A “venerable error”

The word ‘genre’ derives from the Greek genos and Latin genus, i.e. ‘race’ or ‘kind.’ It entered the English language via French in the early nineteenth century (White 2003: 376), therefore coming into the language quite late. The same is true of “literature” – in the modern sense of imaginative works that possess an aesthetic quality, and which form a canon of texts important to a given culture – and the two words share a comparable vagueness. The etymology of ‘genre’ further imposes an analogy with biological taxonomy. With a long-lasting tradition going back to Aristotle, this analogy is responsible for the first, and still fairly common, understanding of genre as a tool for classifying texts and evaluating them against some prescribed criteria (Fowler 1982: 37; Fishelov 1993: 19–53; Miller 1994: 20; Rosmarin 1985: 23; Swales 1990: 34, Frow 2006: 26–7, 55–69).

But for Alastair Fowler “this is a venerable error” (Fowler 1982: 37). The narrow, taxonomical perspective has not proved viable since many, if not most, literary works trespass upon, blur, or explode prescribed boundaries and often, if not always, blend several genres (Fowler 1982: 45–46, 171–190; Genette 1992; Beebee 1994; Frow 2015: 43–54). This is what must have led Croce to declare the “impossibility of such systematizations,” and to formulate his radical proposition that “[a]ll the books dealing with classifications and systems of the arts could be burned without any loss whatever” (1995: 114–115). Another essential factor that contributed to his view was the historical reconceptualisation of literature, rooted in German romanticism. In the wake of this reconceptualisation, “[t]he 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 generalised and self-generating movement, literature seems to imply its own specification” (Chartin et al. 1980: 236, qtd. in Dowd 2006: 12). Convinced of this position, some literary critics have questioned the utility of genres for the classification of literature, if not the utility of the category per se, especially where this relates to twentieth and twenty-first century literature that supposedly defies generic labels (cf. Cohn 1989: 11).