Genre Matters: Essays in Theory and Criticism

Genre Matters:

Essays in Theory and Criticism

Garin Dowd, Lesley Stevenson & Jeremy Strong

First Published in the UK in 2006 by

Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK

First Published in the USA in 2006 by

Intellect Books, ISBS, 920 NE 58th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, Oregon 97213-3786, USA

Copyright ©2006 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1-84150-107-7

Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons

Copy Editor: Holly Spradling

Printed and bound in Great Britain by 4edge, UK.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction: Genre Matters in Theory and Criticism

Garin Dowd

I. Re-framing Genre Theory

Genre Theory: Cultural and Historical Motives Engendering Literary Genre

Brian G Caraher

Objectivity and Immanence in Genre Theory

Paul Cobley

The Genericity of Montage: Derrida and Genre Theory

Jeff Collins

II. Genre in Adaptation and Translation

Ohio Impromptu, Genre and Beckett on Film

Garin Dowd

Translating Genre

Susan Bassnett

Tess, Jude and the Problem of Adapting Hardy

Jeremy Strong

III. Genre in Television Broadcasting and Film Publicity

‘Mixing and Matching’: The Hybridising Impulse in Today’s Factual Television Programming

Richard Kilborn

‘So What Kind of Film is it?’: Genre, Publicity and Critical Practice

Mike Chopra-Gant

IV. Genre, Gender and Fiction

Three Faces of Ruth Rendell: Feminism, Popular Fiction, and the Question of Genre

Margaret Russett

The Historical Novel?: Novel, History and the ‘End of History’

Martin Ryle

Contributors’ Details

Index

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the author, editor and publisher for permission to reproduce ‘Three Faces of Ruth Rendell: Feminism, Popular Fiction, and the Question of Genre’ by Margaret Russett, from Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture XXXV, spring 2002, pp. 143-166 © The University of Oklahoma. We are also grateful to the Research Committee of the Faculty of Arts, Thames Valley University for its financial support.

Preface

Genre Matters is a collection of new essays addressing a topic of established and expanding critical interest throughout the humanities. A key objective of this book is to assert that genre matters in a manner not constrained by disciplinary boundaries. While it does not seek to be comprehensive in the sense of collecting instances of genre-based criticism from all of the humanities disciplines, it is the case that the collection aspires to providing a balanced selection of new perspectives on enduring philosophical and methodological problems in genre theory, contributions to genre criticism based on an application of either a classification in itself, or a perspective linked to methodological predilection, and essays responding to aspects of contemporary cultural transformation. Genre Matters, then, includes new work on genre theory and applications of thinking about genre from Aristotle to Derrida and beyond. The essays focus, variously, on economies of expectation and competency, genre as media form, recent developments in television broadcast genres, translation and genericity, the role played by genre in film publicity, gender and genre, genre in fiction, and the problematics of classification. An introductory essay establishes a context for the diverse contributions in a wide range of thinking about genre in the arts, media and humanities.

The essays grouped together under the heading Re-framing Genre Theory in distinct ways seek to intervene in genre theory. Brian Caraher, in ‘Genre Theory: Cultural and Historical Motives Engendering Literary Genre’ provides a thorough re-articulation of Frye’s ahistorical genre theory in Anatomy of Criticism (1957) along more distinctly social and historical lines. This more historicised model of genre theory, Caraher shows, reflects the pragmatics of specific social groups striving to cope with cultural crises through distinctively socio-linguistic strategies. It is praxis of a different kind that emerges in the discussion by Paul Cobley of expectation as the organising principle of the generic. In his essay, ‘Objectivity and Immanence in Genre Theory’, recalling one consequence of the gesture whereby the critic may give each work the genre it deserves, or that the critic demands that it deserves (in order to neutralise the aberrant uninvited guest of the emergent hors-genre), Cobley sets out to assuage the fears of any genre critics who feel their position challenged by audience-based textual studies, which in his view do not treat the work as an object. It is at the moment of engagement with the work as generic because of its part in an economy of expectation (supply and demand) that genre as a problematic encounters the political imaginary. In ‘Derrida, Genre Theory and the Genericity of Montage’ Jeff Collins pushes genre to the centre of the debate around ‘montage’ in the visual and audio-visual arts. If in terms of its microstructures, for Adorno ‘all modern art may be called montage’ (Adorno, 1997: 155), as a genre term ‘montage’, Collins argues, escapes grounding in ‘classical’ genre theories and exposes the instabilities of generic demarcation. Collins proposes that its condition might best be considered in the light of Derrida’s engagement with genre: a thinking that both radicalises and yet decentres the most prevalent notions of demarcation and classification.

The second section focuses on the conceptually related questions of Genre in Adaptation and Translation. A recent special number of The Yale Journal of Criticism reflects that the word ‘translation’, like the words ‘modernity’, ‘culture’ and ‘literature’, might be ‘so overburdened with meaning as to signify everything yet nothing at all’ (Brantley and Luzzi, 2003: 236). A key question remains: ‘Is adaptation a species of translation, or should one avoid speaking of the two in the same critical breath?’ (236). The combination of a text’s recalcitrance towards generic transposition coupled to a determination on the part of an adapter to transform through that very act of transposition –a kind of treacherous fidelity that is arguably common to any adaptation – provides the focal point for Garin Dowd’s essay, ‘Ohio Impromptu, Genre and Beckett on Film’. Specifically, it is argued that the Beckett on Film version of Samuel Beckett’s play – through a combination of casting and special effects – elides the disjunctions (between ‘genres’ and between ‘characters’) upon which, Dowd argues, the play itself depends. Susan Bassnett’s ‘Translating Genre’ intervenes in the question of translation as a genre category and seeks to ask the question of what happens to the labour of translation within the context of the contemporary and predicted future position of the English language. Bassnett considers how new forms in different eras – such as the sonnet – crossed cultural frontiers through the activity of translation. Similarly, new genres (such as the haiku) have been introduced more recently from other literary systems, whereas others, for example the Arabic qasidah, remain rooted in their source language. Underpinning her essay is a charting of how the perceived status of the source text and its generic characteristics, relative to the perceived status of the translator’s literary system and heritage, determine the process of translation, including the imposition of new generic frameworks and the abandonment of original elements. This section then returns to adaptation in the shape of Jeremy Strong’s essay ‘Tess, Jude and the Problem of Adapting Hardy’. For Strong, to move from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles or Jude the Obscure to the film adaptations they have engendered is never going to be a simple matter of degree of verisimilitude. The ‘genres’ are always apt to refuse one another to some extent. It is an awareness of both the determinant and consequent factors of this ‘refusal’ that motivates Strong’s reading of the ‘between’ that operates disjunctively and constitutively in getting from Hardy to Polanski and Winterbottom and back again. The between here is figured as the site of ideology in Comolli and Narboni’s sense, even if that site is itself refused by both films.

The third section – Genre in Television Broadcasting and Film Publicity – groups together two essays which offer contrasting perspectives on the question of generic hybridity, the one turning its attention to a field that has attracted much attention from Media Studies in recent years – reality television – and the other instantiating an influential methodological stance in relation to genre in film studies. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century a meta-generic distinction is established between the ‘factual’ style of the Lumière brothers and the fantastical visions of Méliès. Nonetheless the distinction between factual and fictional genres was already blurred in early cinema, and in the era that some commentators might still want to call postmodern, the blending reaches its apogee (or nadir depending on one’s view). Richard Kilborn’s essay ‘Mixing and Matching: The Hybridising Impulse in Today’s Factual Television Programming’ outlines the specificity of the ‘hybrid’ genres of ‘reality TV’. His essay explores the manner in which factual television programming has to an increasing extent since the beginning of the 1990s conjoined elements from existing genres into new hybridised formats. The results, he shows, frequently blur traditional distinctions between fictional and factual categories. Mike Chopra-Gant in his essay ‘So What Kind of Film is it?: Genre, Publicity and Critical Practice’ takes his lead from Rick Altman in his study of the use of publicity materials in the post-World War II period. His synchronic approach takes the year 1946 as providing its frame of reference, enabling him to assert that a group of popular Hollywood films, released in what he argues is U.S. cinema’s peak year, is conspicuous in not representing the familiar generic classes employed in film genre theory, classes moreover, he states, which have been assumed to typify Hollywood’s output in the period immediately after the war.

In the fourth section, Genre, Gender and Fiction, the essays intervene in the question of genre in relation to the novel the better to pose questions that in some way resonate with the section on genre theory, and the endeavour of the latter to open genre on to the political. When the philosopher Luce Irigaray refers to the ‘three genres’ (Irigaray, 1991) the fact that she is writing more about the genre that the French word gives us, namely gender, does not for all that make her intervention less crucial for genre studies. In ‘Three Faces of Ruth Rendell: Feminism, Popular Fiction, and the Question of Genre’, the contribution of Margaret Russett writing on the work of Ruth Rendell published under the name Barbara Vine, a confrontation between what Fredric Jameson might identify as ‘expression’ and ‘content’(Jameson, 1981: 161) is staged. The detective and crime genres with which the name of Rendell is primarily linked only came to be associated with the male gender due to a combination of historical and economic factors and the exclusionary force of canon formation and maintenance. In a complex modality of identification with the genres, Rendell as Vine, emerges for Russett as sensitive to the imbrication of matters of genre and gender. Martin Ryle’s ‘The Historical Novel?: Novel, History and the End of History’ is a timely revisiting of the themes of war and cultural memory in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans and Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Postmodern scepticism about historiography, and revaluations of realism by literary critics and theorists, might seem, Ryle suggests, to call into question the viability of historical novels. An evaluation of the genre, he goes on to argue, requires a critical approach capable of addressing their specifically historical ambitions.

In dividing the contributions into four sections the editors have emphasised both conjunctions and disjunctions between the critical voices of the contributors. However, these divisions should not disguise the fact that there are mutual areas of concern evidenced between all the sections. Far from seeking, however, to assert that genre matters in the same way for all of the disciplines touched upon in the individual essays, the collection in its diversity affords a sense of the multiplicity of ways in which considerations of genre inflect and determine our engagement with the humanities.

Bibliography

Adorno, T., Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-Kentor, London, Athlone Press, 1997.

Brantley, J. and J. Luzzi, ‘Introduction: Translation Unveiled’, The Yale Journal of Criticism 16.2 2003, pp. 233-236.

Irigaray, L., ‘The Three Genres’, The Irigaray Reader, M. Whitford (ed.), Oxford, Blackwell, 1991, pp. 140-153.

Jameson, F., The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 1981.

Introduction: Genre Matters in Theory and Criticism

Garin Dowd

Writing in 1925, Le Corbusier, responding to the proliferation of archiving systems in the business environment and to its impact on furniture design in particular, concluded: ‘On s’est aperçu dans l’ordre rigoreux nécessité par les affaires qu’il fallait classer le classement lui-même’ (Le Corbusier, 1925: 76-77 n.1).¹ In identifying the problem of the classification of classification itself, his conclusion serves as a reminder of one of the key considerations faced by a volume such as this. For, by virtue of what it includes, and implicitly excludes, this book proclaims the legitimacy of its own delimiting of ‘genre matters’ themselves. There is in this gesture – of collecting and gathering genre, or items that belong to the question of genre – a manifestation of what Jacques Derrida calls the assumption of a ‘hermeneutic right and competence’.² Genre matters, the title asserts. Aside from acknowledging the continuing importance of genre in diverse areas of the humanities, the present volume also hopes to go some way towards articulating what Gilles Deleuze might call the ‘symptomatology’ of genre. The act of classifying a work of literature as ‘classic’, ‘romantic’, ‘neo-realist’ or ‘nouveau roman’, Deleuze argues, must be attenuated by a commitment to trace the work thus classified to ‘singular symptoms’ or signs rather than general forms (Deleuze in Flaxman, 2000: 368). Rather than be content to seek out a transcendent form which acts as the template for generic works, the task of the critic should be to attest somehow to the ‘matters’ or ‘signs’ operating ‘anonymously’ in them (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 267).

Theorising Genre

Michel Foucault describes the tendency toward classification in terms of ‘the history of the order imposed on things...of that which for a given culture is both dispersed and related, therefore to be distinguished by kinds and to be collected together into identities’ (Foucault, 1970: xxiv). The manner in which Aristotle’s Poetics establishes the problematic of exemplarity, then, remains a pressing question for genre theory today. For, the correlative of exemplarity is exemption or exclusion – the exorbitant or extraordinary to be policed by a logic and pedagogy of conformity, as Aristotle clearly believes:

Let us discuss the art of poetry in general and its species – the effect which each species of poetry has and the correct way to construct plots if the comparison is to be of high quality, as well as the number and nature of its component parts, and any other questions that arise within the same field of enquiry.

(Aristotle, 1996: 3).

Much later René Wellek and Austin Warren express in concise terms a key concern in genre theory from Aristotle through to contemporary interventions such as the present volume. ‘The subject of genre’, they write, raises ‘philosophical questions concerning the relation of the class and the individual composing it, the one and the many, the nature of universals’ (Wellek and Warren, 1949: 357).

The tension between singularity and form as identified by Aristotle, Wellek and Warren, Deleuze, and Foucault (but which as far as genre theory is concerned is first posed by Aristotle) remains on the agenda in the ‘Bulletin’ of the International Colloquium on Genre held at the University of Strasbourg in 1979. The Strasbourg bulletin states that the focus of the colloquium will not be genre theory but the transition from the plural to the singular; specifically the event will explore ‘the singularisation of the concept... [as] this transition was effected most of all by German romanticism’ (Chartin et al., 1980: 235). As it was conceptualised from the perspective of the latter:

The literary work came to be considered as an autonomous process, self-instituting and self-reflexive, entailing the laws of its own production and of its own theory. Hence, genre, in the sense of the literary genre, became the genre of self-generation... in its generalised and self-generating movement, literature seems to imply its own specification.

(Chartin et al., 1980: 236).

If the focus for the Strasbourg bulletin was the singularisation by means of which literature self-classifies, this should not obscure the fact that genre theorists have been much exercised by far less abstract reflexive instances of classification. Gérard Genette has gone furthest in this direction through his enlightening survey of the presence and deployment, to a variety of ends, of autonomous genre indications as evidenced in the titles and subtitles of works of literature.³ In the presence of ‘genre indications’ such as ‘novel’ and ‘roman’ either on the cover or the frontispiece of a volume, ‘no reader can justifiably be unaware of or disregard this attribution’ (Genette, 1997: 94). The novel of course was not one of the genres which Aristotle would have been in a position to identify in the Poetics.⁴ However this genre nonetheless succeeded historically in avoiding ‘flaunting a status Aristotle had never heard of, and contrived to suggest [...] genre status more indirectly by way of parageneric titles in which the words history, life, memoirs, adventures, voyages, and some others generally played a role’ (95). Authors have long had the opportunity to carry out further and more elaborate mischief in their use of genre indicators.

Indeed in the period in which it was held in low esteem the novelistic often uses acrobatic evasions in order to acquire for itself the desired level of respectability. As noted by Schaeffer (Schaeffer in Cohen, 1989: 180), German novelists of the eighteenth century tended to label their works ‘story’ (Geschichte) in order to lean toward such decorum. In England in the same century Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747-51) is not a ‘novel’ but ‘The History of a Young Lady’ (on the historical novel see Ryle). The author does not confine his rhetorical obfuscation to labour on the title. The burgeoning and elaborate editorial apparatus, comprising prefaces, summaries, ‘tables of letters’ and footnotes, over which Richardson fretted as the novel went through successive editions, is of a piece with the desire, remarked upon thus within one of these artefacts (in this case a ‘Table of Letters’):

It is thought fit in this edition, instead of prefixing the whole contents to the first volume (as was done in the last) to subjoin to each its particular contents, which will serve not only for an INDEX of the principal historical matters but as a RECAPITULATION that will enable the reader, without anticipating events, to enter into the succeeding volume with the attention that is humbly bespoke in favour of a HISTORY OF LIFE and MANNERS; and which, as such, is designed for more than a transitory amusement.

(Richardson, 1978, Vol I: 517).

Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67), while far from sharing the propriety insisting in the shape of the results of Richardson’s editorial anxiety, is another well-known instance of the evasion in the title of the genre of the novelistic. This practice of evasion even continues long into the period in which the roman as an acknowledged generic designator moved from the periphery to the centre, namely in the nineteenth century. Indeed while one notable author of this period, Balzac, may steadfastly avoid autonomous genre indications in his titles, the question of paratextual genre identification clearly concerns him – insisting as he does on oeuvre, ouvrage or scène in place of roman (Genette, 1997: 96, n 56).⁵ At the extremes of sombre challenge (a strand exemplified by Maurice Blanchot) and playful mischief (Raymond Queneau) in the twentieth century it is again French authors who come to the fore, with Blanchot (adding and subtracting the designator récit or roman as works go through subsequent editions), Philippe Sollers (Genette’s example: the novel Paradis), Georges Perec (his La Vie, mode d’emploi [1978] is identified on the flyleaf as belonging to the genre ‘romans’) and Queneau all experimenting with the significance (and signifiance) of the presence or otherwise of a genre designation. Queneau in an Editions Gallimard catalogue (to which, being himself a Gallimard editor, one presumes he had a direct input) has his oeuvre divided into three sections: ‘poèmes’, ‘romans’ and ‘*’, thus making of the asterisk the name of a genre. At the opposite extreme is his appropriation of the non-literary genre of ‘le journal intime’ where, under the pseudonym Sally Mara, Queneau ([1950] 1962) writes from the point of view of an 18-year-old Irish student of French who, keeping a journal in her acquired language, details her attempts – following the departure of her erstwhile professeur – to learn Irish. The generic designation here at once presents and absconds into an intricate – and intimate – mise-en-abyme. The author leaves his own name, profession and gender co-ordinates behind and – relocated – ‘falsifies’ an intimate journal which is, in turn, presented as a ‘fiction’ (on generic hybridity see Kilborn and Chopra-Gant).

The example of Balzac is instructive. His refusal of the designator ‘roman’ serves as a reminder of the fact – well documented – that genre designations are imposed retrospectively (see for example Genette, 1992: 1-3; Schaeffer, 1986: 198 and 1989: 175 and Neale, 2000); that if the (aberrant, exorbitant) part which emerges does not seem to find a ready-made host body to which to attach itself, then the genre critic, ‘intoxicated’ by the ‘effervesence’ (Fowler, in Cohen, 1989: 303) of her/his new grouping, will assuredly create a whole in which that part can be lodged and given sustenance (see Cobley).⁶ Part and whole, the relation between the exemplary and the exemplified: the entire logic of exemplarity is laid bare in the genre gesture. If, as Schlegel (1957 [1797-1801]) famously asserted, each poem is sui generis (‘eine Gattung für sich’), that need not prevent the part itself, via a metonymical effort, from the unilateral declaration of its wholeness. This interplay of genus universum and clavis universalis (Beaujour, 1980: 29) continues, in the view of Jean-Marie Schaeffer, to create unease even in the work of Genette. The core problem with the thought of the latter, Schaeffer asserts (in ‘Du texte au genre’), is that it ends up by postulating an ideal text whereby each text has its own genre.

Genre in Contemporary French Philosophy

In the course of his book The Differend: Phrases In Dispute Jean-François Lyotard, while not addressing literary or filmic ‘kinds’ as such, does make an important contribution to genre theory, as first pointed out by Leitch (1991). In a conception which owes much to the notion of the language game in Wittgenstein’s sense (Wittgenstein,