Genre Theory and Historical Change

Theoretical Essays of Ralph Cohen

Ralph Cohen, John L. Rowlett

• Editorial: University of Virginia Press
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813940120
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: Literary Criticism Theory

Ralph Cohen was highly regarded as the visionary founding editor of New Literary History, but his own theoretical essays appeared in such a scattering of publications that their conceptual originality, underlying coherence, and range of application have not been readily apparent. This new selection of twenty essays, many published here for the first time, offers a synthesis of Cohen's vital work.

In these pages Cohen introduces change and continuity as essential modes of discourse in the study of literary behavior, an approach that can produce reliable narratives of literary, artistic, and cultural change. Here Cohen conceptualizes and develops a compelling, innovative theory of genre that promotes a systematic study of historical change, offering rewarding insights for twenty-first-century scholars.

PART II

LITERARY CHANGE AS GENERIC HISTORY

Innovation and Variation

Literary Change and Georgic Poetry

The study of literary history inevitably involves the study of literary change, and any explanation of change must distinguish among the types of change that are possible. These include changes within the work of a single writer, changes among different writers who share common ends, like the Scriblerus group (this can include, as well, changes in what are called “schools,” “movements,” and “periods”), changes in the forms of genres, changes in style, changes in critical interpretation. It is apparent that the term “change” identified with these many different literary situations—and they are not all that one can name—needs to be limited and other terms introduced to make the discussion manageable.

I. THE PROBLEM OF CHANGE

Perhaps the most elementary distinction is one that must precede interpretation of individual works—and has indeed preceded the application of interpretation to literary study. It is the recognition that history must be segmented in order to be comprehensible. Such segments are not arbitrary divisions, but presuppose some rationale such as importance or consequentiality, some natural divisions (infancy, childhood, etc.), or some common stylistic features that can account for the kind and sequence of changes.¹ Whatever the rationale, it is possible to note within any explanation the beginning of a change as well as the continuation of this change. The beginning of a change I call “innovation,” its continuity, development, and extension I identify as “variation.”

This essay was originally published in Literature and History: Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, March 3, 1973, by Ralph Cohen and Murray Krieger (Los Angeles: The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 1974), 1–42, and is reprinted with permission of the publisher. A version of this paper was published in Neohelicon 1–2 (1975): 149–82.

If we grant, therefore, that no matter how scholars deal with literary history, they impose at least these two types of change, the problem is, “How do we distinguish innovation from variation?” How do we distinguish between changes that initiate new styles, periods, movements from those which merely expand upon or extend the received conventions? All poems are, by definition, different in some respects from one another. If we confine our problem to poems within a common form like the eclogue or georgic, and select the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the time for our inquiry, we note a major change in the interrelation of georgic to pastoral. The didactic poem, treated by Sidney with considerable reservations about its function as poetry, became in the second half of the seventeenth century one of the major poetic forms.

The change in the idea of poetry and poetic practice was enacted by writers; this was an empirical phenomenon recognized by contemporary and subsequent critics. What is remarkable is the increased production of poems in a form previously minimized or neglected. Can there be a procedure for indicating why and how this occurs, a procedure for detecting and identifying innovation?

By putting the question in this way, I seek to avoid entanglement in the critical arguments about the problems of tradition and influence. Any attempt to explain change inevitably touches on inherited conventions and direct relation to earlier writers. But tradition and influence—no matter how one deals with them—are subsumed under the more general question of innovation and variation. At what point does a writer so alter a tradition as to begin a new development? How can one distinguish between merely varying a tradition, so that concepts are not changed, and innovating within it so that poetic features become indicative of new ways of conceiving experience?

For this, one criterion is the new relations of poetic features to poetic ends: the speaker assumes a new role, or the rhetorical devices are given new functions, new subjects are introduced, and so forth. With regard to the georgic poem, for example, new perceptual techniques are introduced and new subjects are pursued. The georgic poem not only reveals new functions for poetic features so that these become, in time, new conventions, but the form as a whole urges on its readers a new way of responding. Not only is rationalistic and commercial imagery introduced, not only is perception of nature made primary, but these innovations socialize a form that had up to that time been emblematic.

The georgic form becomes a literary genre for exploring man’s experience, and it leads to prose works such as the novel and periodical essays that embody the exploratory variety of the new georgic. This aspect of innovation cannot be pursued here, but the relation between innovation and originality can be indicated. Within a genre, innovative developments are inevitably original; they introduce new subjects or new functions for old features. Innovations are “original” in the sense that they are new; they should be distinguished from artistically valuable instances of originality. The example of Windsor Forest modeled upon Coopers Hill demonstrates that a variant of an innovation can be artistically original in its use of inherited conventions, and, indeed, can use them in ways undeveloped in the form that sets the new model.

I do not argue that innovation within a genre implies that all features of the genre undergo change. I accept the premise that a literary form is composed of features—rhetorical, metrical, narrative, etc.—that either lead to or imply an aim or end, but the features are related in terms of hierarchical importance. The iambic pentameter couplet used in “To Penshurst” and Coopers Hill, is functionally more prominent in the later than in the earlier poem. It is necessary for aspects of a form to be repeated—whether directly or in terms of family resemblances—if it is to be considered a member of a genre. Thus innovative features do not make a form unrecognizable. The argument that genres are altered by their place in the hierarchy of forms will become apparent, but, more importantly, the role of kinds or genres at any moment in literary history is determined by this relationship.

Here I can merely point out that, since the Renaissance, all generic innovations occur despite the availability of older uses. Virgil and Lucretius are repeatedly reprinted and translated in the seventeenth century, and innovations in georgic poetry occur in spite of these models being available for comparison. So, too, Jonson, Waller, Marvell are available to readers who can recognize the difference between imitation (as variation) and innovation. In this essay I use Denham as the model for innovation in georgic poetry. This is because John Dennis, Pope, and Johnson refer to him as an innovator. For Johnson, Denham is taken as the author of the form; Waller is taken as the author of the smoothness of, the new use of, the couplet. But although innovations that become models for subsequent writers are the achievement of individuals, they do not arise from the self-contained privacy of the poet’s mind but from that mind responding to the experiences that engage it. Waller, Denham, Milton are poets of a revolutionary period, and although they were not on the same sides of the Civil War, they all recognized in art the divergent and even contradictory tensions that ultimately brought on the Civil War. In answer to the question, therefore, “How do we distinguish innovation from variation?” the first criterion is that the poets and, subsequently, the contemporaneous critics that comment upon them identify the innovations.

II. INNOVATION, FUNCTION, AND CONVENTION

When Samuel Johnson wrote the life of Sir John Denham, he declared that Coopers Hill was a new “species of composition” in English literature:

Cooper’s Hill [sic] is the work that confers upon him the rank and dignity of an original author. He seems to have been, at least among us, the author of a species of composition that may be denominated local poetry, of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape, to be poetically described, with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection or incidental meditation.

To trace a new scheme of poetry, has in itself a very high claim to praise, and its praise is yet more when it is apparently copied by Garth and Pope; after whose names little will be gained by an enumeration of smaller poets, that have left scarcely a corner of the island not dignified either by rhyme or blank verse.²

The poem gave Denham the rank of an “original author,” the “author of a species of composition.” To the extent that one literary work is different from any other, it is unique; yet works can be and need to be grouped together. Whenever this is done, it will inevitably be observed that some works introduce new ways of organizing and expressing thoughts in poetry, thereby initiating the possibility of new groupings. Johnson identified Coopers Hill as such a poem and selected as its novel literary features the description of a landscape “with the addition” of two kinds of “embellishments”: “historical retrospection or incidental meditation.”

The selection of these features proved, for Johnson, the basis of a “new scheme of poetry.” They were, for him, new features. But Denham himself saw the poem as a georgic, as an innovation within the received form. And this view was shared by Pope and John Dennis. The latter identified the purpose of Coopers Hill as a form of persuasion or instruction:

And as the Admirable Poet took Occasion before, from the View of St. Anne’s Hill, to give the most important Instruction that can be given to this Island, upon a Religious Account; viz. That we should banish Persecution, and an ill-grounded Zeal, from among us; he takes an Opportunity now, from showing the Prince and the People assembled upon that memorable Occasion, to conclude this Poem, with the most important Instruction, that, upon a Civil Account, can be given, either to Prince or People, viz. That the Prince should avoid intrenching upon Liberty, and the People upon Prerogative; and thus he has in this short, but admirable Poem, given those Instructions, both to the Prince, the Church, and the People, which, being observ’d, must make the Prince Powerful and Glorious, the Church Great and Venerable, and the People a Flourishing and a Happy People; and which, being neglected, must bring universal Misery upon the Nation.³

There can be no doubt that Dennis saw the poem as a georgic, a poem for which Virgil’s Georgics were the model.

But the kind to which Coopers Hill belongs has also been identified as a topographical poem for which “To Penshurst” was the model, as an antecedent of the “greater romantic lyric,” as a pastoral as well as a georgic poem.⁴ The solution to this problem of classification is not a matter of pluralistic choice; it is rather dependent upon a theory of change and innovation. Without an explanation that accounts for the difference between changes that are variants of a type (norm) and those that alter the type (norm), no resolution can be made between classifications that select descriptions and historical retrospection as governing features in contrast to those that prefer references to a country house as primary.

And the issue cannot be resolved by proposing an analysis of Coopers Hill, for such analysis presupposes a decision about the innovative or variational category into which it is to be fitted.

To refer to a “norm” within a genre is to presuppose that the georgic of Virgil, of Jonson, and of Denham constituted a type of verse different from, for example, the lyric or the drama. In this most extended sense, the variants within the class are irrelevant because two different classes or family groups of poetry are being distinguished. But if one sought to distinguish the historical differences within the class of georgic poems, it would then be important to establish a series of “norms” or “types” of georgic. In recognizing innovations that create a new type of georgic, one can refer, as I have, to contemporary critics who give reasons for assuming a new type: new subject matter, new forms of transition, new relations among nature, history, and morality.

But a second argument can be advanced in interpretative terms; not only are new features introduced for new ends, but old features function in new ways by implying resistance to or rejection of former usages. Such rejections are a consequence of discovering or exploring poetic expression for new concepts of experience. Man’s relation to man, nature, and God lead to new poetic expressions and means of organization. These conceptual changes form the basis for a new “type” within the genre as well as for new roles for former genres.

This procedure can be noted in Coopers Hill. It begins as a perceptual poem: the speaker mounts Cooper’s Hill and from it surveys distant St. Paul’s as well as the nearby hills and dales, relating acts and events pertinent to these places. Concluding his reflections on Windsor Castle, he turns to St. Anne’s Hill:

Here should my wonder dwell, & here my praise,

But my fixt thoughts my wandring eye betrays,

Viewing a neighbouring hill, whose top of late

A Chappel crown’d, till in the Common Fate,

The adjoyning Abby fell: (may no such storm

Fall on our times, where ruine must reform.)⁵ (111–16)

The question whether this practice of a survey leading to historical reflections is a Virgilian technique being adapted to Denham’s purposes, or some new implication of the poet’s view of his environment, cannot be answered by a reading which does not interpret the technique as a response to or departure from preceding poetry. The way the speaker proceeds in his transitions, repetitively organizing responses to hills which contrast with each other—the great heritage of Windsor Castle and the destruction of Chertsey Abbey by Henry VIII—cannot in itself explain whether the p...