What Do We Mean by Genre? A Report from Genology
Carol A. Newsom
Biblical studies has a natural
affinity with genology, the study of genres, but has had a strangely on and off
again relationship with that discipline. For biblical studies the investigation
of genres largely took shape as part of the development of form criticism.
Although Gunkel was in conversation with several disciplines (e.g., classics,
Germanics) that were concerned with the nature of genres, he did not apparently
read literary theory.[1] Despite this, or more likely because
of it, early form criticism included some elements that made it among the most
progressive developments in genre criticism of the time. Form criticism, of
course, was not primarily interested in literary genres but in the oral Gattungen
that came to be recorded in written texts. In this regard form criticism might
be seen as an early investigation of issues similar to those that intrigued
Mikhail Bakhtin in his reflections on “speech genres” and their function in
discourse,[2]
though form criticism’s focus was primarily on the reconstruction of oral Gattungen.
More significantly, form criticism’s attention to the Sitz im Leben of
speech forms was a significant contribution to the sociology of genres. Indeed,
this contribution was acknowledged in the work of Robert Jauss, a leading
figure of the
A new interest in the potential of
genre theory for biblical studies was part of the “literary turn” of biblical studies
in the 1970's and was reflected in the SBL Genres Project, initiated by Robert
Funk. Groups were established to investigate the genres of parable,
pronouncement story, miracle story, letter, and apocalypse. Results from some
of the groups were published in various issues of Semeia, and have been
quite influential in shaping the discussion of these ancient genres.[5]
Since that time, of course, various individual scholars have utilized genre
theory in their research,[6]
but the conversation between biblical studies and genre studies continues to be
sporadic.
In this article I wish to make a brief
and selective review of some of the trends in genre theory and their possible
usefulness in biblical studies. In order to organize this discussion I will
examine the approach and findings of the Apocalypse Group of the SBL as
published in Semeia 14, Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre
(1979), noting how more recent developments in genre theory might change the
assumptions, approaches, and questions to be posed in a study of the genre of
apocalypse. My comments are in no sense a criticism of the work of the
Apocalypse Group. To the contrary, even some twenty-five years later, the
quality of the analysis of this deservedly influential work remains impressive
and its results valuable. But not surprisingly, the framework of genre studies
has changed significantly, so that now one would probably approach the issues
somewhat differently.
Characteristic of genre studies of the
time, the Apocalypse Group frames the task primarily as one of definition and
classification, so that the authors describe their purpose as that of
identifying “a group of written texts marked by distinctive recurring
characteristics which constitute a recognizable and coherent type of writing.”[7]
The metaphors and images that appear in the description refer to the “members”
of the genre, to texts “belonging” to the genre, and to the genre’s
“boundaries.” In several of the chapters grids are presented that list the
various features of form and content on one axis and the names of the
apocalypses on the other axis. Each feature attested in the apocalypse is
marked with an “x.” Over the past quarter century, however, genre theorists
have become increasingly dissatisfied with an approach that defines genres by
means of lists of features. The objections are of several sorts. Definitional
and classificatory approaches are now seen as not representing well the
functions of genre in human communication. As Alastair Fowler remarks, genre
primarily has to do with communication. “It is an instrument not of
classification or prescription, but of meaning.”[8]
Moreover, classificatory schemes are by their very nature static, whereas
genres are dynamic. Thus Fowler memorably objects that the classification
approach tends to treat genres as though they were pigeonholes, when in fact
genres are more like pigeons.[9]
“Mere” classification obscures the way in which every text–however it relates
to similar texts–whether “by conformity, variation, innovation, or antagonism”
will change the nature of the genre and indeed give rise to new genres.[10]
The objections from poststructuralists
such as Derrida are, not surprisingly, even stronger. In characteristically
paradoxical fashion Derrida claims that while “a text cannot belong to no
genre” he would rather “speak of a sort of participation without belonging–a
taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set.”[11]
In my opinion there is much to be said for following Derrida’s lead and
thinking of genre in relation to a text’s rhetorical orientation so that rather
than referring to texts as belonging to genres one might think of texts as
participating in them, invoking them, gesturing to them, playing in and out of
them, and in so doing, continually changing them. With respect to apocalypses,
this shift in how one thinks about texts and genres accommodates better not
only the multigeneric nature of many apocalypses but also their irreducible
particularity. It also allows one to think more flexibly about apocalypses and
the penumbra of related kinds of texts.
Classification continues to have its
defenders in genre theory, but often in a way that quite changes the nature and
purposes of classification from a descriptive enterprise to that of a critical
category devised by the critic for the purposes of the critic. Thus Adena
Rosmarin, in The Power of Genre, argues that genre can be seen as a kind
of intentional category error in which two things that are not the same are
brought together “as if” they were the same. Drawing on art historian E. H.
Gombrich’s dictum that “all thinking is sorting, classifying,” she argues that
it is the critic who draws together different texts for productive purposes.
This is how we “can explain texts that are different–“Composed upon Westminster
Bridge” and “The Windhover”–as if they were the same kind of thing, namely, a
sonnet....We can always choose, correct, invent, or define a class wide enough
to make the desired [category] mistake possible....The initial thesis of a
rhetorical and pragmatic theory of explanation, then, is that the inevitability
of making mistakes is not the bane of criticism but, rather, its enabling
condition. It makes classification possible, and classification enables
criticism to begin.”[12]
Thus for the neopragmatist genre critic such as Rosmarin, the “validity” of a
genre category has to do with its potential for creating new critical insight
rather than with its correspondence to the author’s own sense of genre.
The authors of Semeia 14
initially appear to have some sympathy for such a pragmatic approach to genre,
since they observe that the use of the term Apokalypsis in ancient
manuscripts is “not a reliable guide to the genre.” Rather “an ‘apocalypse’ is
simply that which scholars can agree to call an ‘apocalypse.”[13]
If that is the case, then there would be little objection to a classificatory
approach that defines the genre of apocalypse in terms of a clustering of
features of form and content. Nevertheless, it does not seem to me that the
authors of Semeia 14 intended their clarification of the genre
apocalypse simply to function as a convenience for critics but in some sense to
make explicit the tacit assumptions held by ancient writers about how one
composes an apocalypse. That is to say, I judge that their critical act was not
intended so much as a constructive act as a reconstructive one. If that is the
case, then the limitations of the classificatory approach have to be
addressed.
Even if one wishes to move beyond
classification, however, the fact remains that genre recognition involves some
sort of mental grouping of texts on the basis of perceived similarity. Many of
the recent discussions have struggled to find more apt ways of describing this
process. One of the most popular of these explanations is developed from
Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance. In Philosophical Investigations
Wittgenstein posed the question of what is common to the various things we call
games: “board games, card games, ball games, Olympic games, and so on. What is
common to them all?...If you look at them you will not see something that is
common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of
them at that....We see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and
criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of
detail.–And I shall say: ‘games’ form a family.”[14]
Adapted and popularized by Fowler as a
means of thinking about genre,[15]
the notion of family resemblance does seem to get at aspects of the perceptual
processes by which the mind sorts things that belong together from those that
seem not to belong together. One might, of course, argue that classification by
means of features is simply the systematic and self-conscious application of a
model of family resemblance, but that is not usually the way in which genre
theorists invoke the model. Fowler insists that it is neither “as an inferior
substitute for a class” nor “a mere preliminary to definition.”[16]
It rather makes the “blurred edges” of genres of the essence. Indeed, among its
more radical proponents, the family resemblance model appears to dissolve
category boundaries in a fairly decisive manner. But for that very reason the
approach runs into problems of its own. For example, texts in Group A might
exhibit features a, b, c, Group B might exhibit features b, c, d, and group C
might exhibit features c, d, e, and so forth. One is left with the
uncomfortable conclusion that the family resemblance model could produce a
genre in which two exemplars in fact shared no traits in common! As John Swales
remarks, “family resemblance theory can make anything resemble anything.”[17]
Another attempt to describe how genre
recognition and genre competence takes place invokes the notion of
intertextuality. Jonathan Culler describes the way in which readers make sense
of texts as follows: “A work can only be read in connection with or against
other texts, which provide a grid through which it is read and structured by
establishing expectations which enable one to pick out salient features and
give them a structure.”[18]
One of the appealing aspects of this account is that it suggests the tacit and
unselfconscious way in which people acquire a sense of genre by reading many
texts. Culler’s account also attends to the communicative function of genre as
establishing “a contract between writer and reader so as to make certain
relevant expectations operative and thus to permit both compliance with and
deviation from accepted modes of intelligibility.”[19]
In many respects the practice of the Apocalypse Group could be described as a
highly intentional form of intertextuality, as they read texts closely in
relation to one another in order to cultivate a disciplined sense of genre
recognition. But they did so with a much more limited purpose than that which
Culler ascribes to intertextuality. Culler’s model is not only about genre
recognition but also about the dynamics of genre deviation as part of the
text’s communicative purpose. Culler does not, however, draw the implications
for the history of genres, as Fowler does in his reference to an author’s
practice of “conformity, variation, innovation, or antagonism,” by means of
which the very body of intertexts is changed with each new instance, so that
ultimately the very genre itself may be transmuted into something else.[20]
While the Apocalypse Group did not include an attempt to establish a diachronic
map of the changing nature of the apocalypses, the intertextual approach
described by Culler and Fowler could well be adapted for such purposes.
As helpful as the invocation of
intertextuality can be, it is based on a hypothetical sense rather than an
empirical finding of how readers actually acquire a sense of genre, and in fact
it is in some ways mistaken about the nature of this process. One of the most promising
recent developments in exploring how people do recognize and engage genres
emerges from cognitive science and its radical overturning of our understanding
of how mental categories are formed and function. Since genres are categories
of speech or literature, they function in much the same way as other mental
categories. The key insight of the cognitive theory of categories is that
conceptual categories are not best thought of as defined by distinctive
features possessed by every member of the group but rather by a recognition of
prototypical examples which serve as templates against which other possible
instances are viewed. In a series of experiments in the 1970s Eleanor Rosch
showed that this is how categorical structures function.[21]
For instance, even though robins, ostriches, swallows, eagles, and penguins are
all birds, people tend to treat robins and sparrows as “typical” members of the
category birds and ostriches and penguins as “atypical.” Thus robins and
sparrows are the prototypes for the category “bird.” The category can be
extended to cover other birds that do not conform to the prototype (e.g., those
that are large or do not fly or do not sing), but those that do not closely
resemble the prototypes have a marginal status. Categories are thus structured
with central and peripheral members. Indeed membership in a category may be a
matter of degree.[22]
One of the advantages of prototype
theory is that it provides a way for bringing together what seems so
commonsensical in classificatory approaches while avoiding its rigidity. At the
same time it gives more discipline to the family resemblance approach, since
not every resemblance or deviation is of equal significance.[23] As applied to genre categories, prototype
theory would require an identification of exemplars that are prototypical and
an analysis of the privileged properties that establish the sense of
typicality.
How would this approach compare with
the project of the Apocalypse Group? In fact, it appears that they intuitively
worked with something like a prototype model. Consider the following statement:
There is a general consensus among
modern scholars that there is a phenomenon which may be called ‘apocalyptic’
and that it is expressed in an ill-defined list of writings which includes (on
any reckoning) the Jewish works Daniel (chaps. 7-12), 1 Enoch, 4 Ezra and 2
Baruch and the Christian book of Revelation. The list is generally agreed to be
more extensive than this but its precise extent is a matter of dispute.[24]
The apocalypses named are clearly recognized as
“prototypical,” though a prototype theory of genre would find the dispute about
the extent of the genre category not to be a problem that requires solving by
recourse to a strict definition. Also similar to prototype theory is the
distinction made by the Apocalypse Group between “a few elements [that] are
constant in every work,” a larger number that may or may not be present, as
well elements distinctive to particular works.[25]
Thus there is a distinction between central or privileged properties and those
that are more peripheral.
To this point prototype theory may
sound as though it is not much different than a slightly chastened form of
definition by features. But there are other aspects of prototype theory that
differentiate it from traditional forms of category definition. Categories are
not simply collections of features but also involve cognitive models or
background framework schemata. The difference between the two approaches can be
illustrated by a classic example.[26]
By definition, the concept “bachelor” means “an unmarried adult male.” But no
one really thinks of the Pope, Tarzan, or a Muslim with three wives as a
bachelor. The category is implicitly related to a script-like semantic frame
that understands the course of a typical man’s life as beginning with
childhood, progressing to a period of sexual maturity, and involving (or not)
marriage to one woman. Only in relation to that “idealized cognitive model”
does the category “bachelor” make sense.[27]
The significance of this analysis of
cognitive models for genre is that “elements” alone are not what triggers
recognition of a genre but rather the way in which they are related to one
another in a Gestalt structure that serves as an idealized cognitive model.
Thus the elements only make sense in relation to a whole. Since the Gestalt
structure contains default and optional components, as well as necessary ones,
individual exemplars can depart from the prototypical exemplars with respect to
default and optional elements and still be recognizable as an extended case of
“that sort of text.”[28]
The members of the Apocalypse Group
seem to have anticipated something like the gestalt notion as essential to
genre recognition in their discussion of what they called “the inner coherence
of the genre.” As they noted, “the different elements which make up our
comprehensive definition of the genre are not associated at random but are
integrally related by their common implications.”[29]
Specifically, they note “transcendence” as the key to the relationships,
linking the manner of revelation, the existence of a heavenly world, the nature
of its beings, and the function of apocalyptic eschatology. “There is, then, an
intrinsic relation between the revelation which is expressed in the apocalypse
as a whole and the eschatological salvation promised in that revelation.”[30]
Thus an element like pseudepigraphy, which is surely a central category for the
genre apocalypse, may nevertheless be absent even from one of the prototypical
exemplars (the book of Revelation). Certain “default” features characteristic
of prototypical apocalypses (e.g., resurrection of the dead) do not, however,
appear in all of the Jewish apocalypses (e.g., the Apocalypse of Weeks and
Testament of Levi 2-5) and may be represented by different content in others
(e.g., the way in which revealed knowledge conveys present salvation in Gnostic
apocalypses). The Gestalt
structure (or idealized cognitive model) organizes and authorizes the extension
from the prototypical cases to those that are atypical.
Prototype theory, however, challenges
the classificatory approach in a more fundamental way. Classification, no
matter how nuanced, tends toward a binary logic. Does a text belong or not
belong? Does it belong to this genre or to that one? Thinking in terms of
prototype exemplars and a graded continuum challenges this artificial manner of
assigning texts to generic categories.[31]
In a witty analogy Marie-Laure Ryan describes the existence of both “highly typical” and the “less typical” texts
of a genre as encouraging one “to think of genres as clubs imposing a certain
number of conditions for membership, but tolerating as quasi-members those
individuals who can fulfill only some of the requirements, and who do not seem
to fit into any other club.”[32] Though it may seem to be a mere quibbling
over metaphors, metaphors are quite important in how we think. Thus the
prototype and family resemblance approach to genre seems to me to offer
advantages for how one would think about Jubilees or the
One final aspect of prototype theory remains
to be noted, and it is one that raises the issue of the limits of this
approach. Michael Sinding, one of the strong advocates of prototype theory,
argues that, in contrast to the historically oriented family resemblance
approach as developed by Fowler, prototype theory operates ahistorically. That
is to say one can read the prototypical exemplars out of historical order and
thus without a sense of how one text influences or imitates another “and still
have a good a grasp of the genre, as a genre, as anyone.”[33]
Here, too, the Apocalypse Group works with a similar perspective in that they
define their concern as that of “phenomenological similarity, not historical
derivation.”[34] For the
purposes of genre recognition, this ahistorical approach can certainly be
justified. But developing a sense of the genre is not the only matter to be
pursued. Some of the most interesting issues in genology are precisely those of
genealogy.
The recognition of the historical
nature of genres was a surprisingly late development in genre theory. Until the
emergence of Romanticism most genre criticism treated genres as transcendent or
“natural” forms that were valid, descriptively and prescriptively, across
historical periods.[35]
This explains various attempts to identify biblical composiitons in terms of
classical genres, as, for instance, Theodore Beza’s comparison of Job to
classical tragedy. Romanticism’s new recognition of genres as dynamic entities
historically and culturally conditioned was given its classic expression in Hegel’s
lectures on aesthetics. Not surprisingly, this new historicist understanding of
genres soon found an intriguing model in Darwin’s theory of evolution,
developed most fully in Ferdinand Brunetière’s L’évolution des genres,
published in 1890. Although the evolutionary model has been criticized, it has
received a recent defender in David Fishelov, who argues that a more careful
use of Darwinian analogies can be of significant use in understanding why some
genres are productive at particular periods and then become extinct or
“sterile,” as Fishelov would prefer to describe it.[36]
For reasons that should be evident,
this is an extremely important issue for understanding the genre of apocalypse,
since it is possible to date the emergence of apocalypses (sometime in the
third century BCE) and to date their demise within Judaism (in the aftermath of
the Bar Kochba revolt), though they continued to be composed in Christian
circles, including the Gnostics. Moreover, most of the Jewish apocalypses and
many of the Christian ones can be dated with reasonable certainty, and patterns
of influence often can be traced. The relationships among these documents have
frequently been explored with respect to ideas, motifs, or theological
perspectives, but rarely has the focus been on describing the evolution of the
genre as such.
Another aspect of the historicist
perspective on genre has to do with the relationship of different genres to one
another in succeeding historical periods. The Russian Formalists, in
particular, took up the question of the evolution of genres not as isolated
developments but in relation to the genre system as a whole.[37]
Whether or not one could describe a hierarchy of genres within the
Even though Shklovsky rightly challenged
the simple linearity of the nature of genre change, his own metaphors–the
knight’s move in chess or an inheritance that proceeds from uncle to nephew
rather than from father to son–suggest a rather schematic sense of motivated
directionality. While this may be adequate for an investigation of large scale
changes in genre systems, the change that takes place in particular genres is
generally much less tidy. Fowler describes a process of continuous
metamorphosis in which “every literary work changes the genres it relates to.
This is true not only of radical innovations and productions of genius. The
most imitative work, even as it kowtows slavishly to generic conventions,
nevertheless affects them, if only minutely or indirectly.”[39]
Fowler’s observation might be recast in terms of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of
texts as utterances in dialogical relationship to one another.[40]
Not only is every utterance unique but also must be conceived of as a reply to
what has gone before. Thus every instance of a genre can be understood as a
reply to other instances of that genre and as a reply to other genres, whether
or not self-consciously conceived of as such. The dialogical relationship
carries forward the ever changing configuration of the genre.
Bakhtin, however, recognized not only
the continuous transformation of genres but also their profound conservatism.
In a paradoxical formulation he asserted that “a genre is always the same and
yet not the same, always old and new simultaneously.”[41]
This paradox was contained in what he referred to as genre memory, the fact
that new iterations of a genre always contained archaic elements. “A genre
lives in the present, but always remembers its past, its beginning.
Genre is a representative of creative memory in the process of literary
development.”[42]
Bakhtin’s formulation thus brings together the synchronic and diachronic
elements of genre.[43]
With respect to the problem of the
genre of apocalypse this perspective might be of particular use for
understanding the internal dynamics of late Christian and Gnostic apocalypses,
which stand chronologically far from the beginnings of apocalyptic. But it
might also be a fruitful approach to the issue of the multi-generic nature of
apocalypses. Many apocalypses contain paraenesis, historical resumes, dream
reports, and a variety of other small genres. These, too, have genre memory and
retain archaic elements even as they are newly contextualized and transformed
by being incorporated into apocalypses.
As so often, Bakhtin is more
suggestive than systematic. To understand better the issues posed by the origin
of the genre of apocalypse, its multigeneric quality, and its relation to what
the Apocalypse Group terms “related texts” one might turn again to the
intersection of cognitive theory and genre theory. Cognitive theory has
concerned itself extensively with the mechanisms of mental creativity, most
particularly in the notion of “conceptual blending” in the work of Gilles
Fauconnier and Mark Turner.[44]
Although this is a highly complex and subtle theory, to which I cannot begin to
do justice in this short article, it understands certain forms of creative
thinking as occurring as two or more mental schemata are brought together and
integrated in networks of “mental spaces.” This is, in essence, how we think by
means of metaphors or the way we integrate a figural scenario and a political
scenario in political cartoons. The extension of this theory to genre is only
in its initial stages, and its usefulness remains to be demonstrated.[45]
Nevertheless, it might well provide a more rigorous way in which to
investigate, for instance, how late prophetic vision accounts, parabiblical
narrative, historical resumes, and other such forms are creatively blended to
produce what we recognize as apocalypses. Or, one might use such an approach to
understand the way in which apocalypses and testaments are brought together to
create novel types of texts that occupy the periphery between genres.
A final perspective on genres that
holds particular promise for the investigation of apocalyptic literature comes
from the work of the Bakhtin circle. For Bakhtin and his colleagues genre is
not simply a literary form but a mode of cognition. The metaphor invoked by
Pavel Medvedev was that of genre as a means of seeing: “Every genre has its
methods and means of seeing and conceptualizing reality, which are accessible
to it alone....The process of seeing and conceptualizing reality must not be
severed from the process of embodying it in the forms of a particular
genre....The artist must learn to see reality with the eyes of the genre.”[46]
Medvedev compares the different ways of conceptualizing reality that are
accessible to a graph as opposed to a painting, or to a lyric poem as opposed
to a drama or a novel. Genres are thus ideological instruments in that they are
the expressions of mental structures or worldviews. Thus the exploration of the
genre apocalypse needs to include the question of what kind of thinking
is performed by the genre qua genre.
But how might one approach that
question? Bakhtin’s own work on the genre of the novel led him to privilege the
particular configurations of space and time, the chronotope, as he called it,
as that which defines and distinguishes different genres.[47]
Thus the adventure novel of ordeal has a repertoire of characteristic physical
settings (journeys, voyages, exotic locales, marketplaces, etc.) as well as a
repertoire of characteristic ways of handling time (abrupt meetings and
partings, coincidental arrivals, a series of episodes that are largely
interchangeable in sequence, etc.). By contrast the Bildungsroman has a
quite different repertoire of privileged places and constructions of
temporality. These differences have implications for the kind of characters who
can inhabit these different worlds. Indeed, they are very different ways of
construing reality itself.
Although the chronotope has mostly
been explored in relation to narrative structures, there is no reason why it
would not be fruitful for other types of literature. Apocalypses, in
particular, are deeply concerned with the nature and significance of time and
with the relation of certain privileged spaces to one another and to time. The
distinctive character of the apocalyptic seer and the privileging of apocalyptic
knowledge as a moral and religious virtue are integrally related to the
chronotope characteristic of apocalypses. To go beyond superficial observations
would require considerable detailed work, but the aptness of Bakhtin’s
conception of the chronotope for research on apocalypses should be evident.
One could, of course, go on and on,
but I hope in this short article to have shown ways in which the conversation
between biblical studies and genology can continue to be highly productive.
Although it is always hazardous to attempt to predict the future of an
intellectual inquiry, I suspect that the most creative work in genology in the
next decade will take place at the intersection of the Bakhtinian understanding
of genre and that which is developing in conversation with cognitive theory.
Not only can cognitive theory help refine the intuitive insights of Bakhtin and
Medvedev concerning the cognitive force of genre, but the Bakhtin circle’s
emphasis on the social and historical dimensions of genres can also prevent
cognitive theories from becoming too abstract. Given the rich tradition of the
study of oral and written forms in biblical studies, there is every reason to
think that this discipline can play an important role in the developing
discourse concerning genre.
[1] See Martin Buss, Biblical Form Criticism in Its
Context (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999) 227-28, for a discussion of
influences upon Gunkel.
[2] Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late
Essays (University of Texas Slavic Series 1; ed. Michael Holquist; trans.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).
[3] Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception
(Theory and History of Literature 2; trans. By Timothy Bahti with an
introduction by Paul de Man;
[4] Buss, 251, 255, 259.
[5] See Semeia 11 (1978), 20 (1981), 22 (1981), 29 (1983), 36 (1986).
[6] E.g., Richard A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). See also the review by Adela Yarbro Collins, “Genre and the Gospels,” Journal of Religion 75 (1995) 239-46.
[7] John Collinns, “Introduction: Toward the Morphology of a Genre,” Apocalypse: The Morphology of a Genre. Semeia 14 (1979) 1.
[8] Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982) 22.
[9] Ibid., 36.
[10] Ibid., 23.
[11] Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” in Modern
Genre Theory (ed. David Duff; Harlow,
[12] Adena Rosmarin, The Power of Genre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) 21-22. For a similar approach see Ralph Cohen, “History and Genre,” New Literary History 17 (1986) 203-18.
[13] J. Collins, 2.
[14] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958) 31-32.
[15] Fowler, 41-42.
[16] Ibid., 41.
[17] John Swales, Genre Analysis (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1990) 51. See also the extended examination of the
family resemblance model by David Fishelov, Metaphors of Genre: The Role of
Analogies in Genre Theory (University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 1993) 53-68.
[18] Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975) 139.
[19] Ibid., 147.
[20] Fowler, 23.
[21] Eleanor Rosch, “Cognitive Representations of Semantic
Categories,” Journal of Experimental Psychology (General) 104 (1975)
192-233; “Principles of Categorization,” in Cognition and Categorization
(eds. E. Rosch and B. Lloyd;
[22] Michael Sinding, “After Definitions: Genre, Categories, and Cognitive Science,” Genre 35 (2002) 186.
[23] Swales, 52.
[24] J. Collins,3.
[25] Ibid., 9-10.
[26] Sinding, “After Definition,” 193-94.
[27] The term “idealized cognitive model” is from George
Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the
Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 68.
[28] Sinding, “After Definition,” 192.
[29] J. Collins, 10.
[30] Ibid., 11.
[31] Sinding, “After Definition,” 192.
[32] Marie-Laure Ryan, “Introduction: On the Why, What, and
How of Generic Taxonomy,” Poetics 10 (1981) 118.
[33] Sinding, “After Definition,” 193. Sinding argues against Fishelov and Fowler, who stress the role of literary tradition.
[34] J. Collins, 1.
[35] For an excellent succinct view of the history of
genology see David Duff, “Introduction,”in Modern Genre Theory (ed. D.
Duff; Harlow,
[36] Fishelov, 35-52.
[37] These ideas are developed by Viktor Shklovsky, Theories
of Prose (trans. Benjamin Sher;
[38] Duff, 7.
[39] Fowler, 23.
[40] Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four
Essays (University of Texas Slavic Series 1; ed. Michael Holquist; trans.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981)
281.
[41] Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Theory and History of Literature 8; ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson with an introduction by Wayne Booth; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) 106.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Clive Thompson, “Bakhtin’s ‘Theory’ of Genre,” Studies
in Twentieth Century Literature 9 (1984) 35.
[44] Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending
and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (
[45] Michael Sinding, “Conceptual Blending and the Origins of Genres” (paper presented at the Cognitive Approaches to Literature Session, Modern Language Association Convention, Philadelphia, December 28, 2004).
[46] Pavel N. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary
Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics (trans. A.
Wehrle; Baltimore: