Discussing Literary Genre
To define genre is to embark on a conjectural journey within a theoretical minefield. Genre theory has drawn immense debate and contemplation throughout literary history, however, several conclusions have emerged. Genre types are unfixed categories whose characteristics differ considerably among the specific genres; furthermore, the role of literary history plays a significant role in discussions of genre, for genre types evolve and shift with each new literary text. An approach to the discussion of genre, family resemblances, illustrates similar conventions among texts within a genre, but there are significant problems in this approach. There are several ways to discuss genre, and although problems abound in any approach, the subjective nature of the literary experience calls attention to the importance of the interaction between reader and text to provide the final word on genre. Although there is considerable theoretical debate about the definition of specific genres, the conventional definition tends to be based on the idea that texts within a genre share particular conventions of content and form, such as themes, settings, structure and style. However, the nature of genre leads to several problems inherent
in the defining of genres. Certain genres are looser and more open ended in their conventions than other genres and some genres have many conventions while others have very few. Furthermore, literary texts that overlap and mix genres blur the distinction between them. Genres are not discrete systems consisting of a fixed number of list able items. Consequently, the same text can belong to different genres in different countries or times. For example, Latin poets categorized the elegy mainly in terms of its meter, while poets during the English Renaissance regarded the subject matter and tone to be determinate of form. History and culture play a role in the ever changing status of genres, which are difficult to define because the concept encompasses so many different literary qualities and conventions that can be broken or accepted, overlapped or mixed. Such engagement between a literary text and a reader results in the most intriguing and merited discussion of genre. The subjective procedure of defining genre appeals to the relationship between text and reader. Genre provides a framework within which texts are interpreted, and expectations and emotional outlooks are the individual results of reading literature. The expectations prompted by conventions in a literary text play a large role in the discussion of genre. For example, Mavis Gallant's "From the Fifteenth District" cheats the expectation that arises from the first sentence, "[a]lthough an epidemic of hau
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Approximate Word count = 1003
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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