From Fact to Fiction

The Question of Genre in Autobiography and Early First-Person Novels

Bibliographic Data

ID5339282
AuthorsMichael Sinding (corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume39
Issue2
Pages107-130
Publication date2010-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSubStance (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0049-2426 • E-ISSN: 1527-2095
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/sub.0.0081
OpenAlexW2006316499
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited16

From Fact to Fiction:The Question of Genre in Autobiography and Early First-Person Novels Michael Sinding (bio) There is not a more perplexing affair in life to me, than to set about telling anyone who I am—for there is scarce any body I cannot give a better account of than of myself. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Let us leave, if possible, myself;—But 'tis impossible,—I must go along with you to the end of the work. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy Today, genre categories and genre thinking are regarded skeptically and suspiciously. Genre criticism is viewed as pigeonholing and border policing, opposed to creative transgression and intermixing. We hear that genres cannot be defined; that genre concepts give only a broad and vague perspective on the text; that texts have no pure genre, or undermine their generic forms; that genre is unimportant or even illusory—just formal features coincidentally shared by texts more fully defined by content, representational strategies, or ideological forces. But categories of literary works are no less real than categories of other things. We do not claim, because there are specific dogs, no one of which reduces to its category, that therefore there are no dogs. In fact, even studies premised on some idea of genre focus more on individual texts, writers, and historical contexts (e.g. Othello as tragedy, as Shakespearean tragedy, as Elizabethan tragedy, as illustrating the politics of Elizabethan tragedy); their skepticism of generic categories and their operations springs from the fact that genres are so good at eluding analysis.1 The frustration scholars feel when considering genre probably derives from their intuitive reliance on a "common-sense" but erroneous conception of what categories are and how they work. That frustration can be alleviated, and genre theory and genre-based studies advanced, by turning to psychological and linguistic research to update our view of categories. Mark Turner remarked in 1991 on how essential and inevitable [End Page 107] this development is (Reading, 150). I will sketch some of the consequences of such an approach, which are profound, not just in shifting emphasis but in changing the kinds of questions we ask and the ways we try to answer them. This cognitive approach relates in complex ways to other approaches, conflicting with some and cohering with others. Its close ties to discourse studies can help us to integrate discourse-genre analyses into literary study; its conflicts with poststructuralist theory can qualify exaggerated analyses of literary genres in terms of putative ideological functions.2 The central issue distinguishing theories of nonliterary genres from their literary counterparts is the issue of communicative function or purpose. Nonliterary genres are characterized primarily by their functions: they are typified rhetorical responses to recurring situations, conventionally structured to perform certain social actions. But the dimension of function, and its place in genre structure, is fundamentally different in literary genres. Literature is thought to have no direct function, or many, or a function too complex to be usefully defined. A natural way to investigate this disparity is to compare what happens to generic function and form when a nonliterary genre becomes literary. The early novel furnishes rich material for this topic, since it absorbed many nonliterary genres (journals, jestbooks, "anatomies" etc.), as well as earlier literary forms like romance, epic, the picaresque, comedy, tragedy, and satire. Biography and autobiography are among the most interesting examples, because the life-story structure has been so central and pervasive in the history of the novel. While nonliterary autobiography is tractable to a discourse analysis in terms of rhetorical-social action, when the genre is turned to literary ends, the result is a diversification of communicative purposes and an indefinite expansion of its audience, along with increased flexibility of structure. This structural freedom is offset by increased reliance on other genre-structuring principles: story-structure, form-function interconnections, emulation of traditional prototypes, and contrast with other genres. Consequently, literary genres are better characterized in terms of thematic rather than ideological purposes, but our cognitive approach suggests an alternative account of the relation of genre to society and ideology. Cognitive Category Theory and Genre Theory What is most distinctive about cognitive category theory is

Aesthetics · Art · Biography · Criticism · Epistemology · Fiction theory · Ideology · Literary criticism · Literary fiction · Literary genre · Literature · Politics · Reflexive pronoun · Skepticism · Tragedy (event) · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition · Law · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy

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