Question Of Genre Research Articles

Question of Genre: An Approach to Recognitions of Clement as a Work of Romance

One of the earliest Christian texts, Recognitions of Clement has a highly important place within the Western literature. A work with many questions as to its certain date and author, it is often accepted to be written in the third or fourth century by one Clement, most probably Pope Clement I. In terms of genre, too, the work has aroused some suspicions. Although it is generally taken as a novel, it comprises enough elements to be handled as a piece of romance. As one of the basic components of romance, physical and spiritual quest is a core issue in Recognitions. Furthermore, the concept of love, as an element of romance, has a central role in the story. This article aims to bring a new approach to Recognitions of Clement as a work of romance. By displaying its similarities to one of the romances of the time, Apollonius of Tyre, it is meant to prove Recognitions as a romance through the concepts of quest and love.

Is Genre Enough? A Theory of Genre Signaling as Generative AI Rhetoric

ABSTRACT OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) that excels at generating text and public controversy. Upon its release, many marveled at its ability to author intelligible and generically responsible texts (Herman). Writing about his students’ experiences using artificial intelligence (AI) writing assistants, S. Scott Graham remarks that the results were “consistently mediocre—and usually quite obvious in their fabrication.” Why might this be true? How can an LLM succeed in some respects and fail in others? We argue that the discrepant reactions to human and AI rhetoric are a question of genre, specifically that AI rhetoric is only generic; AI rhetoric represents a new enactment of “writing degree zero” (Barthes) that is disengaged from immediate rhetorical situations and knowledge bases. AI text generators (currently) have a more difficult time simulating the positioned perspectives that human writers bring to situations and communicate to audiences through their genre usage. Drawing on the work of Bakhtin, we treat this problem as a question of generic form and audience addressivity. We describe the interplay of form and addressivity as genre signaling and offer it as a construct for the analysis of AI rhetoric and genre as a cultural form (Miller). Genre signaling (Hart-Davidson and Omizo) describes a feature of communicative behavior as it occurs over time that can help both humans and machines evaluate written discourse as it exhibits certain stabilized formal features. When texts contain specific genre signals at expected frequencies and intensities, it may be recognized as being generally accurate, reliable, trustworthy. Without these signals, a text with a similar topical focus might fail to be taken as credible or useful. In this essay we propose to quantify genre signaling based on three measures: (1) stability, (2) frequency, and (3) periodicity.

A Practice of Literary Palliation: Philippe Forest's L'Enfant éternel.

Philippe Forest's first autofictional novel, L'Enfant éternel (The eternal child), centers on the terminal illness and eventual death of the author's daughter, Pauline. While scholarly attention has been directed toward the role of the text in caring for the child, this essay addresses the absence of care for Pauline's parents and their marginalization throughout her end-of-life hospitalization. Focusing on questions of genre, agency, and legacy, I argue that the text allows for a rewriting of the previous, negative experience of care in a way that incorporates the father into care provision. This corrective rewriting understands literature as palliative in its own right, capable of retaining identity, restoring relationships, and facilitating holistic care that "adds life" to all concerned.

A question of genre: Philip Melanchthon's oratorical debut at Wittenberg University

AbstractThe speech Philip Melanchthon gave on 29 August 1518 at the University of Wittenberg to initiate his professorship is an impressive piece of humanist idealism. Already its title, De corrigendis adolescentiae studiis (On the reform of the studies for the young) reveals his earnest ambitions in introducing reform. Not incidentally, thus, the speech received a lot of attention immediately after its delivery and enjoyed a remarkable popularity even decades after. The speech marks, however, not only an interesting object of study in terms of its content but also in terms of its generic form. Usually labelled as a declamation, this study will revaluate this generic attribution, for the first time, by arguing that the declamation as an academic genre was only introduced into the German academic landscape after Melanchthon's debut in Wittenberg and that De corrigendis adolescentiae studiis does not convincingly fit the standards of declamatory speech in many other respects. It will be shown that the category more apt for talking about Melanchthon's speech is that of the inaugural oration – a genre yet highly underappreciated in modern research on early modern academic oratory.

Coloniality, reframing and diversity in New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, volume 2

The author’s aim in this review article is to highlight a few points that he finds intriguing, especially with regard to the classification of the texts and the question of genre, in the second volume of New Testament Apocrypha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, edited by Tony Burke and published by Eerdmans in 2020. He also reflects on what the process of rereading and reframing the narratives present in these texts entails. Choosing which texts to translate and which ones to read and analyse is a process that needs to be evaluated for various reasons. In conclusion, the author mentions a few areas of research that the volume pushes scholars to examine further.

:Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

:<i>Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature</i>

The Question of Genre and Historical Contexts of the Lviv Prosphonema of 1591

The article updates a long-term discussion about the genre of the early baroque Prosphonema of 1591 (the first known literary work that came out of the Lviv Dormition Brotherhood) and a number of other texts from the end of the 16th to the first half of the 17th century. The gradual formation of scientific understanding of the genre polysemantics of early Baroque works, along with their belonging to the literary and proto-theatrical spheres is traced. At the same time, the article highlights the direct relationship between the panegyric declamation constructions of the Prosphonema to the actual history of the judicial confrontation between the Lviv Dormition Brotherhood and the episcopate in 1590–1591. Such historical contribution may aspire to a separate methodological status in the study of declamatory and panegyric literary forms.

Questions of Genre, Refusal, and Cultural Adaptation in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria

A number of critics have deployed the generic category of magical realism in reading Alexis Wright’s novel, Carpentaria. While accepting that the novel has something in common with this generic classification and a relation to texts and writers associated with it, this essay seeks to show the limitations inherent in reducing Carpentaria to this (or other) generic classifications. While Carpentaria enacts and explores elements of the representation of time and the sacred that are congruent to magical realism, it also refuses to be reduced to either magical realism or genre as such.

Daniel M. Gurtner. Introducing the Pseudepigrapha of Second Temple Judaism: Message, Context, and Significance.

Daniel M. Gurtner. <i>Introducing the Pseudepigrapha of Second Temple Judaism: Message, Context, and Significance</i>.

Counter-narratives

Adrian A. Husain, “Counter-narratives: Wuthering Heights and the Intervals of the Brutalized Self” (pp. 33–56) This essay is concerned with meaning and genre and how these become accessible in our encounter with the critically strange. The focus is on a deconstruction and redefinition, by Emily Brontë in Wuthering Heights (1847), of “reality” as a given of domestic realism and a situating of the “real” in the interstices of Gothic romance and domestic realism. The essay contends that Brontë perceives the question of reality and the related question of genre as initially arising at the level of reading and as a problematic of perception necessarily linked to the esoteric nature of literary discourse itself. That reality, to be inclusive, must allow for the crucial idea of pain and the sentient self is understood. The departure from contemporary fiction is seen as involving a symbiosis and at the same time a radical disjunction between civil and visceral, localized and phantasmagorical, whereby a renewed reality—a new narrative space—is enabled to come about. Wuthering Heights is perceived as moving away, with a view to achieving a realized meaning, from the deliberate construct of language toward an involuntary and fragmented mimetic mode—or a language of the gut—more directly expressive of emotion. The essay argues that the production of a hybridized temporal perspective—or a “Bergsonian” time—is equally part of Brontë’s quest for reality.

Of Bugs and Masks

This essay examines the entanglement of Galin Tihanov’s three regimes of relevance of literature—literature as art, literature as high-minded social engagement, and literature as popular entertainment—in the encounter between a literary theoretician (Tzvetan Todorov) and a science fiction writer (Stanislaw Lem). The overt clash takes place in a polemical article by Lem, in which he attacks Todorov’s theory of the fantastic. Not so obviously, the writer’s revolt against the theoretician imbues Lem’s masterpiece “The Mask.” Kafka’s novella “The Metamorphosis” plays a considerable role in both Lem’s polemic and in his fictional response, raising questions of genre (and its dependence on the market and the entertainment industry), of subjective agency (and its philosophical and political implications), and of artistic ingenuity vis-à-vis despotic power. Although Lem’s reading of Todorov involves considerable misunderstanding, it nevertheless produces fascinating results and exemplifies the impossibility of relegating literary theory to a single regime of relevance.

Translating History

ABSTRACT How can the poetic line translate history? In this article, I trace the methods of translation and transmission that accompanied my writing of an archival poetry collection. Immersed in Mexican Inquisition documents and crypto-Jewish oral histories of the Southwest, the collection interrogates questions of genre, form, empathy, and memory. I argue that historical poetry can foreground the materiality of history, embrace the sensual and strange, and hold at once conflicting narratives of the archive. Poetry’s ability to evade coherence and preserve simultaneities allows the ambiguities of history to surface, mythologies intact. The archival poem brings to bear the rhythms of the past through the language of the present.

GiovanBattistaDellaPorta andFrancisBacon on the creative power of experimentation

This special issue brings to the attention of the scholarly community some of the common features and some of the subtle, but important, differences between Francis Bacon's and Giovan Battista Della Porta's ways of dealing with the reading, selecting, enacting, and recording of recipes. Focusing on questions of genre, intellectual and material context, strategies of research, and strategies of performing recipes, the four papers of this special issue address two major issues. First, they shed new light on the relationship between Della Porta'sMagia naturalisand Francis Bacon'sSylva sylvarum. Second, they show that in the recording of their experimental practices, Bacon and Della Porta depart from the traditional recipe format and discover new avenues of experimental research.

Relevant Context, Genuine Relation: Genre, Form, and Gender in Twenty-First Century The Winter's Tale Criticism

A resurgence of interest in Shakespeare's late romances has scholars once again asking what kind of work is The Winter's Tale. After The Tempest, it has occupied critics over the first two decades of the twenty-first century more than any other in this group of late plays. Besides a variety of new themes, dramatic material, staging challenges, and interpretive cruxes, the question of genre among these plays still puzzles late modern critics as much as it did early Enlightenment critics. What was Shakespeare doing experimenting with genre so late in his career, where elements of tragedy and comedy seem to flow together to create a hybrid form or introduce something new on the stage? This article considers how new approaches to The Winter's Tale parallel new speculations about its genre and decisions about its performance on stage. Considering how the issue of genre operates as a kind of regulative principle over new interpretations in much the same way that stage productions must make the play coherent in a limited physical space for an evening's entertainment, the article makes a case for preserving the work's central and traditionally celebrated wonder.

Intermidialidade na literatura brasileira contemporânea

A questão sobre a influência das práticas em hipermídia na literatura tem emergido a partir de estudos de vários campos, desde a aprendizagem da leitura, com a hiperleitura, até a questão dos gêneros, por exemplo, o retorno das narrativas jornalísticas e do romance-reportagem. Neste trabalho eu trago apenas uma pequena parte de uma extensa pesquisa que vem sendo feita nos últimos quatro anos, em cuja fase atual vem analisando a literatura brasileira contemporânea para identificar tendências, questões estéticas, formais, que possam demarcar alguma mentalidade do nosso tempo, sobretudo essa que diz respeito ao modo como hoje as mídias convergem, numa relação recíproca com as práticas de leitura. Para tanto, analisamos duas obras do corpus da pesquisa a partir dos estudos de Intermidialidade, entendendo as estratégias ficcionais da autoficção e da metaficção como fenômenos intermidiais

THE GOSPEL OF MARK AS EPISODICAL NARRATIVE: REFLECTIONS ON THE 'COMPOSITION' OF THE SECOND GOSPEL

The gospel of Mark as ‘episodical narrative’? The second gospel has remained controversial since Johann Gottfried Herder had classified it as a narrative. Although most interpreters have come to realize that the gospel of Mark is a narrative text, this realization has not always been precipitated in the determination of genre or the method of interpretation. However, if the gospel of Mark is a narrative, it ought to be scrutinized and classified as a narrative text. Yet it is not our intention once again to classify the gospel of Mark in terms of literary history. We are interested in something else, namely, to prove that the gospel of Mark is in fact a narrative text, and to attempt an evaluation of the narrative qualities of this text with regard to the ‘composition’ of the gospel. Even if the question of genre is left open for the time being (see below1), it is quite possible to evaluate the fact that the gospel of Mark is essentially a narrative text, for an analysis of its composition.

Eroticism, Pornography, Love: the Discursive Politics of Reactionary French Scholarship on Sexual Imagery

In this article, I focus on a selection of recent French scholars who insist on a fundamental distinction between <em>pornography </em>(<em>pornographie</em>) and <em>eroticism </em>(<em>érotisme</em>). I delve into these scholars’ descriptions of and justifications for the <em>pornography</em>-<em>eroticism</em> distinction, and explore what is at stake in affirming such a difference. I contend that, far from being a question of genre—or even quality—this is a political distinction, which intertwines with important debates about values and social relations that are present in current French politics and academia. This article examines the justifications used and definitions proposed by scholars in France to (re)assert this distinction, and considers the extent to which the new French claims reproduce some of the political assumptions of US anti-porn feminists, as well as an elitist hierarchy based on ideas of artistic quality. Ultimately this article argues that the key concept that distinguishes <em>pornography</em> from <em>eroticism</em> for these scholars is love, and that they conceptualise love in a highly normative and reactionary fashion in order to elevate eroticism and denigrate pornography. In pursuing their analysis in this way, conservative values are permitted to masquerade as apolitical explorations of genre and aesthetics, without open acknowledgement of the political and moral perspectives they reinforce.

Laurence Publicover. Dramatic Geography: Romance, Intertheatricality, and Cultural Encounter in Early Modern Mediterranean Drama.

The last twenty years or so has seen a wealth of scholarship on early modern English drama and the Mediterranean. Thanks to work by Daniel Vitkus, Benedict Robinson, Jane Hwang Degenhardt, and many others, we now have a clearer sense of how the English conceived of the Ottoman Empire, Southern Europe, and North Africa. Moreover, we have a clearer sense of how this geographical imaginary was reflected and refracted across a range of plays set in the Mediterranean and/or featuring characterizations of Turks, Jews, Moors. While questions of genre have come up in this work—in particular in relation to romance and tragicomedy (see work by Cyrus Mulready and Valerie Forman)—the tendency has been to interpret early modern drama in the context of the Mediterranean world, often by employing nondramatic sources about its places and its peoples. In Dramatic Geography: Romance, Intertheatricality, and Cultural Encounter in Early Modern Mediterranean Drama, Laurence Publicover both complements and counters this tendency by positing a more immediate context: the theater itself. Drawing more from stage history and repertory studies than from postcolonial theory, Publicover argues that playing companies, and especially individual playwrights, who mounted plays set in the Mediterranean drew as much from literary tradition as from contemporaneous events. As he points out, the Mediterranean is a key locus in medieval romance, even though the genre’s geographical bearings are often distorted by its blend of real and fantastical locations. Dramatic romance, which is sometimes associated exclusively with late Shakespeare, but which could credibly be called early modern drama’s foundational genre, integrated medieval romance’s unfixed coordinates. According to Publicover, the attraction for playwrights lay in no small part in the popularity of such tales, and in large part in the ways that playhouses were equipped to stage space fluidly and dynamically—which is to say, in ways that dovetailed neatly (or not so neatly) with the fluid, dynamic geographies of romance. Hence a play like Clyomon and Clamydes (early 1580s) travels between Denmark and Macedonia while taking in allegorical landscapes such as the dragon-dwelling “Forest of Strange Marvels” and the “Isle of Strange Marshes” (67). In Publicover’s reading of the play, geography is made to fit genre rather than the other way around.

Grass’s Die Blechtrommel and Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel: Translating the Picaresque into a German Context after 1945

When Grass was working on Die Blechtrommel in Paris, Paul Celan recommended he read Gottlob Regis’ translation of Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. By drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnival this article analyses Grass’s indebtedness to the French author for the purpose of attacking the political climate of his time. The focus is on body images, Grass’s criticism of the state and the church, instances of misogyny, the human/animal divide, questions of genre and parody, as well as Grass’s critical stance vis à vis post-war political avowals of reason as a stratagem of self-distancing from the irrationalism of the Third Reich. The article demonstrates that hybridity relates to more than the Bakhtinian grotesque body of the protagonist, but is closely linked to mimicry, mockery, and ultimately subversion as key feature of human / animal liminality in the postmodern satirical novel with its roots in the European picaresque.

Refusing Consumption and Querying Genre: A Partial Reading of Marie NDiaye

Even thinking (at) the border of thought (what we might call semi-theory), or writing or speaking words, images or dreams (perhaps semi-fictions),1 inevitably raises questions of genre, in both sen...