Beyond essence (or, getting over there): Cognitive and dialetical theories of genre

Genre theories frequently err by shortchanging the full range of genre processes. Focusing on only one stage or context — tradition, author, text or reception — can hide a whole world of genre-relevant facts. A more adequate analysis should consider at least the following factors in the prototypical sequence leading to a new genre member: There is a collection of past works constituting a genre; a writer reads some of those works, and then models a new work after them; a work with some of the genre’s defining features results from this creation; and some readers of the work recognize its relation to its models and its generic intention. The present drive to supersede ‘essentialist’ theories of genre might dovetail with a remedy to this problem. But the available versions of dialectical genre theory — favored candidate for a post-essentialist view — use a method of analysis that unifies the often fractious aspects of genre in a way that fails to respect their di¤erences. Deborah Madsen writes, ‘There appears to be a new consensus emerging in genre theory. [ . . . ] No longer is it thought to reside with the author as an intention, nor is genre considered to be an e¤ect manifest by the reader, least of all is genre treated as a stable core of meaning inherent in the text. The assumption of ‘‘essence’’ or generic identity, upon which taxonomy relies, is now read as an open invitation to deconstruction’ (1994: 7). She later concludes, ‘Genre theory in the wake of poststructuralism must take the form of a post-essentialist theory. This is only possible if genre is located, not in the text, nor in an abstract definition, but in the discourse that relates text to theory’ (1994: 18). This zone of consensus is better labeled post-Jamesonian, given its use of historicizing critiques of essentialism to fulfill Jameson’s project of a ‘dialectical genre theory’. Adena Rosmarin, John Snyder, and Deborah Madsen, in their di¤erent ways, all wish to pursue Jameson’s aim of taking genre study to a new meta-level, which will attend to its own structure and purposes. A