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137 pages

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This collection of new essays addresses a topic of established and expanding critical interest throughout the humanities. It demonstrates that genre matters in a manner not constrained by disciplinary boundaries and includes new work on Genre Theory and applications of thinking about genre from Aristotle to Derrida and beyond. The essays focus on economies of expectation and competency, genre as media form, recent developments in television broadcast genres, translation and genericity, the role played by genre in film publicity, gender and genre, genre in fiction, and the problematics of classification. An introductory essay places the contributions in the context of a wide range of thinking about genre in the arts, media and humanities. The volume will be of interest to both undergraduates and postgraduates, especially those following courses on Genre Theory and Genre Criticism, and to academics working in a range of subject areas such as Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Media Studies and Literary Studies.

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Literary Criticism

Literature

General officer

Literacy

General

Cultural Studies

Informations

Publié par	Intellect Books Ltd
Date de parution	01 janvier 2006
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781841509303
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Genre Matters:
Essays in Theory and Criticism
Garin Dowd, Lesley Stevenson & Jeremy Strong
First Published in the UK in 2006 by
Intellect Books, PO Box 862, Bristol BS99 1DE, UK
First Published in the USA in 2006 by
Intellect Books, ISBS, 920 NE 58th Ave. Suite 300, Portland, Oregon 97213-3786, USA
Copyright 2006 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 1-84150-107-7
Cover Design: Gabriel Solomons
Copy Editor: Holly Spradling
Printed and bound in Great Britain by 4edge, UK.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Genre Matters in Theory and Criticism
Garin Dowd
I. Re-framing Genre Theory
Genre Theory: Cultural and Historical Motives Engendering Literary Genre
Brian G Caraher
Objectivity and Immanence in Genre Theory
Paul Cobley
The Genericity of Montage: Derrida and Genre Theory
Jeff Collins
II. Genre in Adaptation and Translation
Ohio Impromptu , Genre and Beckett on Film
Garin Dowd
Translating Genre
Susan Bassnett
Tess, Jude and the Problem of Adapting Hardy
Jeremy Strong
III. Genre in Television Broadcasting and Film Publicity
Mixing and Matching : The Hybridising Impulse in Today s Factual Television Programming
Richard Kilborn
So What Kind of Film is it? : Genre, Publicity and Critical Practice
Mike Chopra-Gant
IV. Genre, Gender and Fiction
Three Faces of Ruth Rendell: Feminism, Popular Fiction, and the Question of Genre
Margaret Russett
The Historical Novel?: Novel, History and the End of History
Martin Ryle
Contributors Details
Index
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the author, editor and publisher for permission to reproduce Three Faces of Ruth Rendell: Feminism, Popular Fiction, and the Question of Genre by Margaret Russett, from Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture XXXV, spring 2002, pp. 143-166 The University of Oklahoma. We are also grateful to the Research Committee of the Faculty of Arts, Thames Valley University for its financial support.
Preface
Genre Matters is a collection of new essays addressing a topic of established and expanding critical interest throughout the humanities. A key objective of this book is to assert that genre matters in a manner not constrained by disciplinary boundaries. While it does not seek to be comprehensive in the sense of collecting instances of genre-based criticism from all of the humanities disciplines, it is the case that the collection aspires to providing a balanced selection of new perspectives on enduring philosophical and methodological problems in genre theory, contributions to genre criticism based on an application of either a classification in itself, or a perspective linked to methodological predilection, and essays responding to aspects of contemporary cultural transformation. Genre Matters , then, includes new work on genre theory and applications of thinking about genre from Aristotle to Derrida and beyond. The essays focus, variously, on economies of expectation and competency, genre as media form, recent developments in television broadcast genres, translation and genericity, the role played by genre in film publicity, gender and genre, genre in fiction, and the problematics of classification. An introductory essay establishes a context for the diverse contributions in a wide range of thinking about genre in the arts, media and humanities.
The essays grouped together under the heading Re-framing Genre Theory in distinct ways seek to intervene in genre theory. Brian Caraher, in Genre Theory: Cultural and Historical Motives Engendering Literary Genre provides a thorough re-articulation of Frye s ahistorical genre theory in Anatomy of Criticism (1957) along more distinctly social and historical lines. This more historicised model of genre theory, Caraher shows, reflects the pragmatics of specific social groups striving to cope with cultural crises through distinctively socio-linguistic strategies. It is praxis of a different kind that emerges in the discussion by Paul Cobley of expectation as the organising principle of the generic. In his essay, Objectivity and Immanence in Genre Theory , recalling one consequence of the gesture whereby the critic may give each work the genre it deserves, or that the critic demands that it deserves (in order to neutralise the aberrant uninvited guest of the emergent hors-genre ), Cobley sets out to assuage the fears of any genre critics who feel their position challenged by audience-based textual studies, which in his view do not treat the work as an object. It is at the moment of engagement with the work as generic because of its part in an economy of expectation (supply and demand) that genre as a problematic encounters the political imaginary. In Derrida, Genre Theory and the Genericity of Montage Jeff Collins pushes genre to the centre of the debate around montage in the visual and audio-visual arts. If in terms of its microstructures, for Adorno all modern art may be called montage (Adorno, 1997: 155), as a genre term montage , Collins argues, escapes grounding in classical genre theories and exposes the instabilities of generic demarcation. Collins proposes that its condition might best be considered in the light of Derrida s engagement with genre: a thinking that both radicalises and yet decentres the most prevalent notions of demarcation and classification.
The second section focuses on the conceptually related questions of Genre in Adaptation and Translation. A recent special number of The Yale Journal of Criticism reflects that the word translation , like the words modernity , culture and literature , might be so overburdened with meaning as to signify everything yet nothing at all (Brantley and Luzzi, 2003: 236). A key question remains: Is adaptation a species of translation, or should one avoid speaking of the two in the same critical breath? (236). The combination of a text s recalcitrance towards generic transposition coupled to a determination on the part of an adapter to transform through that very act of transposition -a kind of treacherous fidelity that is arguably common to any adaptation - provides the focal point for Garin Dowd s essay, Ohio Impromptu , Genre and Beckett on Film . Specifically, it is argued that the Beckett on Film version of Samuel Beckett s play - through a combination of casting and special effects - elides the disjunctions (between genres and between characters ) upon which, Dowd argues, the play itself depends. Susan Bassnett s Translating Genre intervenes in the question of translation as a genre category and seeks to ask the question of what happens to the labour of translation within the context of the contemporary and predicted future position of the English language. Bassnett considers how new forms in different eras - such as the sonnet - crossed cultural frontiers through the activity of translation. Similarly, new genres (such as the haiku) have been introduced more recently from other literary systems, whereas others, for example the Arabic qasidah , remain rooted in their source language. Underpinning her essay is a charting of how the perceived status of the source text and its generic characteristics, relative to the perceived status of the translator s literary system and heritage, determine the process of translation, including the imposition of new generic frameworks and the abandonment of original elements. This section then returns to adaptation in the shape of Jeremy Strong s essay Tess, Jude and the Problem of Adapting Hardy . For Strong, to move from Thomas Hardy s Tess of the D Urbervilles or Jude the Obscure to the film adaptations they have engendered is never going to be a simple matter of degree of verisimilitude. The genres are always apt to refuse one another to some extent. It is an awareness of both the determinant and consequent factors of this refusal that motivates Strong s reading of the between that operates disjunctively and constitutively in getting from Hardy to Polanski and Winterbottom and back again. The between here is figured as the site of ideology in Comolli and Narboni s sense, even if that site is itself refused by both films.
The third section - Genre in Television Broadcasting and Film Publicity - groups together two essays which offer contrasting perspectives on the question of generic hybridity, the one turning its attention to a field that has attracted much attention from Media Studies in recent years - reality television - and the other instantiating an influential methodological stance in relation to genre in film studies. In the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century a meta-generic distinction is established between the factual style of the Lumi re brothers and the fantastical visions of M li s. Nonetheless the distinction between factual and fictional genres was already blurred in early cinema, and in the era that some commentators might still want to call postmodern, the blending reaches its apogee (or nadir depending on one s view). Richard Kilborn s essay Mixing and Matching: The Hybridising Impulse in Today s Factual Television Programming outlines the specificity of the hybrid genres of reality TV . His essay explores the manner in which factual television programming has to an increasing extent since the beginning of the 1990s conjoined elements from existing genres into new hybridised formats. The results, he shows, frequently blur traditional distinctions between fictional and factual categories. Mike Chopra-Gant in his essay So What Kind of Film is it?: Genre, Publicity and Critical Practice takes his lead from Rick Altman in his study of the use of publicity materials in the post-World War II period. His synchronic approach takes the year