Time and Space

Summary

It is useful to think of genre from a pragmatic point of view. When communicating something to somebody, we follow conventions that determine both form and content. An example is the greeting card. A person we know is getting married, graduating from school, or has lost somebody close to him. Sending the appropriate greeting card will provide us with a medium in which we can express our feelings of sympathy to that person. Though not a literary genre, the greeting card is analogous in the sense that it conveys a message via a specific form and content that are both fixed and adaptable to circumstances. From among the fixed forms of the greeting card, we will choose the option that is best adapted to the situation in which the recipient finds him- or herself. A product of convention, the card also fulfils a social requirement: that of people who want to stay in touch with each other through the expression of different types of feelings. Like genres, moreover, the greeting card is made possible by a society where people, though separated by space, can be in contact with each other by way of a postal system as well as through the services of a publishing industry providing people with a variety of different cards for various occasions.

Literary genres are not different from simpler forms in this respect. Indeed, the premise of this chapter is that the literary genres of medieval Iceland also grew out of social circumstances and evolved as society changed. They provided a medium for communication within society and were made possible by the advent of literacy among laymen and enough economic affluence for books to be produced and made available to major households in the country.

Mikhail Bakhtin's many contributions to our understanding of culture, particularly literature, concern the social nature of language and linguistic production. Any linguistic communication involves at least two participants, i.e. the one communicating the message and the recipient, as well as the context in which the communication occurs. Language and linguistic communications are moreover by necessity community-specific as they derive from and are intended for members of a particular linguistic community.