Document Type
Introduction
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Genre, in its imbrication with the Latin gens, inevitably presents itself as a family romance. But, as in the Freudian sense, this romance is also "tragic," full of intrigue, violence, and disintegration. Just as we don't know our place in the family, we cannot know genre. It is always exceeding and leaving itself, its members dismembered, then coming back to be remembered in various acts of incest. Jacques Derrida, primarily in his discussions of Hélène Cixous, insists on the possible singularity of the genius, the writer who cannot be brought within the family of genre. Although certain artists may foreground this character more than others, it is indeed the possibility that we encounter whenever presented with the question of bringing the family of genre together. Genre is the family that is impossible, for multitudinous reasons, to keep together. But no matter how far a genius runs, he or she cannot escape genre either, so the concept of genre helps us, as critics, to provisionally map its prodigalities and incestuous events as distortions of what was never possible. We desire genre in the form of its distortions. Northrop Frye, a notable fan of genre criticism famously claims that the genre itself is speaking through the individual text. Steve Neale similarly, but differently offers that the generic expectations condition the reception. We recognize it only via its liminality, for genre exists at the threshold between analogies in form and a recursive version of the proverbial children's game, "one of these things is not like the others."
Repository Citation
Clinton, Alan, and Marc Ouellette. "Editors' Introduction." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 9, no. 3, 2009, pp. 1–4. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol9/iss3/8