Genre and Kinds of Text

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Genre and Kinds of Text

• Canon and Classic

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• Genre-kinds, categories or types of cultural
  product and process--incluiding texts
• word comes, through French, from Latin genera
  (pl) meanings kinds or types
• love sonnets, absurdist drama, shopping lists,
  disaster movies
• also genres of chats over coffee to job
  interviews, pizza packaging to shopping malls
• broadest--looking at differences and similarities

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• in literature, poetry, novel, drama
• flexible mega-genres, can be broken down into
  sub-genres
• poetry epic, lyric, ballad, sonnet, haiku,
  epigram, free verse, concrete poetry, etc.
• novel picaresque, epistolary, journals, realist
  (social or 'magical'), stream of consciousness,
  etc.

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Tristan Todorov, The Fantastic

• When we examine works of literature from the
  perspective of genre, we engage in a very
  particular enterprise we discover a principle
  operative in a number of texts, rather than what
  is specific about each one of them

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Todorov

• Which brings us to the very heart of the
  fantastic. In a world which is indeed our world,
  the one we know, a world without devils,
  sylphides, or vampires, there occurs an event
  which cannot be explained by the laws of this
  same familiar world. The person who experiences
  the event must opt for one of two possible
  solutions either he is the victim of an illusion
  of the senses, of a product of the imagination
  and laws of the world remain what they are or
  else the event has indeed taken place, it is an
  integral part of reality but then this reality
  is controlled by laws unknown to us. Either the
  devil is an illusion, an imaginary being or else
  he really exists, precisely like other living
  beings with this reservation, that we encounter
  him infrequently.

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Todorov

• The fantastic occupies the duration of this
  uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the
  other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring
  genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. The
  fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a
  person who knows only the laws of nature,
  confronting an apparently supernatural event.

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Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

• The essential element of plot in romance is
  adventure, which means that romance is naturally
  a sequential and processional form, hence we know
  it better from fiction than from drama. At its
  most naive it is an endless form in which a
  central character who never develops or ages goes
  through one adventure after another until the
  author himself collapses. We see this form in
  comic strips, where the central characters
  persist for years in a state of refrigerated
  deathlessness. however, no book can rival the
  continuity of the newspaper, and as soon as
  romance acheives a literary form, it tends to
  limit itself to a sequence of minor adventures
  leading up to a major or climateric adventure,
  usually announced from the beginning, the
  competion of which rounds off the story. We may
  call this major adventure, the element that gives
  literary form to the romance, the quest.

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Frye, Anatomy of Criticism

• melos - medody musical quality
• opsis seeing, vision pictoral quality
• epos oratorial
• paronomasia puns
• mythos plot, narrative What is the story
  about?
• ethos characters and setting
• dianoia theme, What is the point of the
  story?

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Eric Auerbach, Mimesis

• The dramatic occurrences of human life were seen
  by antiquity predominantly in the form of a
  change of fortune breaking in upon man from
  without and from above. In Elizabethan tragedy on
  the other hand the first specifically modern
  form of tragedy the heros individual character
  plays a much greater part in shaping his destiny.

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• g - gé -- génie, générosité, généologie jet,
  jeter to throw -- jetty -- project --
  projectile -- subject -- object je
• The secret of literature is thus the secret
  itself. It is the secret place in which it
  establishes itself as the very possibility of the
  secret, the place it, literature as such, begins,
  the place of its genesis or of its geneaology,
  properly speaking. - Jacques Derrida

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Jacques Derrida The Law of Genre

• Before going about putting a certain example to
  the test, I shall attempt to formulate, in a
  manner as elliptical, economical, and formal as
  possible, what I shall call the law of the law of
  genre. It is precisely a principle of
  contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical
  economy. In the code of set theories, if I may
  use it at least figuratively, I whould speak of a
  sort of participation without belonging a
  taking part in without being part of, without
  having membership in a set. The trait that marks
  membership inevitably divides, the boundary of
  the set comes to form, by invagination, an
  internal pocket larger than the whole and the
  consequences of this division and of this
  overflowing remain as singular as they are
  limitless.

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• Canon comes from Greek meaning 'measuing rod' or
  list reed
• both taken over by early Christianity
• 'Canon law' rules of the Church
• 'the canon' list of books of the Bible seen as
  genuine
• later, also work that Church fathers saw as
  authoratative, orthodox
• distinguised from apocryphal works, fake
• and heretical works, blasphemous, forbidden

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• What about concept of classic?
• writers and their works, first class
• stood the test of time
• contrast to other work, minor, common, popular
• first used as study of Latin and Greek from
  sixteenth century onwards
• so texts identified with 'the ancients' rather
  than with 'the moderns'
• but vernacular writers, Dante, Chaucer,
  Shakespeare, Milton also hailed as classics

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Louis Althusser, "A New Theory of Law" in
Montesquieu Politics and History

• A refusal to subordinate the material of
  political facts to religious and moral
  principles, a refusal to suborninate it to the
  abstract concepts of the theory of natural law,
  which are nothing but disguised value judgements,
  that is what clears away the prejudices and opens
  the royal roads of science. That is what
  introduces Montesquieu's great theoretical
  revolutions. ... "Laws...are the necessary
  relations arising from the nature of things."