Contents
Coda Genre as Telescopic Method
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Published:October 2016
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One of the virtues, indeed the pleasures, of genre study is the fact that it allows for telescoping between levels of analysis. Genre study endeavors like much historicist and sociological literary scholarship to tease out the relations between literary forms and broader social and cultural phenomena. This book has argued for a triple-stranded approach to studying genre, as it sits at the intersection of form, history, and the workings of social institutions. Analyzing the variations on the formula or recipe that constitute a genre aims to elucidate the transformations and adaptability of a literary form. The conventions that appear across a cross-section of a genre communicate a common set of assumptions, a shared social logic that helps explain why a succession of writers gravitate to a generic technique at a particular historical moment. And genres serve institutional and marketplace functions, helping producers target audiences and gain strategic advantages in the market, and providing satisfactions for readers. But because any text that utilizes a genre shares features with a wider corpus of texts while departing from them in other ways, genre study allows scholars to strive for claims about a genre’s greater social significance while remaining sensitive to the innovative or idiosyncratic features of individual texts. Genre, that is, appeals to the scholar who wants to reach for the breadth of social significance without abandoning the nuance of close reading. One can zoom in on a novel such as Coetzee’s Foe, which departs from the bulk of minor-character elaborations by maintaining Friday’s silence and opacity, insisting that a contemporary author cannot in any straightforward way allow a previously minor character to speak for himself, that histories of violence and oppression are irrevocable. Or one can attend to the particularities of a book such as Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife, which holds in common with so many texts using the genre a commitment to rendering the unique interiority and rich subjectivity of a central protagonist but is unique in the degree to which it traces the development of that subjectivity to the protagonist’s immersion in the great books of the Western literary tradition. At the same time, because genres overlap with and share characteristics with kindred genres, analysis of one genre opens up insights into a host of related phenomena, vistas onto a wider landscape of genres.
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