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Genres in Motion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Stephen Owen
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Extract

When we interrogate a concept like genre, there are advantages to beginning with the way we use the word in the common language. In reading a text, we “identify” or “recognize” a genre. If we attempt to define or describe a genre as such, we are engaging in an entirely different order of activity, one remarkably close to legislation or border control. To identify something assumes a paradigm with a limited set of choices. We may identify a given text differently as a “novel,” a “realist novel,” a “pastoral”; we may debate whether a work is a “novel” or a “prose romance”; but in each case we presume sets of categories on various levels of specificity, whether we deploy particular categories to confirm or surprise common expectations in our identification.

Type
Special Topic: Remapping Genre Coordinated by Wai Chee Dimock and Bruce Robbins
Information
PMLA , Volume 122 , Issue 5: Special Topic Remapping Genre , October 2007 , pp. 1389 - 1393
Copyright
Copyright © 2007 by The Modern Language Association of America

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References

Works Cited

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