Poetics 10 (1981) 109-126 North-Holland Publishing Company

109

INTRODUCTION

ON THE WHY, WHAT AND HOW OF GENERIC TAXONOMY *

MARIE-LAURE RYAN

The attitude toward the concept of genre which one fmds most pervasive in con- temporary literary studies is a skepticism that conceals uneasiness and even dis- couragement. Reluctant to tackle a case that has been open since the beginnings of their discipline, but never definitely resolved, literary critics invoke a number of arguments to bring about its dismissal. One of the many excuses used to avoid wres- tling with the problem of genre is that no consensus has ever been reached on a definition of genre, and that, therefore, the concept is too hopelessly fuzzy to achieve scientific respectability. The prospect for consensus does not look any brighter on the level of individual generic categories than on the level of the family concept: after some two thousand years of enquiry, not so much as one genre has been completely defined (A. Dundes, quoted in Ben-Amos 1969: 175). To make the matter worse, contemporary writers seem to be doing their best to prove the notion obsolete. The popularity of the term text as replacement for traditional generic labels betrays a desire among both critics and writers to deprogram the read- ing public by freeing the act of writing from any kind of convention. A fairly typi- cal attitude among todays literary authors is to claim that when they write, they do not care about genre. Why then should the critic attempt to put a label on their works? Critics echo this objection by arguing that the truly great literary works are those that break away from any established norm. After alI, it is said, it is common knowledge that real genius cannot be harnessed by petty conventions. Those who need the shelter of genre are mostly minor writers (cf: Corti 1978: 132), and why should the critic bother with second-rate products, when he can exert his reading skills on immortal masterpieces?

To the reader who endorses the view of poetics defended in this journal, none of these constitutes a valid argument. Unlike the brand of criticism still prevalent in academic circles, theoretical poetics is not primarily concerned with the master- pieces of world literature, but rather with the whole of the literary institution. It

* I am indepted to Bernard Rollin, Paul Hemadi and JOAM Schick-Baynum who commented upon the manuscript of this paper and offered stylistic advice.

Authors address: 5900 Birch, Bellvue, CO 80512, U.S.A.

0 304422X/8 l/0000-0000/$02.50 0 North-Holland

110 M-L. Ryan /Introduction

cannot therefore turn its back on those minor works whose production can be traced back to a well-defiied generic recipe. The conscious struggle of avant-garde writers against all attempts to classify their work does no more to challenge the importance of genre in literary history than does the alleged uniqueness of the great masterpieces. In trying to escape from the prison of genres, these writers bear indirect witness to the power of that institution, regardless of the success of their attempts to break away. As to the alleged fuzziness of the individual generic cate- gories, it only constitutes a drawback if these notions are used as analytical tools. But if genres are an object rather than an instrument of investigation, if they are more or less given entities themselves needing to be explained, then their fuzziness will no longer constitute a theoretical shortcoming, but a fact to account for. That fuzzy does not mean unworthy of rigorous investigation, as commonly believed, can be demonstrated by the existence of a fuzzy set theory and of a logic of fuzzy predicates. What should not be allowed to remain fuzzy, however, is the notion of genre as class of the individual generic classes, since, as we shall see below, genre itself can only be an analytical notion.

Counterbalancing the literary critics impatience with traditional generic con- cepts, more particularly with the too long established division of literature into the triad epid/lyric/dramatic is a trend in current poetics which promises to give new life to the concept of genre: that of viewing the study of literature not as a self- enclosed discipline, but as part of a global theory of discourse. One of the postu- lates of discourse theory is that language is a diversified entity, a collection of rules with varying ranges of applicability which divide discourse into distinct species. Inasmuch as language use is always specialized, the concept of genre should not only be used in the literary domain, but as Mary Pratt suggests in the present issue, in all realms of discourse. This view is relatively new in English speaking countries, but it has permeated genre studies for a number of years in Germany, for instance in the work of Giilich and Raible (1972, 1977). Interest in textual linguistics awakened much earlier in.Germany than for instance in the United States, and tex- tual linguistics cannot avoid facing the problem of text typology. Another domi- nant trend in literary theory, that of replacing it within a semiotic framework (i.e. within a general theory of communication and signification), speaks in favor of expanding the concept of genre even farther, so that it will also apply to forms of deliberate human communication relying on acoustic and visual media, or to combinations of these with the linguistic code.

But whether the dividing lines of.genre are made to cut through the realm of literature exclusively, or are extended toward all discourse or communication, the concept of genre will only receives firm theoretical basis if the investigator con- fronts the questions which underlie every taxonomical enterprise: Why classify? What is to be classified? How is one to classify? As long as these questions are shunned, discourse about genre will not be theory, but simply criticism. What is most urgently needed in the study of genre is not yet another way to justify tra- ditional divisions, nor another ingenious way to divide literature, discourse, or com-

M.-L. Ryan /Introduction 111

munication, but, as B. Rollin points out in his contribution to this issue, an explora- tion of the logic underlying the very attempt to construct taxonomies of these domains. In what follows I propose to give a general overview of the problems facing genre theory, by breaking the why, what and how of generic taxonomy into more specific and manageable questions.

1. Why classify?

Whether it seeks to establish an order among already given units, or creates these units through the very act of drawing dividing lines across a certain field, every sig nificant taxonomy must be supported by an explicit theory. The function of this theory is either to account for the natural delineation of the units, or to justify the choice of the proposed model over other possible ones. In biological classification, the archetype of all taxonomies, the explanatory principle is genetic and historical. Common ancestry decides which species may be grouped together on the tree of life, and the possibility of breeding together decides which individuals may be grouped under the same species. Inspired by the apparent success of biological taxonomy, nineteenth century scientists attempted historical/genetic explanations in a number of other fields. The work of Brunetiere stands as the classical attempt to introduce evolutionary considerations into the study of genre:

Sans doute la differentiation des genres sopke-t-elle dans Ihistoire comme celle des espkes dans la nature, progressivement, par transition de Iun au multiple . . 11 sagit de savoir quel est le rapport de ces formes entre elles, et les noms que Ion doit donner aus causes encore incon- nues qui semblent les avoir dCgagCes les une des autres. (Quoted in Hempfer 1973: 202.)

For proponents of this approach, the answer to the question why is literature divided into genres is tied to the answer to another question: where do genres come from? One of the most recent attempts to define genres by means of a genetic argument is Todorovs (1976) claim that genres derive historically from speech acts such as lament, praise, or greeting. (This is not the same as saying that genres incorporate speech acts among their ingredients!)

These evolutionary explanations appear as unsatisfactory as the recourse to history to define the units of the linguistic code. What discredits historical/genetic arguments in genre theory is that, as Rollin points out, literature (or discourse, or communication) is in essence a matter of meaning, that is of signification. And when it comes to explaining the functioning of signs, as Saussure has established, their history becomes altogether irrelevant. Just as the speaker of English need not be aware of the fact that th (6) is a reflex of Proto-Indo-European t, or that silZy once meant blessed, the spectator of a greek comedy can participate in the com- municative event without knowing that the genre originated (if Aristotle is right) in phallic song and improvisation. Once we realize that genres are a matter of com- munication and signification, generic taxonomy becomes tied to the same type of

112 M-L. Ryan f Introduction

assumption that underlies current linguistic theories: namely that the object to account for is the users knowledge. According to this assumption, the communi- cative competence. of the members of a culture includes a generic component, through which they are able to handle a variety of linguistic artifacts such as trage- dies, poems, jokes, and advertisements. The significance of generic categories thus resides in their cognitive and cultural value, and the purpose of genre theory is to lay out the implicit knowledge of the users of genres.

2. What classify?

The first decision to make when addressing the problem of getting at the basic units of the proposed taxonomy, is whether these units exist independently of the taxo- nomical scheme, or arise as a result of the attempt to classify. These two possibili- ties correspond, respectively, to the philosophical stances of realism and nominal- ism (as discussed in Hempfer 1973), or to what B. Rollin (this issue) calls natural- ism and conventionalism. Proponents of the conventionalist/nominalist position hold that discourse, literature, or communication can be divided along a number of different lines, and that the task facing the genre theorist is simply to find the most useful way to draw the divisions. An example of a nominalist approach toward literary taxonomy is the one advocated by Bennison Gray (1978: 144):

The initial question should be neither What are the kinds of literature, reully [my italics]? Nor should it be: What do we actually mean when we talk about kinds or genres of litera- ture. The proper question is: Can we conceive of a consistent literary taxonomy that in addi- tion to providing a hierarchical system of either/or distinctions also provides a consistent cor- relation with some central feature of the subject?

The authors example of a classificatory scheme meeting these criteria is a tree representing the various ways to present a narrative (see fig. 1). Like ail nominalist taxonomies, this model avoids the labels in use among the readers, writers and sellers of literature, in favor of a technical metalanguage for the exclusive use of the literary scholar. But it leaves one wondering what central feature of the subject can be explained by its categories. Since the nominalist denies the existence of naturally given or predefmed units, he cannot present his model as an account of the users awareness of already distinct discourse categories. Where then is he going to find criteria of usefulness? Once we accept the assumption that genres have a

Literature

Unmediatnediated A\

Monolog Dialog erial Script

Fig. 1.

M-L. Ryan /Introduction 113

social and cognitive reality, we are pretty much committed to a compromise between the conventionalist/nominalistic and the naturalistic/realistic approaches. As divisions of verbal communication, genres are conventionally defined entities, since they are man-made and not nature-made, and since there is more than one way to divide the realm of verbal communication. Different cultures make indeed use of widely differing systems of genres. But from the point of view of the investi- gator, genres are something given, something existing out there in the minds of the members of a culture. The genre theorist deals with the species of culture, just as the biologist deals with the species of nature.

One of the proponents of a compromise between the two stances is Dan Ben- Amos, who suggested in a pioneering article (1969) that genre theory should be based on the generic labels in use in a given culture. He opposes the ethnic genres yielded by native taxonomy to the analytical categories made up by the specialist for their description and classification, and he warns against the danger of chang- ing folk taxonomies, which are culture-bound and vary according to the speakers cognitive system, into culture-free, analytical, unified and objective models of folk literature (1969: 276). The discrepancy between ethnic and analytical cate- gories may be somewhat blurred to students of Western folklore and literature, since the analytical categories in use among specialists were presumably made up to reflect the Western cultural reality, but it becomes obvious when the same cate- gories are matched against the verbal tradition of a foreign culture.

Yet even if the generic system of every culture should be studied in its own terms, there is no need to give up the possibility of describing its genres by means of cross-culturally applicable concepts. The gap between ethnic and analytical approaches to the problem of genre can be bridged by viewing analytical categories as building blocks for the characterization of genres, rather than as abstract generic concepts in themselves. The analytical categories underlying genre theory will then be elements such as narrative, fictional, exemplary, free vs. bound in form, etc., rather than myth, legend, riddle, efc. These cross-culturally applicable categories may be used as the parameters of universal classificatory schemes, such as in the model proposed by R. Champigny in the present issue [ 11. The usefulness of these schemes resides in their ability to form the basis of cross- cultural comparisons of genres, a task that would remain impossible if one dealt exclusively with ethnic categories. Once abstract analytical features have regrouped actual ethnic genres into broad families, however, we still need to differentiate the

[ 1 ] Another good example of a purely analytical classificatory model is that proposed by Long- acre (1976). He divides discourse into narrative. procedural, behavioral, and exposi- tory, according to the pair of distinctive features + or - chronological sequence and + or - agent orientation. Examples of actual ethnic genres fitting into the four divisions of this model are novel and short story for narrative, recipes and how to books for procedureal, eulogies and pep talks for behavioral, and news reports, scientific writing and essays for exposi- tory.

114 M-L. Ryan / Iwroduction

members of each group. It seems neither feasible, nor even desirable to perform this task without resorting to culture-bound categories. If one chooses to derive basic units from native taxonomy, it would be very unreasonable to ignore the native way of defining these units, which is likely to rely on culture-bound concepts. (Through etymology, native labels often provide the key to native definitions.) Susan Tripps analysis of Sanskrit genre theory provides a strong point in favor of combining universal features with culture-specific concepts in the description of genres. Sanskrit drama, for instance, must be characterized in terms of rosa, a term which captures the intended effect on the audience and cannot be divorced from the social context, just as Greek tragedy must be defied by means of the highly culture-bound concept of catharsis.

The assumption that the elements of a genre theory can be directly derived from native taxonomy is not itself without its own problems. First of all there is no such thing as the native taxonomy. It would be simplistic to assume that a culture makes use of only one set of labels, and that native taxonomy can therefore provide basic units playing the same role as the species does in biological classification. Even if the members of a culture agree on certain broad divisions of discourse, they will base their taxonomy on various levels of abstraction, depending on their communi- cative needs. As Clark and Clark have pointed out (1978: 235) basic categories vary with the experience of the people who name the objects. The most useful level of distinction for a literary critic may comprise classes such as sonnet, ballad, hymn, etc., but for the student who takes literature classes as part of the general requirements for a college degree, the modern version of the classical epic-lyric- dramatic triad, namely novel, poem and play, is more than sufficient. If he chooses to rely on the labels in use in a given culture, the genre theorist should therefore give up the idea of a basic level of genre, in favor of a relativistic model of dis- course taxonomy.

Another problem with native taxonomy, is that the communicative competence of the members of a group may be more diversified than suggested by the labels they use. For instance, Ben-Amos (1969) observes that the Limba of Sierra Leone have only one term for their prose expression - mboro. This term seems to cover such various prose forms as what we would call, somewhat ethnocentrically, folk- tale, riddle, proverb, and historical accounts. Ben-Amos suggests, however, that the Limba people differentiate behaviorally, if not explicitly verbally, betweeen the various forms of mboro. The short forms are used in the context of persuasion, arguments, oratory, and joke, while the longer forms are told in the relaxed atmo- sphere of the evening before retiring. It can be argued that the complementary dis- tribution of the long and short mboro, and consequently the fact that different appropriateness conditions relate to the two forms, constitutes sufficient ground for viewing them as distinct genres. Under this proposal, the systematic clustering of properties - here textual and contextual requirements - provides an elementary discovery procedure for getting at the units of the system of genres. In the above example, the discovery procedure refines native categories without disrupting them;

M-L. Ryan /Introduction 11.5

but there is no guarantee that the results yielded by this method will always be compatible with the native taxonomy.

A third reason that native taxonomy fails to turn up directly the basic elements of a genre theory, is that the metalinguistic vocabulary of a culture usually relates to various aspects of verbal communication. Among the 410 metalinguistic expres- sions found by Brian Stross (1974) in Tzeltal Maya, for instance, we find terms cor- responding not only to what folklorists would call genres, but aiso dialects, regis- ters, ways of speaking, styles, erc. (See Hymes 1974 for a review of these notions.) Moreover, when folk taxonomy provides terms for classes of classes, these may group together forms of discourse along lines entirely different from the above cate- gories. For instance, according to Bauman (1978), the Chamula Indians divide dis- course into ordinary speech, speech for people whose hearts are heated, and

pure speech, according to the analytically reconstrued criteria of increasing for- malism, redundancy, and invariability. The first category is itself undivided (it cor- responds to unmarked everyday speech), the second comprises ways of speaking (speech for bad people, angry speech), speech situations (court speech), verbal games, and a form we may call genre (political oratory), while the third is mostly made up of elements classifiable as genres: Song, prayer, true ancient narrative, jokes, proverbs, etc. But despite this approximative corre- spondance between genre and true speech, the Chamula system of verbal behavior can be entirely described by means of native terms. If he resorts to the concept of genre, the investigator introduces a foreign element in the native taxon- omy. Yet the use of foreign analytical notions is indispensable, if one wishes to make cross-cultural comparisons and work toward a general theory of literature, discourse, and communication.

As a cross-culturally applicable analytical concept, genre must be disentangled from a number of competing notions pertaining to discourse. A way of dividing discourse can be considered theoretically relevant if it fulfdls either one of these two criteria: (1) more than one predictable formal, semantic or pragmatic features is paired with the proposed category; or (2) the category must be recognized as such for proper communication. These two ways to justify divisions of discourse are illustrated, respectively, by baby talk and irony. Baby talk is not only discourse addressed to a baby (pragmatic feature), it is characterized by a number of formal particularities in syntax, lexicon and phonology. The pragmatic category of irony does not pair up with any other regular features in form or content, but a failure to recognize a statement as ironic would lead to the failure of the communicative event. Distinctions of these two types can be found to occur in the following rubrics (the list is far from exhaustive!):

Register: Mens speech VS. womens speech in cultures making this formal distinc- tion; baby talk; legal jargon; written vs. oral style, etc.

speech situarion: Informal gathering, telephone communication, sports broadcast, court testimony, church service, etc.

116 M.-L. Ryan /Introduction

Speech event (the actual verbal exchange occurring in the above situations): conver- sation, telephone dialogue, play-by-play report, testimony, sermon.

Speech acts: assertion, question, command, praise, lament, promise, confession, description, summary, etc.

Verbal modufities (i.e. types of intent, contrasting with the unmarked case of speaking sincerely, seriously, and literally): metaphor, symbolism, imitation, lie, fiction, irony, etc.

Verbal games and speech play: counting rhymes, pig latin, verbal duelling, riddles, cross-word puzzles, etc.

To distinguish genre from the above notions we need first to ask: of what is genre a type? (It makes sense to speak of types of speech acts, speech events, verbal games, ect., but not of types of genre since genre itself means type!) The theoretical rele- vance of the concept of genre thus depends on whether or not, once we have gone through this tentative list of speech notions, there is stilI a candidate left to fill in the empty slot in the expression genre is a type of -. Conspicuously missing in the above repertory, is a class pertaining to the notion of text. If text itself is of theoretical importance, if it needs distinguishing from discourse in general, dis- course theory will need the concept of genre to regroup its varieties.

But what, in turn, is text? Despite the considerable amount of attention devoted in recent years to text grammar and theory, linguists and literary critics have too often been confronted with approximative defmitions, such as this one, proposed years ago by Weinrich (1973: 13): A text is a meaningful sequence of linguistic signs between two breaks of communication. Since all verbal interaction fulfills this condition (communicative events always begin and end with silence), Weinrichs definition fails to answer the theoretical need for distinguishing texts as utterances composed according to a general plan and governed by global conditions of coherence (what T.A. van Dijk (1977) would call a macro-structure), from direc- tion-switching forms of verbal expression governed only by micro-level constraints. Unlike the more general concept of discourse, which may apply to open-ended utterances, text is a self-contained entity whose ending cannot be dictated by an external event. When rain interrupts a non-textual form of discourse, such as a con- versation, the already exchanged words still qualify as conversation, but when the death of the author interrupts the writing of a text such as novel or essay, what remains is a fragment of novel or essay, a discourse but not a text. Another condi- tion for a sequence of linguistic signs to constitute a text, I would suggest, is that its unity must be brought to light through some framing device. Frames can be pro- vided by titles and blank spaces, by introductory and concluding formulae (do you know the one about as a way to introduce a joke, dixi as a way to conclude a public speech in the antiquity), by non-formulaistic introductory and concluding remarks (to illustrate this point I will tell you a story; this story tells US that . . .); or simply by the material object through which the text is transmitted (book for a novel, billboard for an advertisement). These framing devices make

M.-L. Ryan / Irrtroduction 117

texts potentially detachable from a verbal context, a phenomenon that Weinrichs definition would disallow, text corresponding for him to the entire exchange, or if change of speaker counts as break in communication, to the entire turn of a single speaker. Texts may thus appear in the context of a non-textual speech event (a joke told in a conversation, a tall tale during a drinking party), or may be part of another text (a parable in a sermon, an anecdote in a political speech). It seems in fact that anecdotes and parables cannot be used in any way other than embedded in a verbal context. This would make texts self-contained and detachable, but not necessarily independent as a discourse unit.

Once we define genre as a type of text, its relationship to the above categories becomes much less problematic. Since speech events may or may not involve the transmission of a textual utterance, genre and speech event will sometimes fall together (sermon, political speech) and sometimes remain distinct (interview, chat- ting, telephone conversation). The notion of speech situation pairs up with the notion of genre whenever a type of text is used on a specific occasion, such as a ser- mon during church services and a toast during a banquet. Pragmatic rules are then needed to hook up the genre with the speech situation. The relationship between types of texts and types of verbal games is one of overlap: some verbal games make use of texts (counting rhymes, riddles), while others consist of open-ended dis- course (verbal duelling, speaking in pig latin). And finally registers, speech acts and verbal modalities relate to genre as possible ingredients: texts of a given genre may require a specific register (legal jargon in laws), count as a specific speech act (ques- tion/answer in riddles), or involve a specific modality (fiction in novels, imitation in pastiches, irony in satire). These remarks on the situation of genre within discourse theory, and on the role of other discourse notions within genre theory remain of course very sketchy. Any advance in the investigation of these domains will require a sharpening, not only of the concepts of genre and text, but of the whole array of rival discourse notions.

3. How classify?

Once a decision has been made as to how to retrieve the elements of a genre theory, the next problem to be addressed is: what to do with these units? How genres should be described and classified depends, primarily, on what type of sets they constitute. Three possibilities must be taken into consideration. First of all generic labels could belong to the same semantic category as geometrical predicates such as round or square. These predicates are either entirely true or false of an object, and the set they define draws a clear-cut line between members and non-members. If generic labels belong to this type of predicates, each genre will be defined by a hard core of necessary and sufficient conditions, and there wilI be almost unanimous agreement among the members of a culture as to which texts belong to which cate-

gory.

118 M-L. Ryan / introduction

The second possibility is that generic labels are fuzzy predicates. According to logicians, a fuzzy predicate is one whose truth or falsity is relative to some standard and is, therefore, a matter of degree. Small, rich, heavy fit in this category. If genre labels are fuzzy predicates, each generic category will comprise highly typi- cal and less typical members. Unlike the first possibility this view is compatible with disagreements among the users of generic labels. But these disagreements will not entail a lack of consensus over the genres definition. Just as we all know what tall means, but may disagree as to whether or not such and such can be described as tall, so we may share a definition of the tragic, but disagree when it comes to calling a certain play a tragedy.

A third possibility is that generic categories constitute what Wittgenstein would call family-resemblance notions. Under this proposal, each genre would be asso- ciated - as Mary Pratt suggests in her contribution -with a group of characteris- tics, only some of which may be present in a given member of the genre. Once again, there would be highly typical and less typical members of every genre, but the less typical ones would differ qualitatively and in a variety of different ways from the most typical ones, rather than quantitatively along a single dimension. This proposal would explain disagreements among the users of generic labels in the same way a semantic theory might explain possible variations in the use of such familiar terms as table or chair. You and I may roughly agree as to which set of properties it takes for an object to qualify as table or as chair, yet upon encounter- ing a strange object presenting only some of the required properties you may label it table or chair, while I prefer another term. This approach invites us to think of genres as clubs imposing a certain number of conditions for membership, but tole- rating as quasi-members those individuals who can fulfill only some of the require- ments, and who do not seem to fit into any other club. As these quasi-members become more numerous, the conditions for admission may be modified, so that they, too, will become full members. Once admitted to the club, however, a mem- ber remains a member, even if he cannot satisfy the new rules of admission.

Which one of these three proposals is the most adequate? There is no compelling theoretical reason to give a global answer to this question, and no methodological need to fit all genres within the same model. For practical genres such as law, adver- tisement or recipe, the first approach is the most satisfying. What could one do with a quasi law or a quasi recipe? These genres fulfill a narrowly defined purpose, and there is widespread agreement as to which texts qualify as members. In the literary domain, such consensus is only found in the case of purely formal genres such as sonnets or haikus. Among the genres that seem to benefit from the second approach are those which are supposed to arouse a certain emotion on the continuum of human feelings, such as the drama kinds classified in Hernadis contribution, or those which embody a specific spirit or Weltatmhauuttg. By maintaining that poems can be more or less lyric, novels more or less epic, and plays more or less dramatic depending on how strongly they embody the corresponding spirit, a critic like Emil Staiger (1963) implicitly views the genres of the classical triad as fuzzy

M-L. Ryan /Introduction 119

sets, and their labels as fuzzy predicates. But in the majority of modern literary genres, for instance in short stories, science fiction, detective novels, or simply novels, borderline cases differ in so many different ways from the archetypes that the model to be preferred is that of family-resemblance notion. This model appears particularly well suited to deal with the fact that genres evolve in time, and that consumers recognize as members of the same class both currently produced texts and works of older periods which are still readable, but no longer produceable.

The next problem to be taken into consideration, is whether a genre theory should take the form of a systematic taxonomy or of an informal catalog. The dif- ference between these two types of classification resides in the availability of a spatial model of organization. In a systematic taxonomy, to describe a unit is to assign it to a predefmed slot on a twodimensional network of relations, a slot which reflects the properties of this unit. In an informal catalog, on the other hand, newly described units are simply added to a one-dimensional, open-ended inventory without internal structuring principles. Classical examples of systematic taxonomies are the periodic table of elements, where contiguous units present similarities in atomic structure, and biological classification, where the place assigned to a species on the tree of life reveals its genetic relations with other forms of life. As an example of an informal catalog, one can mention the first contributions to speech act theory, which were more concerned with the enumeration and individual defini- tion of various kinds of speech acts, than with the elaboration of some global scheme of classification. Since spatial patterns represent a classificatory logic, sys- tematic taxonomies enjoy far greater theoretical prestige than simple inventories. This prestige explains the repeated attempts, by linguists, to organize the phonolo- gical inventories of languages along axes of symmetry, or the recent efforts of speech act theorists (ex. Searle 1973) to regroup speech acts into broad families, and to distinguish these by means of binary features. The feeling that a spatial, and preferably symmetrical model of classification spells the difference between purely descriptive and theoretical discourse has been particularly influential in the study of genre, both in its purely literary and folklore-oriented branches. In the present issue, the spatial/relational approach to genre classification is illustrated by the Sanskrit genre theories discussed by Susan Tripp, and by Paul Hernadis mapping of dramatic literature. The oppositie view - that differences between types of texts present too much variety to justify a symmetrical spatial model of organization - is defended by Mary Pratt. She argues that symmetrical classifications, such as those obtained by binary features, presuppose that all elements of the system are related and differentiated from each other in always the same ways. This assump- tion would lead the investigator not only to construct what G. Genette (1977) has called fake windows to restore the symmetry when no genre seems to fit in a spe- cific slot [2], but also to ignore those questions which are not relevant to all textual types. It is clear for instance that literary genres require a different approach, and

[ 2 J An example of a classificatory scheme requiring some rather arbitrary decisions to preserve

120 M-L. Ryan /Introduction

call for different criteria, than purely practical genres. But if, all taken together, the genres of a culture resist classification on a tree, wheel, pyramid, or whatever figure one may think of, there is no reason to exclude the possibility for the general cata- log of genres to include self-enclosed sub-systems characterized by systematic oppo- sitions. We may not gain anything by construing a global spatial model for the clas- sification of such heterogenous genres as riddle, obituary, and essays in literary criticism, and by defiiing these genres in terms of each other; but within a homo- genous, well-defined sub-system such as narrative fiction or drama, relational analysis through contrasting features has often proved an effective method. Pratts own account of the short story in terms of its opposition with the novel demon- strates the fruitfulness of a systematic approach, once adjusted to an object of rea- sonable size.

Rule types

The kind of principles involved in the characterization of genres depends on whether this characterization is thought of as a maximally economical definition, or as a maximally complete description of the genre. In some areas of language studies, most notably in phonology, the users competence is better accounted for through the economy of definition than through the wealth of description. Since all that is needed to use a phoneme correctly is the ability to distinguish it from the other phonemes of the language, the characterization of the speakers phonological com- petence should not go beyond those principles needed to differentiate unambigu- ously the various members of the phonological system. But, as Pratt and Rollin argue, such a restriction in genre theory would reduce it to the most trivial obser- vations. If one followed the phonological model, all that genre theory would need to say about the short story would be something like written-narrative-iictional- short-pleasure-oriented (or ludic, in Champignys terminology). This characteriza- tion correctly differentiates the short story from any other text type, but - as Pratts article demonstrates - it leaves aside the most interesting components of the public knowledge and public habits pertaining to that genre. What makes this sort of characterization insufficient is that competence, in textual matters, goes far

its symmetry is the discourse taxonomy proposed by Charles Morris (1971: 203):

Mode Usage

Informative Evaluative Incitative Systematic

Designative Scientific Fictive Legal Cosmological Appreciative Mythical Poetic Moral Critical Prescriptive Technological Political Religious Propagandist

Formative Logico-mathematical Rhetorical Grammatical Metaphysical

M-L. Ryan /Introduction 121

beyond the mere ability to distinguish a type from another. Generic competence differs from phonological competence in that it is subject to gradations: one cannot use the phoneme t more or less well, one just uses it (even if the pronunciation is poor), but one can show various degrees of expertise in dealing with a certain text type. This would be a trivial observation, without consequences for genre theory, if generic expertise were simply a matter of private knowledge and of individual talent. But being good at using a genre is also a matter of cultural knowledge - that is of a knowledge which must be shared in order to be efficient. To be an expert at decoding advertisements, one must for instance be familiar with the usual tricks of the genre so as to protect oneself from false conclusions; and to be success- ful at joke-telling one must know how to highlight the punchline through recogniz- able signals. While paying due attention to strictly distinctive features, genre theory should thus remain open to whatever expectations the members of a culture asso- ciate with a genre, and to whatever uniformities can be observed in their behavior when dealing with that genre.

This stance commits the genre theorist to a flexible approach to what I shall call genre-sensitive regularities. One of the areas of genre theory where the most work remains to be done is the exploration of the variety of principles involved in the dif- ferentiation of discourse into textual types. Neither current linguistic theories, nor the greater part of literary semiotics have much help to offer to the genre theorist seeking to refine his conceptual tools and to make explicit the theoretical status of his observations. While linguistics (more particularly transformational grammar) tends to ignore the facts that cannot be accounted for by means of rigid either/or principles drawing an absolute line between legal and illegal constructs, literary semiotics is plagued by an indiscriminate use of the terms code and convention. Both disciplines thus blind themselves to the variety of species to be found among the regularities pertaining to their object. A sorely needed semiotic enterprise, from which not only discourse studies but all scientific disciplines would greatly benefit, would be a typology of the regularities which may form the concern of scientific discourse, based on an analysis of the various possible sources of uniform behavior (such as: material causality, social contract, convention, habit, and confirmism). (See Lewis 1969 for an important contribution to this future typology.) In genre theory, the regularities involved in the differentiation of types include not only imperative rules, but also options, tendencies, technical advice (that is, a rhetoric), and rather loose guidelines for appropriate use.

A useful starting point, for the investigator trying to cut his way through the jungle of genre-sensitive regularities, is Searles (1969) distinction between consti- tutive and regulative rules. The former define and create a form of behavior, while the latter merely capture the regularities presented by an independently existing activity. The regulative department of genre theory contains room for a wealth of observation which specialists have too often swept under the rug, finding no place for them in their analytical models. Among such observations one can mention: that a good way to introduce a joke in a conversation is by means of the quasi-for-

122 M.-L. Ryan / Ituroductbn

mula you know the one about; that detective novels should avoid lengthy disgres- sions, or that redundancies are appropriate in fairy tales but unwelcome in news reports. (A good source of regulative principles are the how to books for prospec- tive writers of a given genre.) The non-authoritative, flexible character of the regu- lative rules of genres invites their assimilation to the type of regularity which David Lewis defies as convention. With proper adaptation to genre theory, this defini- tion reads as follows [3] :

A is a convention (regulative rule) of genre x if: (1) Almost every sender of texts belonging to genre x conforms to A ; (2) Almost every receiver expects every sender to conform to A; (3) Almost every receiver would prefer every sender to conform to A; (4) A is not necessary, since sender and receiver could have agreed on another prin-

ciple meeting the above conditions.

This definition, it will be noted, takes care of sender-oriented conventions. To account for receiver-oriented regularities (such as the reading conventions defined in Steinmanns contribution), it must be rewritten as follows:

(1) Almost every receiver conforms to A; (2) Almost every sender expects almost every receiver to conform to A; erc,

It is the above distinction between two functions of generic principles which per- mits apparently unproblematic comparative statements such as: The narrative style of myth welcomes digressions and ornate language in the Shoshone culture, while it advocates sobriety of expression in the Yokuts culture (observations bor- rowed from Shin&in and from Newman and Gayton, both in Hymes 1964). While Yokuts and Shoshone myths differ in their regulative conventions, they are classi- fied in the same cross-cultural category by virtue of an alleged common core of con- stitutive features.

In addition to regulative and constitutive principles, the description of genres

[3] The original version reads as follows (1969: 63):

A regularity (R) in the behavior of a population (P) when they are agents in a recurring situa- tion (S) is a convention if and only if, in any instance of(S) among members of (fl:

(1) Everyone [or almost everyone] conforms to (R) (2) Everyone expects [almost] everyone else to conform to (R) (3) Everyone prefers to conform to (R) on the condition that the others do, since (S) is a

coordination problem and uniform conformity to (R) is a coordination equilibrium in (s).

The distinction between sender and receiver in linguistic matters, and the existence of both sender and receiver-oriented conventions, makes it necessary to modify this definition.

M-L. Ryan /Introduction 123

may finally include regularities which do not derive from rules, but rather from cul- tural and mental habits. Many sociological and cognitive facts belong to this cate- gory. There is for instance no principle qualifying as either constitutive rule or as convention (as defined above) that instructs prospective writers of novels to first try their hand at the short story: the success of this practice does not depend on a similar behavior by other writers. And there is certainly nothing in the codification of the novel that tells readers to pay less attention to details of micro-structure (sur- face form), and more attention to the semantic macro-structure, than they would when reading a poem. Most authors of non-popular novelistic genres would like their readers to process their works as carefully as a poem on the micro-level. The widely attested practice of focusing on units of different levels in novels and poetry is due mostly to a material cause: the limitations of human memory, which call for different strategies when processing long and short texts. Yet from a length-condi- tioned strategy, the procedure has evolved into a genre-conditioned one, since long poems are processed more or less like short ones, and short novels like long works of the same genre. Even though their status as rules or conventions remains ques- tionable, observations of these two types have a legitimate place in genre theory, if the ambition of the theory is to account not only for the implicit knowledge, but also for the actual behavior of the users of genres.

***

The diversity of the contributions gathered in this issue is meant to be taken as a plea in favor of a flexible and truly interdisciplinary approach to the problem of genre. The editorial policy was not to promote a unified methodology, but rather to give the reader an idea of the many directions in which the study of genre or dis- course types may be fruitfully pursued. Among the fields represented in the col- lection are: philosophy of taxonomy (Rollin), philosophy of language (Champigny), sociology of literature (Pratt), cognitive psychology (Olson, Mark and Duffy), speech act theory (Hancher), sign theory (Steinmann), history of literary theory (Tripp), and model logic and ontology (Pavel). A contact with the Western tradition of literary criticism is nevertheless maintained through Hernadis essay.

The collection opens with the contributions of two devils advocates: first Bernard Rollin, who stresses the lack of theoretical foundations for most of the available literature on the question of genre, and urges the investigator to make more explicit what he is looking for; and second Robert Champigny, who, after outlining a semantically based, purely analytical scheme for the classification of dis- course, goes on to discuss the merging, in modern literature, of the traditional genres of poetry, novel and essay toward an amorphous species which he calls prose poem, but in which one may also recognize the fashionable artifact commonly labelled as text.

The third of the papers, Mary Pratts contrastive study of the novel and short story, demonstrates that a purely formal analysis of text-internal features cannot do

124 M.-L. Ryan /Introduction

justice to the complexity of the phenomenon of genre. By detailing the wealth of semantic and pragmatic differences that cluster around the opposition between long and short forms in narrative pleasure fiction, she provides evidence supporting this observation, originally made by Ben-Amos concerning two genres of Yoruba story- telling: There is a whole gamut of distinctions between these two genres, and although the reduction of the difference to just a single set of contrastive attributes may be analytically convenient, it is ethnographically simplistic (1969: 292).

If Pratts account of the short story is mostly writer-oriented, Hernadi adopts the point of view of the audience in his classification of dramatic literature. He jus- tifies this choice by arguing that our public reaction to performed plays is more observable and less idiosyncratic than our private reaction to written or printed texts. Through his mapping of individual works along the continuum of emotional responses that they elicit from the audience, he generalizes the Aristotelian approach to tragedy as applicable to all types of drama or perhaps even to non- dramatic literature. Implicit in this procedure is the view that genres are archetypes to which individual works do not belong in the strict sense, but rather in which, as Staiger (1963: 241) and Derrida (1980: 18s) suggest, they participate to a greater or lesser extent. By allowing an individual work to participate in several types, this view appears particularly well suited to deal with the phenomenon of mixed and hybrid genres. An excursion into one of the very few non-Western theoretical reflections of genre is provided by Susan Tripps overview of Sanskrit literature and Sanskrit genre theory. To the reader who wonders to which extent Western preoccupations with genres are indebted to the_ Aristotelian heritage, her article demonstrates very similar concerns in a totally foreign scholarly tradi- tion.

Thomas Pavels analysis of myth and tragedy in terms of their underlying world view innovates both in method and content previous attempts to define these two genres; in method, by resorting to model logic and possible world semantics to describe the structure of their respective ontological foundations; and, in content, by insisting on the non-fictional character of mythical discourse. Not only is myth to be opposed to the false discourse of fiction (false only literally, since fiction may present an exemplary value), but also to alI genres of informative discourse referring tothe states of affairs of the profane layer of the actual world. While the accuracy or exemplary value of informative and fictional discourse may be called into question, myth is rooted in a sacred reality from which it derives an absolute authority. Two semantic classes of discourse thus emerge from Pavels discussion: those of debatable and of guaranteed validity. He ascribes the birth of tragedy to the disappearance of the sacred dimension from a cultures ontology. This disap- pearance deprives myth of a referent, and makes its narrative content available for fictional communicatioh.

The common concern of the last three papers is with the diversification of inter- pretive strategies along the lines of genres. An approach which has enjoyed con- siderable popularity since the rise of literary semiotics consists of viewing genres as

M-L. Ryan /Introduction 125

programs for decoding (Corti 1978) or as systems of reading conventions (CulIer 1975). Yet the results of this approach have been so far mostly trivial. Martin Steinmanns essay is one of the very few serious attempts to convert the vague notion of reading convention into concrete proposals. With his superordi- nate genre conventions he proposes various amendments to the general interpre- tive principle according to which the world of a fictional text is reconstructed as being the closest possible to the reality we know (see Lewis 1978 on this principle, and my own adaptation of it in Ryan 1980). Steinmann shows that some communi- cative demands such as exposition and plot development may create a conflict with the demands of verisimilitude. The reader adjusts to this situation by bringing into play a number of genre-sensitive conventions which override the criteria he would normally use in the reconstruction and evaluation of the worlds of both fictional and non-fictional texts. If discourse falls into genres, so does the meta-discourse that relates to these genres. A genre theory should therefore be supported by a theory of textual interpretation. Michael Hancher takes care of this problem, first by situating interpretation within the framework of speech act theory, and second by distinguishing various types of interpretive discourse, as they relate to various types of texts. Moreover, by exploring a notion that can be viewed as either a speech act, a speech act family, a genre, or a genre family, he invites the reader to reconsider the problematic relations between the units of speech act theory and text taxonomy. To conclude the colIection, Olson, Mack and Duffy tackle the problem of interpretation at its most basic level, by exploring the possibility of an empirical verification of the claim that genres have a primary psychological reality, and that generic distinction affect elementary cognitive processes such as informa- tion storing and retrieval They focus on two possible factors in the diversification of cognitive processes: first the generic distinction between essays and stories; and second the distinction between ill-formed and well-formed texts within each of these two genres.

Taken together, it is hoped that the papers gathered in this issue will demon- strate that genre theory can very welI live with the condition diagnosed by Dundes - namely that not so much as one genre has been [or ever will be] completely defined. That genres are not the sort of entities that can be given an exhaustive and definitive defmition does not mean that they cannot form the object of a sys- tematic and rigorous branch of knowledge presenting significant implications for our understanding of human communication.

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