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 contemporary literary studies is a skepticism that conceals uneasiness and even discouragement. 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 wrestling 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 reading public by freeing the act of writing from any kind of convention. A fairly typical 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 masterpieces 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

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

who commented

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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 categories, 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 concepts, 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 selfenclosed discipline, but as part of a global theory of discourse. One of the postulates 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 textual linguistics cannot avoid facing the problem of text typology. Another dominant 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 confronts 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 traditional divisions, nor another ingenious way to divide literature, discourse, or com-

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111

munication, but, as B. Rollin points out in his contribution to this issue, an exploration 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 . . 11sagit de savoir quel est
le rapport de ces formes entre elles, et les noms que Ion doit donner aus causes encore inconnues 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 communicative 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 communication and signification, generic taxonomy becomes tied to the same type of

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112

assumption that underlies current linguistic theories: namely that the object to
account for is the users knowledge. According to this assumption, the communicative 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 tragedies, 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 taxonomical scheme, or arise as a result of the attempt to classify. These two possibilities correspond, respectively, to the philosophical stances of realism and nominalism (as discussed in Hempfer 1973), or to what B. Rollin (this issue) calls naturalism 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 literature. The proper question is: Can we conceive of a consistent literary taxonomy that in addition to providing a hierarchical system of either/or distinctions also provides a consistent correlation 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.

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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 investigator, 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 BenAmos, 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 changing 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 categories 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 categories 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 crosscultural 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 Longacre (1976). He divides discourse into narrative. procedural, behavioral, and expository, 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 expository.

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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 communicative 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-lyricdramatic 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 discourse 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,
folktale, 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 atmosphere of the evening before retiring. It can be argued that the complementary
distribution 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 expressions found by Brian Stross (1974) in Tzeltal Maya, for instance, we find terms corresponding not only to what folklorists would call genres, but aiso dialects, registers, 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 categories. For instance, according to Bauman (1978), the Chamula Indians divide discourse into ordinary speech, speech for people whose hearts are heated, and
pure speech, according to the analytically reconstrued criteria of increasing formalism, redundancy, and invariability. The first category is itself undivided (it corresponds 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 correspondance 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 taxonomy. 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 distinction; baby talk; legal jargon; written vs. oral style, etc.
speech situarion: Informal gathering, telephone communication,
sports broadcast,
court testimony, church service, etc.

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M.-L. Ryan /Introduction

Speech event (the actual verbal exchange occurring in the above situations): conversation, 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 relevance 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
Conspicuously missing
the empty slot in the expression genre is a type of -.
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, discourse 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 direction-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 conversation, 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 condition 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 provided 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

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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, chatting, 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 sermon 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 discourse (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 (question/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 category.

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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 typical 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 associated - as Mary Pratt suggests in her contribution
-with a group of characteristics, 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 encountering 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 tolerating as quasi-members those individuals who can fulfill only some of the requirements, 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 member 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, advertisement 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

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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 difference 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 definition of various kinds of speech acts, than with the elaboration of some global
scheme of classification. Since spatial patterns represent a classificatory logic, systematic taxonomies enjoy far greater theoretical prestige than simple inventories.
This prestige explains the repeated attempts, by linguists, to organize the phonological 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 assumption 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 specific 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

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120

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 catalog of genres to include self-enclosed sub-systems characterized by systematic oppositions. We may not gain anything by construing a global spatial model for the classification 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 homogenous, 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 demonstrates the fruitfulness of a systematic approach, once adjusted to an object of reasonable 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 competence should not go beyond those principles needed to differentiate unambiguously 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 observations. If one followed the phonological model, all that genre theory would need
to say about the short story would be something like written-narrative-iictionalshort-pleasure-oriented
(or ludic, in Champignys terminology). This characterization 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

Designative
Appreciative
Prescriptive
Formative

Usage
Informative

Evaluative

Incitative

Systematic

Scientific
Mythical
Technological
Logico-mathematical

Fictive
Poetic
Political
Rhetorical

Legal
Moral
Religious
Grammatical

Cosmological
Critical
Propagandist
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 successful at joke-telling one must know how to highlight the punchline through recognizable signals. While paying due attention to strictly distinctive features, genre theory
should thus remain open to whatever expectations the members of a culture associate 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 differentiation 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 constitutive 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-

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M.-L. Ryan / Ituroductbn

mula you know the one about; that detective novels should avoid lengthy disgressions, 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 prospective writers of a given genre.) The non-authoritative,
flexible character of the regulative rules of genres invites their assimilation to the type of regularity which David
Lewis defies as convention.
With proper adaptation to genre theory, this definition reads as follows [3] :
A is
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)

a convention (regulative rule) of genre x if:

Almost every sender of texts belonging to genre x conforms to A ;
Almost every receiver expects every sender to conform to A;
Almost every receiver would prefer every sender to conform to A;
A is not necessary, since sender and receiver could have agreed on another principle 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 permits 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 borrowed from Shin&in and from Newman and Gayton, both in Hymes 1964). While
Yokuts and Shoshone myths differ in their regulative conventions, they are classified in the same cross-cultural category by virtue of an alleged common core of constitutive 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 situation (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 cultural and mental habits. Many sociological and cognitive facts belong to this category. 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 (surface 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-conditioned 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 questionable, 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 discourse types may be fruitfully pursued. Among the fields represented in the collection 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 discourse, 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 storytelling: 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 justifies 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 nondramatic 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 tradition.
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 disappearance 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 interpretive strategies along the lines of genres. An approach which has enjoyed considerable 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 superordinate genre conventions he proposes various amendments to the general interpretive 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 communicative 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 information 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 demonstrate 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 systematic and rigorous branch of knowledge presenting significant implications for
our understanding of human communication.

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Ryan /Introduction

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