Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007
4.2 Recognizing or deciding what genre a text is in
Unit 4 Recognizing genre
Section 1 Basic techniques and problem-solving
Criteria for distinguishing different genres, we have said, tend to work together rather than independently of one another. Deciding what genre a text is in therefore involves weighing up a number of interlocking considerations. This can make it difficult to judge whether a text fits a category simply by ticking off features in a list of required attributes.
Consider the sonnet, which is often viewed as an exemplary case of a highly codified form. Sonnets consist of fourteen lines grouped as an octave (eight-line stanza) and a sestet (six-line stanza), with ten syllables in each line, a prescribed rhyme scheme, and a change of direction or reversal in the poem’s argument between the two stanzas at a point called the volta. This attractively simple picture has nevertheless to be refined, because of the existence of two main traditions: the Italian (or Petrarchan) style, with its highly patterned, closed and interlaced rhyme scheme (abba, abba, cde, cde); and the English (or Shakespearean) style, with a different rhyme scheme (abab, cdcd, efef, gg) that reshapes the poem as a douzain (twelve lines, consisting of three openrhyme quatrains) plus a final rhyming couplet that in effect shifts the volta to near the end. This still simplified account then needs to be refined further, to acknowledge that each of these traditions allows for variation. The description also needs to incorporate thematic criteria: specialized conventions relating to love, heroic and sacred sonnets, as well as (later in development of the form) to nature sonnets and political and moral sonnets. Even this enriched account of rules governing the sonnet still needs to be refined further before it could function as a complete list of necessary and sufficient conditions of being a sonnet.
Refined, though, in what direction? What is inevitably missing from this account, focusing as it does on formal and thematic conventions, is relevant history, in this case the composition of sonnets almost continuously from the thirteenth century through to the twenty-first century, with complex interaction between sonnet traditions in different languages and different periods.
To view the sonnet form in a way that incorporates social dimensions involves thinking not only of formal rules but also about cultural interaction and influence, with forms evolving through innovations that are based on established conventions but do not respect pre-set boundaries. When Milton writes broadly Petrarchan sonnets with the volta apparently out of place, or when Blake writes a sonnet that doesn’t rhyme, or when John Updike writes a sonnet in which none of the lines after the first even have words, they are not so much failing to follow rules as pushing back boundaries (for discussion of these and other examples, see Fuller, 1972). It is readers, and subsequent writers, who decide whether such experiments are still sonnets - and when a new genre or sub-genre has been created that merits a category of its own.
4.2.1 Genre as an expression of conventional agreement
An alternative to thinking of genre as a list of essential properties is to start instead with the idea that genres may be focused in especially influential texts that serve as exemplary cases. Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex (c.400 bc) is often appealed to as an exemplary tragedy, for example: a sort of benchmark, with other texts defined as tragedies to the extent that they are similar to it. This view of genre, where a prototype is taken to exist and where other texts are judged to be more or less close to the prototype, enables texts to be assigned to genres even when they do not have all the apparently necessary features. It then becomes possible for a text to be a novel even if it has no discernible narrative (as many experimental novels don’t), so long as the text works with or exploits our expectation that it should have.
Even notions of the typical or ’prototypical’ are not fixed, however. Generic conventions come to us as a historical legacy, shaped and reshaped by the changing production and circulation of texts, as well as by changing attitudes to them. What constitutes a typical novel in the early twenty-first century - even allowing for huge variation within the novel form - is not the same as what constituted a typical novel during the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. It is this difference in the genre prototype that makes possible the paradoxical observation that some novelists may be said to be writing highly successful nineteenth-century novels even now, at the beginning of the twenty- first century.