Anomalies of Genre: The Utility of Theory and History for the Study of Literary Genres

Abstract

In this commentary I will consider a topical thread that runs through most of the essays comprising this issue of New Literary History and the one before it. The topic is the relation between history and in literary studies. In his contribution to this symposium, Michael Prince cites Ralph Cohen's suggestion that both the notion of (literary) and genres themselves appear to be to theory. Prince goes on to suggest that genre's resistance to theoretical consideration tells us more about than it does about itself. For if, as everyone seems to agree, is an essential element or aspect of literarity, then genre's resistance to implies that itself is inimical to literature and should not, therefore, be brought to bear upon the literary artwork. Indeed, Prince holds that it may be genre's resistance to that generates the endless task of literary interpretation, which has the role in criticism of mediating not only between literature and life but also between literature and as well. If we hold to interpretation and abandon we might be able, Prince tells us, to produce a low-level theory of genre without falling into paradox or self-contradiction. And in his essay on mauvais genres, he provides a brilliant historical account of how eighteenth-century English thinkers, in their attempt to construct a theory of genre, met with a kind of resistance by that left them in a wasteland of and a quagmire of logical contradiction, left them, that is, with little more to do than turn over the question of to the newly emerged field of aesthetics, where the paradoxes it generated could be assimi lated to the idea of the sublime. Thus, Michael Prince's alternative to a theoretical approach to the question of is a history (in this case, of the failure of one attempt to construct an adequate theory) of genre. This is consistent with Ralph Cohen's historical approach to the study of genre. Cohen's idea that is resistant to is not itself a theoretical finding; it is a historical or more precisely a historicist one. It is based on the fact that no one has ever produced a compelling of in spite of the