Approaches to

Literature
HOW CAN WE UNDERSTAND GENRE OR GENRES?
GENRE AND CINEMA, GENRE AND SOCIETY
Things we have done and are going to do

LAST WEEK THIS WEEK

• Theme(s) • The Definition of Genre
• Opening from City of Sadness (1989)
• Why is genre essential to our
• What is a theme? What is a moral?
understanding of literature?
• Five Tips for Identifying Themes
• Group Exercises
• “Wildwood,” Junot Diaz and certain
controversies
• Mid-term Review
Two Titles, One Text
THE PERSONAL HISTORY OF
MURDER AT MARPLETHORPE DAVID MARPLETHORPE
“The clock on the mantelpiece said ten “The clock on the mantelpiece said ten
thirty, but someone had suggested thirty, but someone had suggested
recently that the clock was wrong. As recently that the clock was wrong. As
the figure of the dead woman lay on the figure of the dead woman lay on
the bed in the front room, a no less the bed in the front room, a no less
silent figure glided rapidly from the silent figure glided rapidly from the
house. The only sounds to be heard house. The only sounds to be heard
were the ticking of that clock and the were the ticking of that clock and the
loud wailing of an infant.” loud wailing of an infant.”
Genre: A Social Institution
Genre: a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a
particular style, form, or content (Merriam-Webster). Coming from the ancient Greek
work γένος: birth, offspring, family, kind.
“One of the oldest analogies to the experience of reading our hypothetical opening
paragraph, then, is that of operating within a social code: genre, as many students of
the subject have observed, functions much like a code of behavior established between
author and reader” (2)
It is important to remember that this goes both ways. You are expected to follow
certain rules, while the author promises, at least implicitly, not to violate certain
fundamental assumptions.
 Degrees of Disbelief
“Similarly, when we begin to read a detective novel, we
agree to a willing suspension of disbelief. We may, for
example, be expected to accept the unlikely proposition
that our detective is gifted with quite uncanny acuteness,
or that half a dozen otherwise normal people are all
possessed with a motive for murder and have all
gathered on the same house-boat” (3)

However, this willing suspension of disbelief is necessary

for literature; it is an issue of degree.
Cultural Variances of a Genre
“Generic prescriptions also resemble social
codes in that differ from culture to culture and
in that they may in fact be neglected, though
seldom lightly or unthinkingly … Readers have
often noted that genre invites yet another
analogy from daily experience: the way a social
institution, such as an established church or a
legislative body, functions” (3)
Give me examples of movies you hate and why!
 If you remember what we talked about from
“Boys and Girls” …

You’ll find this passage very familiar: “A school

curriculum at once reflects and generates
assumptions about history; the Bildungsroman
embodies presuppositions about when and how
people mature and in turn encourages its reader
to see that process of maturation in the terms
the novel itself has established, even when he
encounters it outside the novel” (4).
Three main genres: narrative, drama, lyric
“Many maintain that narrative, drama, and lyric demand to be distinguished from
types like the Bildungsroman and the epigram: the three forms that comprise that
important triad are much broader than others, and they are further distinguished by
the fact that they recur throughout Western literature”(4).
“Narrative, Lyric, and Drama are the three general literary forms into which writing,
especially poetry, has traditionally been grouped.  A narrative tells a story or a tale;
drama is presented on a stage, where actors embody characters; lyric has been loosely
defined as any short poem other than narrative and drama, where poets express their
state of mind” (U. of Chicago, Keywords for Media Studies:
http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/narrativelyricdrama.htm)
Narrative: Epic, Ballard. Drama: Tragedy, Comedy. Lyrics: Odes, Sonnets
What defines a generic difference?
• Prosody (meter, rhythm), decorum, state of mind, setting, mood, etc.
• “When analyzing tragedy, Aristotle describes not only the subject matter appropriate
to that genre but also the effect it should have on its audience – ‘the plot ought to be
so constructed that, even without the aid of the eye, he who hears the tale told will
thrill with horror and melt to pity at what takes place’” (5)
• Decorum, An Important Hierarchical Concept
• meaning: appropriate social behaviors
• in literary studies: literary and dramatic propriety, the necessary correspondence between
form and content (which would become an essential criterion for aesthetics.)
• In his Mimesis, Erich Auerbach argues that the Bible breaks away from this tradition of
“rhetorics” and invents the “mixed style.”
 Now, the first group exercise

Take a look at this list of

fictions that we have read so
far. How would you classify
them? Why? Provide
explanations to your
classifications.
Genres: family resemblances and psychologies

“The major reason it proves so difficult to arrive at a simple and satisfactory

definition of individual genres or of genre itself, then, is that the concept
encompasses so many different literary qualities. Since the nineteenth century, critics
have energetically pursue parallels between genres and biological species …” (7)

Why is this inappropriate?

“The limit of art is the absence of limitation”
--Orson Welles
“Since the time of romantic criticism, it has been fashionable to denigrate generic
prescriptions by focusing on the ways authors transmute or transcend them. Many
contemporary critics have reinforced this tendency by emphasizing the conflict
between the individual work and its literary predecessors” (8)
“The most distinguished authors, as well as their more mediocre contemporaries,
freely adopt the plots they inherit from other writers – after all, most of the tales
recounted by Chaucer’s pilgrims are versions of well-known stories, and
Shakespeare, like other Renaissance playwrights, bases most of his plays on plots so
familiar that Ben Jonson could label one of them ‘a mouldy tale’” (9)
 The Unattainable Lady
SONNET 1 (PETRACH)

O JOYOUS, blossoming, ever-blessed flowers!

’Mid which my pensive queen her footstep sets;
O plain, that hold’st her words for amulets
And keep’st her footsteps in thy leafy bowers!
O trees, with earliest green of springtime hours,
And all spring’s pale and tender violets!
O grove, so dark the proud sun only lets
His blithe rays gild the outskirts of thy towers!
O pleasant country-side! O limpid stream,
That mirrorest her sweet face, her eyes so clear,
And of their living light canst catch the beam!
I envy thee her presence pure and dear.
There is no rock so senseless but I deem
It burns with passion that to mine is near.
Sonnet 147: My love is as a fever, longing still

My love is as For that which longer nurseth the disease,

a fever, Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,

longing still Th’ uncertain sickly appetite to please.

My reason, the physician to my love,
(Shakespeare
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
)
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed:
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
 By this he knew she wept with waking eyes:

Modern That, at his hand's light quiver by her head,

Love: I The strange low sobs that shook their common bed
Were called into her with a sharp surprise,
(George And strangled mute, like little gaping snakes,
Meredith) Dreadfully venomous to him. She lay
Stone-still, and the long darkness flowed away
With muffled pulses. Then, as midnight makes
Her giant heart of Memory and Tears
Drink the pale drug of silence, and so beat
Sleep's heavy measure, they from head to feet
Were moveless, looking through their dead black years,
By vain regret scrawled over the blank wall.
Like sculptured effigies they might be seen
Upon their marriage-tomb, the sword between;
Each wishing for the sword that severs all.
 Generic Disappearance: Why?
• A lot of literary genres you are going to encounter in this
program are dying. Why? Because genres are a certain
organization of human affairs, a certain hierarchy of forms, a
certain understanding of the world. As our society and culture
change, our genres mutate as well. Sometimes, they wither
away.
• For example, detective fictions have evolved into procedural
dramas (like CSI, courtroom drama, medical drama). But few
of us still read detective stories on a daily basis.
• Sometimes, genres can also be revived to a great effect, such as
“chapter novel” ( 章回小說 ) …
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