. An example of such a theoretical approach, which Todorov critiques, is Northrop Frye’s well-known work in Anatomy of Criticism, which classifies literary texts according to archetypal themes and images. Historical approaches, on the other hand, recognize genres as resulting “from an observation of literary reality,” meaning that genres are defined based on an inductive method, whereby critics identify genre categories based on perceived structural patterns in texts, as these texts exist historically within particular literary contexts (Fantastic 13-14). (Todorov’s approach to genre study can be described as historical in this way.) While Todorov does not deny the usefulness of theoretical or “abstract analysis” for the designation of what he prefers to call “types” of genres, he wants to reserve the word “genre” to designate “only those classes of texts that have been historically perceived as such” (“Origin” 198).
What we are calling Neoclassical approaches to genre utilize a theoretical, trans-historical set of categories (or taxonomies) in order to classify literary texts. Such taxonomic approaches start with apriori, macro-categories which are then used to define and clarify kinds of literary texts according to internal thematic and formal relations. As Todorov’s critique suggests, Neoclassical approaches to genre tend to rely on these taxonomies to classify and describe relations between literary texts, rather than examine how genres emerge from and are codified by users within actual contexts of use.
Gérard Genette has described how Neoclassical literary taxonomies have their basis in the famous literary triad of lyric, epic, and dramatic, which is mistakenly attributed to Aristotle but is actually more the product of Romantic and post-Romantic poetics (Genette 6-12).1 According to Genette, “the whole history of the theory of genre [within the literary tradition] is imprinted with these fascinating patterns that inform and deform the often irregular reality of the literary field” (45). This triad has traditionally been used to define the literary landscape: the novel, novella, epic (epical); the tragedy, comedy, bourgeois drama (dramatic); ode, hymn, epigram (lyrical) (49). As a taxonomy, the classical triad has also been used to describe genre change. For example, citing Ernest Bovet’s theory of how the triad evolved naturally to reflect biological and social evolution, Genette writes: “To Bovet, as to Hugo and the German Romantics, the three ‘chief genres’ are not merely forms . . . but rather ‘three basic ways of imagining life and the universe,’ which correspond to three stages of evolution, as much ontogenetic as phylogenetic . . .” (56). So within a given historical era, different periods will mark stages of generic evolution reflecting, say, an “epic world,” a “lyric consciousness,” and a “dramatic milieu” (Genette 62). At other times, the triad has been associated with spatial presence and temporal perspective. Lyric, for instance, is at times defined as subjective, dramatic as objective, and epic as subjective-objective (Genette 38), so that in each formation we have a different notion of presence—each, that is, articulates a different spatial dimension in which a particular literary action takes place.2
As illustrated by the lyric, dramatic, and epic triad, what distinguishes Neoclassical genre approaches is their pursuit of systematic and inclusive rules based on universal validity for classifying and describing kinds of literary texts (Frow 52). As such, we can describe Northrop Frye’s well-known work on genre as Neoclassical insofar as it seeks a transhistorical system of archetypes in order to describe literary texts and their relations. For example, in Anatomy of Criticism, Frye identifies four archetypal mythos: comedy, romance, tragedy, and irony/satire. These narratives are associated with the cycle of the seasons, such that Winter is associated with irony/satire, Spring with comedy, Summer with romance, and Autumn with tragedy. Each of these narratives unfolds within archetypal plots (for example, the movement from one type of society to another within comedy), and each of these plots unfolds within archetypal phases (for example, the movement from complete innocence to tragic flaw to unrelieved shock and horror within tragedy). And the phases themselves are associated with archetypal characters and traits (for example, the quest plot of romance includes archetypal characters such as youthful hero, aged magician, sibylline, monster, nymphs, as well as archetypal imagery such as water, fertility, wooded landscapes, valleys, brooks, friendly companions, and so on). As Frye explains of Neoclassical approaches, “the purpose of criticism by genre is not so much to classify as to clarify such traditions and affinities, thereby bringing out a larger number of literary relationships that would not be noticed as long as there were no context established for them” (247-48).
While Neoclassical taxonomies seek to organize relations between literary texts, the main critique of such approaches has been the way they universalize the ideological character of genres rather than seeing genres as emerging from and responding to socio-historically situated exigencies. In terms of their impact on writing instruction, such attitudes toward genre have helped to authorize the creation of decontextualized taxonomies which have resulted in the use of modes of writing such as the still widely-taught “description,” “narration,” “persuasion,” and “exposition.” These artificial modes isolate form from content and presume that all writing (and associated cognitive processes) can be classified and explained by way of universally applicable categories. At the same time, such an abstract view of genre constrains writing teachers and students from treating genres as dynamic, situated actions, in ways articulated in more recent literary, linguistic, and rhetorical genre studies.
Structuralist Approaches to Genre
While Frye’s archetype-based taxonomy invites criticism such as Todorov’s for being theoretical rather than historical, Frye’s work also provides a way of describing how literary texts do not function as free standing entities, but exist in systematic, intertextual relation to one another within a literary universe. In Anatomy of Criticism, Frye proposes an approach to literary criticism rooted not in ideological perspectives, personal taste, and value judgments, but in a systematic study of literary texts, one that sought a “coordinating principle” through which to identify and describe literary texts as parts of a larger whole (16). In tracing the archetypal patterns (rituals, myths) that permeate and help distinguish literary texts, Frye delineated a complex, intertextual literary universe in which literary texts participate and are defined. All literary texts draw on a finite set of available archetypes, configuring these archetypes according to the genres in which the literary text functions. In this way, Frye’s work can also be seen as operating in part within another of the literary approaches to genre: the structuralist approach.
Structuralist (or literary-historical) approaches understand genres as organizing and, to some extent, shaping literary texts and activities within a literary reality. In Metaphors of Genre: The Role of Analogies in Genre Theory, David Fishelov explores the connections between literary reality and genre theory, explaining that the metaphor “genres are social institutions” is commonly used by literary scholars to describe how literary genres coordinate textual relations, organization, and change. Fishelov, for example, explains that as “a professor is expected to comply with certain patterns of action, and to interact with other role-players (e.g. students) according to the structure and functions of an educational institution . . . , a character in a comedy is expected to perform certain acts and to interact with other characters according to the structural principles of the literary ‘institution’ of comedy” (86). So genres are literary institutions that make certain literary activities possible and meaningful, both in terms of the subjects who participate within them and in terms of the writers and readers who produce and interpret them. Structuralist approaches, thus, examine how genres structure literary texts and contexts within what Todorov calls “literary reality” (Fantastic 13-14).
Whereas Neoclassical approaches to genre use transhistorical categories (such as