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11 - Theories of genre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Tilottama Rajan
Edited by
Marshall Brown
Marshall Brown
Affiliation:
University of Washington
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Summary

To argue for a Romantic genre theory may seem surprising. This is the period when William Wordsworth writes that every author must ‘creat[e] the taste by which he is to be enjoyed’, when Madame de Staël praises Germany as opposed to France because its authors ‘form [their] public’, and when Victor Hugo insists that writers be judged by the ‘laws of their personal organisation’ instead of ‘rules and genres’. But as Hugo indicates Romanticism may not so much reject genre as expand its provenance so that it is no longer a system of exclusion. Noting that a work's ‘defects’ are often the ‘condition of [its] qualities’ (p. 107), Hugo questions the equation of genre with achieved form. He also points to what is more systematically theorized in Germany as hermeneutics: the understanding of culturally or historically different texts through a reading that is ‘psychological’ as well as ‘grammatical’ and ‘technical’. Wilhelm Dilthey later links a specifically Romantic hermeneutics to a tradition leading from Leibniz through Goethe and Herder to the post-Kantians, one that sees ‘the shaping structure of the soul behind the appearance’ of natural and cultural phenomena. Instituting a hermeneutics of genre, romanticism replaces earlier pragmatic or formalist approaches with a phenomenological approach to genres as expressing sometimes conflicted states of (cultural) consciousness. Genres are seen not in terms of effects or structural features, but as sites of negotiation between subject and object, inwardness and its externalization, or as (in)adequate embodiments of the ‘Idea’. This essay traces the emergence of ‘philosophical genre theory’ up to its temporary consolidation by Hegel.

Type
Chapter
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The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , pp. 226 - 249
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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