Law Of Genre Research Articles

Altering eyes: new perspectives on Samson Agonistes

The essays in this volume bring under scrutiny traditional interpretations of what is widely considered Milton's last poem. As such the essays in Altering Eyes are an imitation of the writings they would illuminate, which is to say that they are methodologically adventurous, not merely assimilative, and will do the kind of work that much Milton criticism of recent decades has resisted. Evident in all these essays is a deep alliance, an interdependency between history, literature, and theory. Here philosophy and psychology, international law, economics, ethics, legal theory, aesthetics and biblical hermeneutics, the laws of genre and generic transformations, republican politics, comparative religion all come into play. Because of the paths they pursue and the critical methodologies they deploy, these eleven essays revise not only past criticism but also one another with the title of this volume, Altering Eyes, in its invocation of Blake's wise injunction that the eye altering alters all, serving as their intellectual and methodological, paradigm.

The Transtextuality of Transvestite Sainthood: or, How to Make the Gendered Form Fit the Generic Function

The very thought that I am a woman is enough to make my wings droop.— Saint Teresa, The Life of Saint TeresaThe true nature, genre, of a writing is often far from obvious.…—Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the SaintsThe question of the literary genre is not a formal one: it covers the motif of the law in general, of generation in the natural and symbolic senses, of birth in the natural and symbolic senses, of the generation difference, sexual difference between the feminine and masculine genre/gender, of the hymen between the two, of a relationless relation between the two, of an identity and difference between the feminine and masculine.—Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre”

The Transtextuality of Transvestite Sainthood: or, How to Make the Gendered Form Fit the Generic Function

The very thought that I am a woman is enough to make my wings droop.— Saint Teresa, The Life of Saint TeresaThe true nature, genre, of a writing is often far from obvious.…—Hippolyte Delehaye, The Legends of the SaintsThe question of the literary genre is not a formal one: it covers the motif of the law in general, of generation in the natural and symbolic senses, of birth in the natural and symbolic senses, of the generation difference, sexual difference between the feminine and masculine genre/gender, of the hymen between the two, of a relationless relation between the two, of an identity and difference between the feminine and masculine.—Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre”

Gender, Genre and the Romantic Poets: An Introduction

Reviewed by: Gender, Genre and the Romantic Poets: An Introduction Adela Pinch Philip Cox. Gender, Genre and the Romantic Poets: An Introduction. New York: Manchester University Press, 1996. Pp. 170. $59.95 cloth, 19.95 paper. Philip Cox’s study of key texts by the five canonical Romantic poets—Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Byron—demonstrates the value of genre as a critical concept in poststructuralist, feminist reading. Taking as his starting point Derrida’s “The Law of Genre” (which focuses on genre’s perpetual difference from itself, its implication in other systems of categorization) together with Helene Cixous’s understanding of the ways in which the binary oppositions of sexual difference both cooperate with and undermine other systems of difference, Cox trains his attention on intersections of gender and genre. He seeks consistently to show “how [End Page 545] an attention to the poet’s use of generic conventions can alert us to the shifting—and often conflicting—gender positions within the poetry” (20). The result is a critical approach that can “trace the ways in which generic tensions rehearse the struggles, inequalities and uncertainties of gender and reveal the instabilities inherent in what is apparently the essentially masculine ideology of Romanticism” (12). Cox’s chapters often begin with the Romantics’ contemporaries’ critical reception of the texts at hand, reminding us how central a concept genre was to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century understandings of literature. And his own theoretical approach to genre is often salutary. In his chapter on “Tintern Abbey,” for example, Cox argues that the meanings of genre are not immanent in the text, but are rather constructed by readers as they construe its generic markers within the “conceptual syntax” of a literary history in which genres have meaning in relation to other genres (41). He focuses on the tentativeness of Wordsworth’s own hopes that the reader will consider “Tintern Abbey” an “Ode,” in conjunction with the poem’s many affiliations—in subject matter and tone—with another influential late eighteenth-century genre, the elegiac sonnet. Arguing that by the 1790s the sonnet had come to seem a feminine genre (through its identification with both woman poets such as Charlotte Smith, and with sentimental subject matter), Cox suggests that “Tintern Abbey”s oscillating affiliations with both the elegiac sonnet and the more heroic, “masculine” ode might be mapped onto the poem’s thematic concerns: the relation between Wordsworth’s own earlier self—represented in part by the feminine figure of Dorothy—and his more reconciled maturity. Thus, a historically textured understanding of genre opens up and mediates a reading of the gendered nature of the poem’s conflicts and resolutions. Similarly, in the book’s first chapter, Cox shows how gender structures the use of pastoral in two poems of the 1790s, Coleridge’s “Reflections on having Left a Place of Retirement” and Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s “To Mr. C—GE.” In both of these chapters, Cox documents how “the ambiguities of the cultural constructions of gender in the 1790s are displaced onto the language of poetic genre” (22). The book’s final three chapters—on Keats, Byron, and Shelley—all focus on the writers’ explorations of the tensions between dramatic genres on the one hand, and presumably less performative genres such as lyric on the other. According to Cox, his emphasis on Romantic drama is no accident: it reveals the extent to which all genre—and all genders—are performed rather than given. In the Keats chapter, he rehearses the persistent perception that there was something “effeminate” about the poet’s lyric subjectivity and his aesthetic as a whole (enshrined in, for example, the self-dissolving notion of “negative capability”); he then sees Keats’s turn to dramatic tragedy in Otho the Great as an attempt to overcome his residual resistance to a performative, feminine aesthetic with masculine ambition and fixity. In Byron’s Manfred, the hybridities of the Romantic “closet drama” or “dramatic poem” (Byron’s term) work out the gendered tensions between the “body” of performance, and the “spirit” of lyric, between abjection and individuation, between the doomed pairing of Astarte and Manfred, between Byron’s understanding of humanity as “Half...

Women Enter the Wilderness: Male Bonding and the American Novel of the 1980's , and: Claiming the Heritage: African-American Women Novelist and History , and: The Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchon (review)

Reviewed by: Women Enter the Wilderness: Male Bonding and the American Novel of the 1980's, and: Claiming the Heritage: African-American Women Novelist and History, and: The Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchon Alan Nadel Donald J. Geiner . Women Enter the Wilderness: Male Bonding and the American Novel of the 1980's. U South Carolina P, 1991. 138 pp. Missy Dehn Kubitschek . Claiming the Heritage: African-American Women Novelist and History. Jackson Mississippi: UP of Mississippi, 1991. 203 pp. $27.50 cloth; pb. $14.95. Deborah L. Madsen . The Postmodernist Allegories of Thomas Pynchon. New York: St. Martin's, 1991. 146 pp. $45.00. Given the current scrutiny of the literary canon, it is not surprising that a number of books on contemporary literature deal implicitly or explicitly with the concept of "heritage," for the word implies a genealogy, a set of ideological assumptions, without which a canon could not exist; at the same time, the word also implies the cultural conditions against which an ostensive canon can be critiqued. If one were to claim, for example, that the American heritage is comprised by contributions from men and women of a multiplicity of ethnic, religious, and racial backgrounds, then the body of works that have passed as canonical over the bulk of the twentieth century fail to reflect that heritage. To claim the heritage, then, would be to disclaim the canon. Such disclaimers, however, also unavoidably identify the inherited canon as part of a cultural heritage, for certainly it is possible to inherit misconceptions, prejudices, lies, just as it is possible to inherit property that did not belong to those who bequeathed it, or that was acquired illegally. To contest an inheritance necessarily requires recognizing the fact of that inheritance and of its material consequences, prior to disputing its validity or fairness. Any discussion of canonicity or tradition thus requires recognizing a heritage, whether to be claimed or disclaimed, bolstered or amended. As T. S. Eliot prophetically implied in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," the only way a tradition can be changed is from the inside. Circumscribed as he was by a far more narrow range of literary issues than we find today, Eliot, of course, could not have anticipated the complex political debates over canonicity or the concomitant theoretical debates over the distinction between inside and outside. Eliot would very probably be aghast, moreover, at any connections between his essay and Derrida's essay on "The Law of Genre." And yet their striking similarities—too extensive and complex for treatment here—located in drastically divergent philosophical and aesthetic understandings, highlight the problematics of literary heritage, doubling in on itself as it always must, marking the return of its own otherness as an inside version of its own outside. The books at hand all attempt to engage the relationship of contemporary fiction to its heritage, and as a group they thus reveal some of the difficulties in navigating its problematics. The greatest failure in this regard is Donald Greiner's Women Enter the Wilderness. What the book succeeds in showing is that some white, male authors of the 1980s—Fredrick Busch, John Irving, Larry Woiwode, Ben Greer, Richard Russo, Padgett Powell, and Robert B. Parker—view women's role in society and particularly their relationship to male bonding in a way significantly different from that role and relationship as presented in The Last of [End Page 491] the Mohicans. This is not a difficult argument to make, and Greiner makes it in roughly eight pages per author. The hard part comes in giving significance to his discussion, a task to which Greiner devotes the first half of his slim volume. The tortuous and slippery argument constructed there fails to clarify what constitutes a heritage, what it means to inherit, how we identify the heirs, and what kind of influence an inheritance has (questions that Henry James certainly knew were fundamental to understanding American experience and the art it produces). Greiner deals with white, middle-class male writers because the novels that have "dominated the literary canon and . . . inspired the notions of culture which [D. H.] Lawrence and [R. W. B.] Lewis defined was written by white, middle-class males," and...

Reply to Dominick LaCapra and Richard Harvey Brown

I APPRECIATE comments of Dominick LaCapra and I welcome his invitation to expand upon some of statements made in History and Genre. Mr. LaCapra is quite right in noting that I conceive of genre as a classification system and as a discursive institution. I would add, however, that I conceive of both as expressed in writing. Writing about genre-about classification systems, about institutions and transformations-presupposes writing in a genre or genres. discussions such as mine and his fall within genres of literary theory, of criticism, of dialogues. Such genres undergo changes no less than epic, tragedy, or ode. writing-of whatever kind-is historical in sense that at a particular time certain works are identified as belonging together by an author or critic. And this grouping is made in order to relate such writing to literary, social, and other ends. When such ends become unimportant, writing of a particular genre diminishes or is discontinued while other genres assume importance. Thus in Renaissance serious objections arise to including De Rerum Natura in genre poetry, but during Restoration and eighteenth century Lucretius's georgic poem becomes once again an important literary genre, and thus is included in comprehensive genre poetry. Mr. LaCapra recognizes that my use of genre stresses the interchange between past and present as well as interaction between recurrence and change. In this respect, my own essay is directed at certain shortcomings of critical writings on genre. I take as my example Jacques Derrida's questioning of usefulness of naming and interrelating kinds of writing in Law of Genre. It is a questioning that seems not to realize that an individual text such as Derrida's own Law of Genre is generically related to literary theory, literary criticism, and fictive narrative. A study of genre need not disregard analyses of individual texts; on contrary, my view of genre makes interpretation of texts more precise and their historical interrelations more apparent. The mixture of genres, incorporation, merging, and transformation of genres, may appear a monstrosity to some critics and theorists and an impasse to others, but

The Law of Genre

I will not mix genres. I repeat: genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix them. Now suppose I let these utterances resonate all by themselves. Suppose: I abandon them to their fate, I set free their random virtualities and turn them over to my audience-or, rather, to your audience, to your auditory grasp, to whatever mobility they retain and you bestow upon them to engender effects of all kinds without my having to stand behind them. I merely said, and then repeated: genres are not to be mixed; I will not mix them.