Genre

John Frow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317693215
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

This second edition of John Frow's Genre offers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the area. Genre is a key means by which we categorize the many forms of literature and culture, but it is also much more than that: in talk and writing, in music and images, in film and television, genres actively generate and shape our knowledge of the world. Understanding genre as a dynamic process rather than a set of stable rules, this book explores:

• the relation of simple to complex genres
• the history of literary genre in theory
• the generic organisation of implied meanings
• the structuring of interpretation by genre
• the uses of genre in teaching.

John Frow's lucid exploration of this fascinating concept has become essential reading for students of literary and cultural studies, and the second edition expands on the original to take account of recent debates in genre theory and the emergence of digital genres.

1 Approaching Genre

DOI: 10.4324/9781315777351-2

Preliminary Questions

Consider the following piece of writing, displayed recently for a few hours on hoardings in the streets of Edinburgh:

RAPE CASE

JUDGE IN

NEW STORM

This very transient and very simple text, referring to a judge deemed to be handing down lenient sentences, works with a number of ‘deep’ suppositions. It supposes a reader walking or driving in the street whose attention needs to be caught by large and bold lettering, and who knows that these words are on display because they are tied to a story in the newspaper whose name is inscribed on the border of the poster. (The contemporary digital equivalent of the news hoarding might perhaps be the RSS feeds and news aggregators that send out, at regular intervals, a set of news headlines designed, by the use of click-baiting and search-engine optimisation, to entice readers to follow the link to the full news story.) The text assumes that the reader believes the story it tells is factually true, and that it is newsworthy, not trivial; this is one reason why the word ‘storm’ here cannot be read literally, since judges caught in the rain are not news. And it supposes that the reader possesses the information necessary to understand what this ‘case’ was, and hence what the old ‘storm’ was in which this judge was involved. (The reader must also know enough about legal process to know what a judge and a case are.)

Most of the knowledge required to read and understand this text is knowledge about the kind of writing it is: knowledge about its genre. Some of the knowledge required of the reader looks like knowledge about the real world rather than knowledge about texts and genres; but the ‘rape case’ with which the reader is deemed to be familiar is defined by the fact that it was extensively written about in previous issues of the newspaper; the ‘storms’, both old and new, are storms in a newspaper, and the knowledge the reader is expected to have is intertextual: knowledge of earlier reports and earlier controversies.

This piece of writing establishes a set of knowledges, then, by invoking them in a compressed form; like all texts, this one is elliptical, setting out new information on the basis of old information which is not explicitly given but which it supposes its reader to have. (It may be that the reader does not have it, of course: they may not be able to read, they may be a child, or they may just not have heard about the previous story: they may not belong, that is to say, to the discourse community which is invoked and renewed by this hoarding.) In its small way, this text constructs a world which is generically specific. It is different in kind from the worlds performed in other genres of writing, although it will overlap with some of them.

In calling this story a ‘world’ I don’t mean to imply that it is a complete world, the infinitely complex totality of everything that exists. This is a schematic world, a limited piece of reality, which is sketched in outline and carved out from a larger continuum. It has its own coordinates of space and time: a strip of time stretching from the ‘old’ to the ‘new’ ‘storm’, and the geographical and cultural space of Scotland. This world is populated by specific players (judges, criminals, victims, and ordinary people) and infused with a moral ethos which brings with it certain attitudes to these players; for example, that judges are potentially out of touch with reality and so tend to be overly lenient in their sentencing, that criminals should be punished in accordance with their crimes, and that ordinary people have a stake in these issues because they are always potential victims.

The definition of space, time, moral ethos, and players is an effect of the genre which is actualised as story in the hoarding headlines and more fully articulated in the successively more expansive pieces of text (heading, sub-heading, first paragraph, subsequent paragraphs) in the newspaper itself. In addition to this thematic content, the headline is characterised by a number of distinctive formal features which set it apart as a genre: compression, nominalisation, or suppression of verb forms, the use of large and bold type, and a specialised vocabulary in which ‘storm’, for example, means ‘furious controversy’. In another, even more strikingly nominalised headline from a few days earlier – DEATH MUM TRAGEDY PROBE CALL – the word ‘probe’ takes on a meaning (‘enquiry’ or ‘investigation’) that it possesses in few if any other contexts, and the syntax twists itself into a chain of implicit causal linkages which requires a quite specialised knowledge of the genre if it is to be translated into an expanded form (‘there have been calls for an official investigation into the circumstances surrounding the tragic death of a mother of small children’). Note finally that, although the two texts belong to one of the simplest of genres, they nevertheless manage between them to refer, in the course of eleven words, to five other literary and non-literary genres: the legal case, the ‘storm’ (controversy), tragedy, the ‘probe’ (official enquiry), and the ‘call’. These texts are at once generically structured and metageneric in their reference: they refer from one genre to another.

Suppose, though, that I modified the words of the headline to produce a slightly different text – something like:

SCAPEGRACE

RAPE CASE

JUDGE IN

NEW STORM

and that these words appeared not on a street hoarding but in an anthology of poetry. Framed and lineated in this way, they would be read as a poem (of sorts), and we would attend to the sound of its words and the rhythm of its enjambed lines in a way that we didn’t with the first text, where the lineation, the spondaic rhythms, the nearly equal letter count in each line (8–7–8), and the internal assonance (rape case) were disattended, treated as inconsequential. Certain formal features become salient in the new text which would have been disregarded in the hoarding: a dancing rhythm, for example, which generates a certain playfulness in the place of moral indignation.

Yet it is not the formal features in themselves that lead us to make a different generic assignment, although it helps that I have manipulated the text to call attention to them. It is, rather, the different framings of the two texts, their placing in different contexts, that govern the different salience of their formal features, and of all the other dimensions of genre that are entailed in this shift of frame: a different structure of address, a different moral universe, and different truth-effects. Or rather, there is an interplay between the cues given by formal features, such as assonance and rhythm, and the reframing that reinforces their role; and these intertwined effects of form and framing give rise to new patterns of meaning and tone.

Let me summarise the different structural dimensions that have emerged from my discussion of the genre of the headline to this point. In brief, they look like this:

• a set of formal features: the visual structure of the type size and its relation to the page; the organisation of sounds, much more strongly foregrounded when the text is rewritten as a ‘poem’; a syntactic structure which works above all through nominalisation of verb phrases; and a vocabulary which is, in part, specific to the genre of the headline
• a thematic structure which draws upon a set of highly conventional topics or topoi (the lenient judge, the tragically dead mum) and projects a schematic but coherent and plausible world from these materials
• a situation of address in which an anonymous speaker addresses a random and undifferentiated reader passing by in the street. This speaking position brings with it a certain kind of authority and moral force (‘what I say is true, and I know that you share my moral concern’), or what I earlier called ‘tone’
• a more general structure of implication, which both invokes and presupposes a range of relevant background knowledges, and in so doing sets up a certain complicity with the reader
• a rhetorical function: the text is structured in such a way as to achieve certain pragmatic effects: to catch the attention of a distracted reader with sufficient force to persuade them to buy a copy of the newspaper; to reinforce a set of populist moral judgements
• finally, the generic structure of this text is established, and many of these other dimensions activated, by a physical setting which takes on the force of a regulative frame. This frame differentiates the genre of this text from other possible genres, alerts us to the way it works (its rhetorical function), and draws our attention towards some of its features and away from others.

Genre, we might say, is a set of conventional and highly organised constraints on the production and interpretation of meaning. In using the word ‘constraint’ I don’t mean to say that genre is simply a restriction. Rather, its structuring effects are productive of meaning; they shape and guide, in the way that a builder’s form gives shape to a pour of concrete, or a sculptor’s mould shapes and gives structure to its materials. Generic structure both enables and restricts meaning, and is a basic condition for meaning to take place. I take it that genre theory is, or should be, about the ways in which different structures of meaning and truth are produced in and by the various kinds of writing, talking, painting, filming, and acting by which the universe of discourse is structured. That is why genre matters: it is central to human meaning-making and to the social struggle over meanings. No speaking or writing or any other symbolically organised action takes place other than through the shapings of generic codes, where ‘shaping’ means both ‘shaping by’ and ‘shaping of’: acts and structures work upon and modify each other.

At the same time, there are real and perhaps intractable conceptual difficulties involved in thinking about genre. Assuming that we want to do something other than simply list the genres that there are (a list which is potentially endless, not least because new genres are constantly emerging and old ones changing their function), we would have to think about some of the following questions:

• How do we know what knowledge is built into the structure of a genre? ‘Built into’ in what sense? How are these background knowledges organised, and what determines their relevance to the interpretation of a text?
• How is a text assigned to a particular genre? What operations must readers (listeners, viewers, players …) perform in order to generalise from a specific piece of text to the class of which it is a member?
• Are there in fact such well-defined classes, or are the genres of talk or writing or painting (and so on) looser, fuzzier, more open-ended than, say, a mathematical set or a biological species? Is genre just a name for certain regularities of use? What model of generality best captures the way genres operate?
• What guarantees that we correctly recognise this class? Is there such a thing as ‘correct’ genre assignment, or is the process of generalisation looser and more variable? When the form or the function of a genre changes, is it still the ‘same’ genre?
• Conversely, what relations hold between all the members of a class? How many features must they have in common before they count as ‘belonging’ to it? How do we know which features are relevant to a judgement about genre? And is the point of thinking about genre to assign texts to the relevant class, or rather to say something useful about what a text means or how it works?
• Do texts in fact ‘belong’ to a genre, in a simple type/token relation (general form/particular instance), or should we posit some more complex relation, in which texts would ‘perform’ a genre, or modify it in ‘using’ it, or only partially realise a generic form, or would be composed of a mix of different genres?
• What happens when genre frames change, as in the case when a newspaper headline is read as a poem, or when the ‘same’ text is reinscribed in a book as an ‘example’ of a genre? Do texts have a definite and fixed structure, and if they do, to what extent does this limit the ways they can and should be read?
• To what extent and in what way does the setting or frame of a text govern the salience and function of its various elements? If we know the genre to which a text belongs, can we predict what it will be like?
• What exactly is the ‘setting’ of a genre? Is it a matter of physical context, or of something immaterial? Where does its regulative force come from? Is it an empirical fact, or does its power derive from the fact that it is a kind of setting?
• Given the diversity of dimensions along which genre can be defined (formal structure, thematic structure, mode of presentation, rhetorical function …), is it possible to produce a coherent account of the interrelations between them?

This book does not aim to solve the many problems of taxonomy, to produce an overall ‘theory’ of genre, or to elaborate a systematic account of the relations between texts and genres. But I do assume that these are interesting problems, because they go to the heart of the way meaning and truth are structured, circulated, and controlled in a set of complex social relations of discourse. The category of genre is a privileged object of study because it supposes that questions of meaning and truth are always questions of form and of the situation of utterance (these are questions I explore more fully later in this chapter); because it has to do at once with systems and with historical change; and because it ranges over every level of the symbolic order, of our social world and of every other.

The Situation of Genre

Reflection on genres and the distinctions between them is built deep into ordinary talk and writing and into systems for the ordering of texts and talk. We have already seen it happening, spontaneously and without conscious intent, when the two newspaper headlines invoke other genres. It may take the form of explicit guidelines, or of informal reflection by way of ‘rules, silences, gestures, … complaints’ (Giltrow 2002: 202): small hints that warn of boundaries. It is embedded in filing systems, in the organisation of books and journals in libraries, in school syllabuses, in the instructions for filling out tax returns or playing a game, in Powerpoint templates, and in online discussions of list etiquette. It flourishes ‘at the thresholds of communities of discourse, patrolling or controlling individuals’ participation in the collective, foreseeing or suspecting their involvements elsewhere, differentiating, initiating, restricting, inducing forms of activity, rationalising and representing the relations of the genre to the community that uses it’ (Giltrow 2002: 203). Embodied in sorting mechanisms that are continuously reinforced by discussion, by use, even by contestation, generic classification is at once ‘conceptual (in the sense of persistent patterns of change and action, resources for organising abstractions) and material (in the sense of being inscribed, transported, and affixed to stuff)’ (Bowker and Star 1999: 289). This is to say that genre is not just a matter of codes and conventions, but that it also calls into play systems of use, durable social institutions, and the organisation of physical space.

At another level, classification is an industrial matter. It is enacted in publishers’ catalogues and booksellers’ classifications, in the allocation of time slots for television shows and in television guides, in the guidelines and deliberations of arts organisations, and in the discourses of marketing and publicity, together with the whole apparatus of reviewing and listing and recommending that drives so much of film production. The consumers of books, recorded music, television, and film are continually being schooled, and actively school themselves, in the fine-grained details of genre. But this ‘schooling’ translates into difficult and precarious judgements: is this story I’m hearing meant to be serious or joking? Do I read this movie as melodrama or pastiche? Readers and viewers and listeners have constant resort to a kind of folk classification, an unsystematically systematic taxonomy which feels intuitive and yet covers most of the difficult and ambiguous cases they are likely to encounter, and translates an experience of texts into the terms of a naturalised moral order (‘I don’t like Hollywood action movies because they’re so violent’).

‘Folk classification’ is perhaps a pat...