Genre Trajectories

Identifying, Mapping, Projecting

Garin Dowd, Natalia Rulyova, Garin Dowd, Natalia Rulyova

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137505484
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a fresh interdisciplinary perspective on genre and identifies developments in genre studies in the early 21st century. Genre approaches are applied to examine a fascinating range of texts including ancient Greek poems, Holocaust visual and literary texts, contemporary Hollywood films, selfies, melodrama, and classroom practices.

Part I

Reassessing Theoretical Traditions: From Ancient Greece to Bakhtin

1

Philosophy’s Broken Mirror: Genre Theory and the Strange Place of Poetry and the Poem from Plato to Badiou

Garin Dowd

This chapter explores the rather striking manner in which at key moments in the history of philosophy, in the discipline’s attempts at self-definition, the genre or literary form of poetry plays a key role. Philosophy, at these moments, has been defined, inter alia, as the enemy of poetry, the guiding light for the philosopher who can only try and inevitably fail to emulate its brilliance, or as the anomalous guest at the philosophical table with whom the host discipline has relations which result in either generative or degenerative effects. Insofar as it lays claim to or liaises with philosophy – as we have come to know it today – poetry has thus played a part in the self-definition of genre theory. The aim of this chapter is to capture a very specific set of transfers, transpositions, metonymies and other modes of reversible relations of substitution and surrogacy between philosophy and poetry, and along the way between genre-theory-as-philosophy and poetry.

In the Republic, Plato, through the voice of Socrates, casts doubt on the good of purveyors of poetry (and the imitative artforms for which it stands) for the walled-in polis of Athens; in his Poetics, Aristotle would likewise urge a resistance to mimesis; at the close of the 19th century, the group convened around the journal Athenaeum would reverse this position and find in poetry and in its particular embodiment of poiesis a model and refuge for philosophy itself – which along with the polis was one of the recipients of protection in different ways in Plato and Aristotle. If the Jena romantics mark a turning point in the development of genre theory, they do also in the theorization of the relationship between poetry (as mimesis) and thought (as dianoia). In this respect they also issue in what Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe call the ‘literary absolute’ (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1988). Such an advent is for Alain Badiou also the inauguration of what he calls the Age of the Poets, the debilitating play operative in philosophy of imitation and deception via false autorecognition (and ‘suture’) of which he advocates the undoing (Badiou, 1999). In each of these moments, philosophy enters into a particular relationship with poetry and also in the course of this negotiation enters a self-reflexive exploration of genre, of philosophical utterance and poetic utterance in generic terms, as effects of genericity (Schaeffer, 1989) or of what Derrida calls ‘degenerescence’ (Derrida, 1980), which for him is ultimately the paradoxical mark and remark of the genre gesture.

In her book Genres of Philosophy, Robyn Ferrell summarizes the play of repetition, reflection and mirroring, modulated by difference and repetition, which operates between philosophy and the matter of genre:

Genre emerges for philosophy as an ontological question. Genre is the concept which seeks to capture the generative in thought. One might articulate this process of a reproduction of thought as one in which the new thinking is produced but not immaculately. It is the process whereby new thinking can represent something of the old while being an original departure, reiterating something as new.

(Ferrell, 2002, p. 8)

Repetition and difference: we are very much observing here the standard terrain of genre theory. One of the most significant moments in the modern history of the field was the 1979 Colloque International on Genre at the University of Strasbourg. This conference belongs to a key period in the history of humanities disciplines which had, in 1979, undergone a significant period of self-scrutiny under the impetus of Derridean deconstruction. As the bulletin serving to situate the colloquium states, as the hold of structuralism weakened,

in recent years much of the interest previously directed at the discovery of or elaboration of scientific models for humanistic research has shifted towards those forms of articulation that have historically engaged the enigmatic aspects of language in the most radical manner. Of these practices, the equivocal but dynamic interrelation of literature and philosophy has progressively emerged as a decisive area of investigation.

(Chartin et al., 1980, p. 234)

The Strasbourg bulletin locates the crux of its interests in a particular historical context, namely in Jena romanticism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Hence it goes on to state that the focus of the colloquium will not be genre theory but, rather, the transition, in thinking about genre, from the plural to the singular; specifically the event will explore ‘the singularisation of the concept … [as] this transition was effected most of all by German romanticism’ (Chartin et al., 1980, p. 235).

The aim in what follows is to reprise and reframe some of the questions associated with the transition. In particular, however, through a discussion of Alain Badiou’s proposition that what he calls the Age of the Poets inaugurated by the Jena romantics and perpetuated in his view by philosophy, to its own detriment it will be argued that a return to the questions posed at the 1979 colloquium, as well as in Plato and Aristotle, offers insights for contemporary genre theory and genre studies.

The interrelated questions to be pursued hereunder then are the following: Why is it that in some ways and to some degree, that when the discipline of philosophy attempts to define itself, it has so often felt the need to have recourse to the explanatory power of the genre (or literary form) of poetry or the poem? Why has poetry so frequently been synonymous with the beyond of literary taxonomy, while at the same time it seems to be the core element of genre theory? How can poetry and philosophy be both anomalous and synonymous, at one and the same time? And why is it that philosophy and poetry are so strange and familiar to each other?

Poetry and philosophy

The first significant intervention in this topic is not by any means the Strasbourg colloquium. Commentators frequently mention the great philosophical poem of being written by Parmenides. In Parmenides, philosophy and poetry are born together, not as non-identical twins but as conjoined. If we turn to Plato and Aristotle we find poetry to be at the core both of philosophy’s self-definition by means of negation (in the case of Plato) and as providing the occasion for the first major instalment in the tradition of genre theory as such (Aristotle). If for Plato poetry is what philosophy first and foremost is not, for Aristotle poetry stands in as the very exemplar of genre or kind of literature.

In Book X of the Republic, Plato returns to his theme of the banishment of the poets from the State. He does so for two reasons. The first of these is that he wishes to elaborate on, and provide further support for, the judgement as expressed earlier in Part III of Book III. There he asserts:

So if we are visited in our state by someone who has the skill to transform himself into all sorts of characters and represent all sorts of things, and he wants to show off himself and his poems to us, we shall treat him with all the reverence due to a priest and giver of pleasure, but shall tell him that he and his kind have no place in our city.

(Plato, 1974, 398 b)

In this edict, Plato would have banished almost all poets and artists aside from those dedicated to specifically pedagogical tools serving military purposes (398 b). The second reason is that Plato seems to wish to offer the illusion of a potential reprieve to the poets and musical performers (and their advocates). For though the poets deserve, for the pleasures they afford, to be, in Book III, praised (‘anointing him with myrrh and crowning him with fillets of wool’ [398 b]), Plato would still have them escorted to the perimeter of the city. In Book X, however, the notion is at least hypothetically entertained that it is not impossible that one day someone may come, either in poetry or in prose, successfully to argue the case for the poet and associated artists (607 d–e). At least, in Book X, the ranks of admissible works now include ‘hymns to the gods and paeans in praise of good men’ (607).

With regard to the first aim, however, namely confirming the need for the banishment of the poets, Plato in Part X of Book X has this to say: the danger inherent in poetry resides in its appeal to the imagination rather than to reason, or, as he puts it, ‘the instinctive desires of a part of us’ (606 b). Moreover, given its position, at a third remove from the world of forms, poetry has what Plato calls a ‘low degree of truth’ (605 b).

To give political power to poets would be equivalent to handing over the affairs of state to its worst-equipped citizens. To yield authority to the poet is, for Plato, to delegate to someone who is incapable of a sense of proportion; someone incapable of maintaining the proper hierarchy of form-copy-simulacrum; the poet is one who views with indifference the distinction between the truthful and the chimerical.

Genre, in this case exemplified in the empirical instantiation of poetry (in various forms), is concerned both with form and with politics. This genre with its constituent types, of poetry as understood by Plato, produces political effects; it alters the shape of the polity. In particular, if it is allowed free rein, it has the capacity to deform the latter. The deformation of the polity by the redistribution of values and the distortion of perspectives and shake up of proportionality brought about by the genre of poetry is to be accounted for by the distance from truth at which it is found to operate.

The two gestures – in Plato – are suggestive of the definition of genre itself as they also are of the paradox of genre. For a work to be included in a genre, it has to alter that genre; the act of belonging to a genre is in some ways the act of belonging to itself as constitutive and founding of that embracing category. It is this paradoxical ambiguity of the whole genre enterprise that informs the philosopher’s ludic erasure of literary taxonomy (as in Derrida’s loi du genre) as well as the more sober retrenchments (Todorov, Genette, Schaeffer) of literary theorists all taking place in, or in the aftermath of, the 1979 colloquium on Genre at the University of Strasbourg.

The colloquium explicitly set itself up as a forum for addressing literature and philosophy. Continental (and, in particular, French) philosophy has regarded the legacy of the Aristotelian and Schlegelian attempts to think genre into the two quite different modes of philosophy and the poem, respectively, with an attentive eye. Under the sway of continental philosophy, the Strasbourg colloquium was presided over by the theoretical mantras developed by one of its organizers, Jean-Luc Nancy, in collaboration with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, taking the themes of their book, published but a few years prior to the colloquium, The Literary Absolute (1978). Clear traces of the presiding influence of this doctrine may be seen in the ‘Bulletin’ issued in advance to the speakers, signed also by Jean-Jacques Chartin and Samuel Weber:

the literary work came to be considered as an autonomous process, self-instituting and self-reflexive, entailing the laws of its own production and of its own theory. Hence, genre, in the sense of the literary genre, became the genre of self-generation … in its generalized and self-generating movement, literature seems to imply its own specification.

(Chartin et al., 1980, p. 236)

The theoretical ground for literature as genre is developed at length in Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy’s study of the Jena romantics. The latter group convened around the journal Athenaeum were responding to a triple crisis: a bourgeoisie with increased access to culture; the political crisis represented by the French Revolution; and the challenges of the Kantian critique (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1988, p. 5). The perspectives on literature developed in Athenaeum are thus to be thought of less as pertaining to literature as such than as being concerned with a general crisis and a general critique ‘for which literature or literary theory will be the privileged locus of expression’ (p. 5). Schlegel’s core concern, as expressed in the famous fragment 116, is as follows:

The romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never be perfected. It can be exhausted by no theory and only a divinatory criticism would dare try to characterise its ideal … The romantic kind of poetry is the only one that is more than a kind, that is, as it were, poetry itself: for in a certain sense all poetry is or should be romantic.

(Schlegel, 1971, pp. 175–176)

The name of the journal (of which only three numbers were to appear between 1798 and 1800) in which brothers Friedrich Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel and their associates (including Dorothea Schlegel, Caroline Schlegel, Novalis and Friedrich Schleiermacher) published their unsigned texts and fragments signals that aspect of Jena romanticism which entailed a sublation of ancient and modern (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1988, p. 11) and the ‘completion’ entailed in such an act of dialectical synthesis. The completion would entail the ‘production of something entirely new’ (p. 11, emphasis added). The something in question amounts to what they call literature:

They … will approach it explicitly as a new genre, beyond the divisions of classical (or modern) poetics and capable of resolving the inherent (‘generic’) divisions of the written thing. Beyond divisions and all de-finition, this genre is thus programmed in romanticism as the genre of literature: the genericity, so to speak, and the generativity of literature, grasping and producing themselves in an entirely new, infinitely new Work. The absolute, therefore, of literature. But also its ab-solute, its isolation in its perfect closure upon itself (upon its own organicity), as in the well-known image of the hedgehog in Athenaeum fragment 206.

(Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1988, p. 11)¹

The fragment is both the theme and the form of exposition chosen to articulate the theme of fragmentation in its role both in poetry and in philosophy’s approach to the poem. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy position this in the context of the common ground between Schlegel’s ‘System-Programme’ and the Kant of the Third Critique: ‘there appears to be very little distance between romanticism and idealism’ (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1988, p....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Reassessing Theoretical Traditions: From Ancient Greece to Bakhtin
• Part II: Memory, Testimony, Politics
• Part III: Revisiting Literary Genres: Writing Back/Writing Forward
• Part IV: Visual Cultures: Technologies, Institutions and Genres
• Part V: Film Genres: Endurance and Transformation
• Part VI: Pedagogies: Applications in Education
• Index