Title: The genres of world literature: the case of magical realism
Abstract: The making of a new world literature – new world literary critical discourses, new
bodies of texts covering a broader and more diverse literary world – calls for a reevaluation of the old categories that have structured our discipline. One of them,
genre, has been conspicuously absent from many of the debates on world literature
of the last decade. Since Aristotle, and well into the twentieth century, genre was a
master-category and offered itself as the first signifying inscription of any given text.
Its absence from contemporary world literary discussions underscores a recent
break in the traditional conception of genre as the critical tool capable of realizing
the promise of order in a world of textual chaos.
Plato had established in the Republic the division between a poetry that describesor narrates actions (epic), and one that impersonates action (drama). But it was
Aristotle who inaugurated the tradition of genre theory in his Poetics, which organized the proliferation of texts produced and received under the rubric of poetry or
poetic mimesis into “kinds” according to the objects and events represented and the
mode of such representation. Tragedy and epic, then, were, respectively, dramatic
and narrative representations of the world of superior beings, while comedy was the
dramatic account of inferior ones. The surviving fragments of Aristotle’s Poetics set
the foundations for a discourse on genre – based on a taxonomic fetishism often
belied by actual literary practices – that has permeated the history of literary criticism since the seventeenth century, when literature began to be seen as an autonomous aesthetic discipline, and genre classification became the fundamental maneuver
of a discipline that sought to authorize its practices by appealing to a systematic
organization of knowledge derived from the natural sciences.
Occasional voices were raised in objection: in his “Dialogue on Poetry” (1800),Friedrich Schlegel had one of his characters utter: “I shudder whenever I open a
book where the imagination and its works are classified under rubrics” (Schlegel
1968: 76), and Benedetto Croce expressed similar discontent in his 1902 essay Aesthetic
as Science of Expression and General Linguistic (Croce 1978). Despite such demurrals,the system of genres has been at the center of literary studies ever since, at least until
the second half of the twentieth century, when the imperium of generic taxonomies
began to break down. In 1959, Maurice Blanchot proposed displacing genre as a
critical category so as to think about literature in isolation, indeterminate, internally
undifferentiated: “The book is the only thing that matters, the book as it is, far from
genres, outside of the categorical subdivisions – prose, poetry, novel, document – in
which it refuses to lodge, and to which it denies the power of establishing its place and
determining its form. A book no longer belongs to a genre; every book stems from
literature alone” (Blanchot 2003: 200). A few years later, in 1965, ReneWellek pointed
in the same direction, perhaps in a more descriptive than programmatic way: “The
theory of genres has not been at the center of literary study and reflection in this
century. Clearly this is due to the fact that in the practice of almost all writers of our
time genre distinctions matter little: boundaries are being constantly transgressed,
genres combined or fused, old genres discarded or transformed, new genres created,
to such an extent that the very concept has been called in doubt” (Wellek 1970: 225).
Many notables (for instance Derrida in his influential “The Law of Genre”) fol-lowed suit in declaring the emancipation of literature from the oppression of genre,
and the attack on genre as an organizing concept was redoubled among comparatists
in the 1970s and 1980s, when scholars increasingly questioned the applicability of
Western literary concepts to non-Western cultures, arguing for example that the
Japanese monogatari has to be seen as something distinct from “the novel,” and that
“literature” itself is a modern Western concept fundamentally different from the
traditional Chinese idea of wen (see, e.g., Yu 1998). All in all, the frequent absence of
genre from recent reconceptualizations of world literature is hardly surprising. There
are exceptions, however. Franco Moretti has invoked genre in his proposal to
restore world literature as the disciplinary frame of comparative literature, but
Moretti’s polemical proposal in “Conjectures on World Literature” (Moretti 2000)
(as well as in his monumental The Novel: History, Geography and Culture [2006]) does
not propose a renewed theory of genre, but deals with the novel in its historical and
geo-cultural variability. Moretti’s attention to the novel is certainly justified by its
global ubiquity and metonymic relation with the modern, but the place of the novel
within a generic world literary system is not addressed beyond its global hegemony,
and the concept of genre itself is not interrogated regarding its viability as a helpful
category for the project of world literature. A significant first step in such a direction
has been taken by Wai Chee Dimock, who proposes to consider genre “not just as a
theory of classification but, perhaps even more crucially, a theory of interconnection,” and when it comes to conceptualizing relations between texts, she suggests
dropping the rigid legality of genre in favor of the notion of kinship: “a remote
spectrum of affinities, interesting when seen in conjunction, but not themselves
organically linked” (Dimock 2006: 86). I would like to follow up on Dimock’s cue to
suggest the need for new world literary genres.
If today world literature can be understood (among other possibilities) as “a modeof circulation and of reading” (Damrosch 2003: 5), genre could still be a compelling
travelling vehicle for the realization of world literature as an interpretative project. In
this essay I argue, however, that traditional genres are no longer a useful matrix to
produce critical discourses on the trans-nature (trans-cultural, trans-historical, trans-generic) of this new world literature and its global imaginaries; that even though,
within a world literature paradigm, we still refer to novels, poems, short stories,
essays, and drama, the conventional conception of genre is not the productive
meaning-making machine it once was. The idea of the genres of world literature does not
present a problem of scale (the same traditional genres considered on a global scale)
or quantity (the addition of all the particular, local genres of the world), but it
introduces questions of novelty and specificity.
My hypothesis is that world literature produces new genres, or rather new genericformations, constellations of texts whose identity is defined in accordance with new
needs and new critical and aesthetic desires translated into new organizing principles:
(1) bridging the different historical and geopolitical ways in which texts are inscribed
and classified locally and globally within mappings made up of uneven power relations; (2) foregrounding the worldly in world literary texts – in other words, discovering the universalizable potential of akin texts; (3) accounting for the ways in
which texts mutate as they travel across cultures and languages, and therefore elude
the generic fixity of yesteryear. And these are only some of the new demands that
world literary genres should be able to satisfy. The trick, however, is that since
world literary generic formations can no longer be taken to be constructional norms
or interpretative guidelines, but the contingent effect of institutional readings
(anthologies, syllabi, prizes, conferences), these new genres are as stable or unstable
as the world literary interventions that produced them.
World literature has taken full advantage of its potential to open up traditionalgenres, re-shuffle texts, and produce new generic formations that address specific
cosmopolitan, trans-interpellations whose inscription in the discursive frame of world
literature depends either on their global spread, or on the global aesthetic and critical questions they pose. Just a few examples of new configurations of genres on a
global scale:1. Magical realism as the “literary language of the postcolonial world” (Bhabha
1990: 7) that would extend from Garcia Marquez’s Cien anos de soledad (1967)
(One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1975) to Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1980)
and Mo Yan’s Big Breasts and Wide Hips (1996) – I will return to the world literary
nature of the genre of magical realism.
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-09-14
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 7
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