Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

4.1 Sorting texts into types
Unit 4 Recognizing genre
Section 1 Basic techniques and problem-solving

In its most general sense, ’genre’ simply means a sort, or type, of text: thriller, horror movie, musical, autobiography, tragedy, etc. The word comes from the Latin word ’genus’, meaning ’kind’ or ’type’ of anything, not just literary or artistic works. (’Genus’, in fact, is still used to describe a technical sense of type, in the classification of species; and ’generic’ is sometimes used to mean ’broad’ or ’with the properties of a whole type or class’.) There is an obvious convenience in being able to label texts. We can fit any given text into a class that offers a convenient shorthand in which to describe what it is like: it resembles others that people already know. The notion is useful when applied not only to literary works but also to non-literary discourse, distinguishing the typical features of, say, a shopping list from those of food labelling, a menu or a recipe.

For all its convenience, however, the notion of genre presents difficulties.

Is there a fixed number of sorts of text? If so, when and how was this decided, and on what basis? And who will decide for still evolving types, such as emergent styles in popular music, texting or multimedia? A more theoretical question also arises: whether genre is a prescriptive category - grouping features to be incorporated into writing or production of a given type - or whether it is descriptive, generalizing on the basis of agreement among language users.

4.1 Sorting texts into types

Each of the main criteria involved in distinguishing members of one genre from members of another has its own history and implications, and typically they work in combination with one another. It is, however, worth listing them individually before considering complications in how they work.

4.1.1 Classification on the basis of formal arrangement

One basis for classifying texts is their formal properties (see Unit 3, Analysing units of structure). Sonnets, for instance, have fourteen lines and follow distinctive stanzaic and rhyme patterns. At the same time, sonnets are a type of poetry, which in turn exists within a conventional three-way distinction between poetry, drama and fiction - a classification derived historically from Aristotle’s distinction between lyric, epic or narrative, and drama.

Aristotle’s distinctions were primarily, though not exclusively, based on formal properties. Poetry typically involves rhythm and other kinds of sound patterning; fiction does not, at least not necessarily; but it does involve narrative. Drama involves characters speaking and acting in relation to each other. In Poetics (fourth century bc), Aristotle further emphasized one particular, distinguishing aspect of form: who speaks. Lyrics are uttered in the first person; in epic or narrative, the narrator speaks in the first person, then lets characters speak for themselves; in drama, the characters do all the talking.

Although common ever since Aristotle, genre classification on the basis of formal differences can be difficult to sustain. What about verse drama? Or narrative poetry (as in ballads)? Or dramatic monologue (in which a single character or persona speaks, but without any given dramatic context or action)? And the difficulties multiply as soon as multimodal kinds of discourse or other media are taken into account that bring together conventions drawn from more than one medium (say words and pictures).

4.1.2 Classification on the basis of theme or topic

Sometimes subject matter is the basis for genre classification. Texts show thematic affinities by treating the same or similar topics, often topics or subject matter that may be especially important for the society in which the texts circulate (e.g. war, love and marriage, royal succession, independence struggles).

The pastoral, for instance, is concerned with country life; crime fiction is about crime; biography relates events in a life; and science fiction explores possible future or alternative worlds; but in principle it is possible to treat any of these topics following formal conventions of any of the different kinds listed above, or in different moods that will create different kinds of effect on the reader or viewer.

4.1.3 Classification on the basis of mood or anticipated response

What a text is about can overlap with an attitude or emotion conventionally adopted towards that subject matter. Pastoral often implies not just concern with country life, but also a reflective or nostalgic mode. Elegies - although first defined on the basis of the metre they used - became primarily concerned with lamenting deaths (and often take the form of pastoral elegies, delivered in the personae of shepherds). War poetry has a complex history both of jingoistic and anti-war traditions, though both strands tend to explore ideas of patriotism, moral values and loyalty.

A more complex case is that of tragedy. Classical tragedy combines conventions about the protagonist (the ’tragic hero’, who has a character with a crucial flaw) and conventions about the nature of the plot (in which the main character typically suffers and dies). At the same time, tragedy is also defined (at least in Aristotle’s account in Poetics) by its characteristic mode of audience response: what Aristotle called catharsis, or a purging or purification by means of feelings of pity and fear aroused in the audience by the dramatic spectacle. Later developments of tragedy - associated particularly with Seneca (first century ad) in classical Rome, then during the European Renaissance and into the modern period - vary in each of these main respects, while retaining some quality that is still thought to be distinctive of tragedy. Whereas classical tragedy involved kings and princes, for instance, modern tragedy commonly involves relatively anonymous, often socially alienated protagonists; and modern tragedies tend to involve little or no significant action, in contrast with the major political events and destinies of nations that formed the usual concern of classical tragedy (see Williams, 1966). Given the scale of such changes within the genre, it is arguable that what most allows a modern audience to consider a new text to be a tragedy is less its formal properties or subject matter than the mood it creates or audience reaction it evokes.

4.1.4 Classification on the basis of occasion

Literary forms may now seem specialized kinds of discourse, isolated from the rest of society and mainly discussed in literature classes, but for most of its history literature has not been marked off within specified boundaries in this way. Rather, its involvement in public life, including in various kinds of social ritual, meant that many different texts had their origins in composition for or performance on specific kinds of social occasion.

Drama in classical times, for instance, was a ritual involving important cultural customs and had significant social implications for members of the audience. Many later dramatic genres also developed in particular historical contexts and for special kinds of occasion: chronicle plays dealing with English history flourished in the sixteenth century in a period of patriotic fervour following the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588; and in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries masques were a form of court entertainment combining poetic drama, music, dancing and elaborate costumes and staging, and involved participation by the aristocratic members of the audience in the performance (for further discussion, see Unit 25, Ways of reading drama).

Poetic genres have developed in analogous ways. An epithalamium is a poem written for - and proclaimed at - a public occasion, in celebration of a victorious person (e.g. an athlete or a general). The genre of elegy evolved during the seventeenth century into its modern role as a consolatory lament for the death of a particular person. Ballads began as poems to be danced to, but evolved into two divergent traditions: continuing folk ballads in the oral tradition, and urban broadside ballads circulated as single sheets or chapbooks that typically contained popular songs, jests, romantic tales and sensational topical stories.

4.1.5 Classification on the basis of mode of address

Even when dissociated from specific social occasions or performance rituals, texts are still in some cases labelled on the basis of how they address their readers or audience. Some texts involve direct address to a reader or audience (e.g. public speeches, letters and e-mails, news anchoring); others have a specific addressee named in the text but are written so as to be overheard (e.g. odes, dialogue in most stage drama). Sometimes within a single form there is variation between modes of address. Essays addressed to ’Dear Reader’ are interpolated into narratives in some eighteenth-century novels, stepping outside the frame of the imagined world and narrative style of the rest of the text.