Mauvais genres

New Literary History

Volumn 34, Issue 3, 2003, Pages 452-479

  Prince, Michael B ^a  

^a BOSTON UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950560088     PISSN: 00286087     EISSN: 1080661X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/nlh.2003.0036     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. Judging from the new Blackwell Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (1998), that time appears to be not yet here. Amongst units devoted to "Formalisms," "Structuralism and Linguistics," "Psychoanalysis," "Marxism," "Deconstruction and Post-Modernism," "Feminism," "Gender Studies, Gay/Lesbian Studies and Queer Theory," "Historicisms," "Ethnic and Post-Coloniality," and "Cultural Studies," there exists no unit on genre or genre theory
2. David Hartley, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations (New York, 1971), vol. 1, p. 364
3. For the connection between the former "plurality" and the latter "divisibility," and for research assistance with this essay, I am grateful to Dove Pedlosky, whose undergraduate thesis at Boston University (2003) explores relations between science and literature in Henry More, Thomas Burnet, David Hume, Erasmus Darwin, and Joseph Priestly
4. George Berkeley, "The Analyst; or A Discourse Addressed to an Infidel Mathematician," in The Works of George Berkeley, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, vol, 3 (Oxford, 1901), p. 19
5. Lee Smolin, "Counting Space," Natural History: The Magazine of the Museum of Natural History, 110 (2002), 14
6. Richard Price, A Free Discussion of Materialism, and Philosophical Necessity, in a Correspondence between Dr. Price, and Dr. Priestly (London, 1778), p. 62
7. For a good example of the Germano-centric interpretation of the origins of modern aesthetics, see The Origin of Modern Critical Thought: German Aesthetic and Literary Criticism from Lessing to Hegel, ed. David Simpson (Cambridge, 1988), which anthologizes only German authors
8. In this regard, Roman Jakobson's important essay, "The Dominant," in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), pp. 41-46, although not explicitly about genre, represents an important contribution to genre theory
9. Thomas Stanley, The History of Philosophy: Containing the Lives, Opinions, Actions, and Discourses of the Philosophers of Every Sect, 3rd ed. (London, 1701), p. 59
10. For a vivid expression of this optimism in terms that parallel the present discussion, see Rohault 's System of Natural Philosophy (1735) : "Since the World is the Work, or rather the Diversion of the Hand of God, who could divide it in as many Parts as he pleased, and dispose them in an infinite variety of Ways; it is impossible for us to know the Number or Order of them, by any Reason drawn from the Nature of the Things themselves; and we can only know by Experience, which Way God was pleased to choose, out of those many in which they might have been disposed. We ought therefore to consider every Particular, as far as the Weakness of human Nature, assisted by all the Helps of Art and Industry, will permit, that we may go back, as far as we are able, from the Effects to the Causes; and first take Notice, how things appear to us, before we make a Judgment of the Nature and Disposition of them." Rohault's System of Natural Philosophy, illustrated with Dr. Samuel Clark's Notes, tr. John Clarke (London, 1735), vol. 2, p. 4
11. I am of course minimizing the famous differences between the beautiful and the sublime, and simultaneously taking issue with the mistaken overemphasis constantly given to the sublime at the expense of the beautiful. The sublime is beauty's supplement: as inductive inference goes, so, unfortunately goes beauty as well, and with it the analogue of design. The sublime reasserts the validity of design (the categorical) at the very moment of its apparent transgression. Fear is only aesthetic at a framed distance, and the frame reconstitutes what beauty can no longer provide. Literary historians who emphasize the sublime at the expense of the beautiful are usually invested in a discontinuous account of historical change and think that the rupture promised by sublimity will provide a fit analogue for their own expository practices. On this point see Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in History, Aesthetics, and the Subject (Oxford, 1989)
12. and The Sublime: A Reader, ed. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (Cambridge, 1996)
13. The claim that mauvais genres are the types of the ideal needs to be distinguished from another influential claim about genre, namely that genres are defined not by what they include but by what they exclude. In the Derridean account, genre, because bound up with classification, is an expression of the law, but every genre also breaks the law by virtue of its own necessary (and necessarily arbitrary) positing of an other that stands outside the set (see "The Law of Genre," tr. Avital Ronell, Glyph: Textual Studies, 7 [1980], 202-29). The proposition that mauvais genres are the type of all genres, even the best might be thought to bank upon a logical truism all done up in rhetorical display. Every set functions through inclusion and exclusion; the boundary between inside-set and outside-set is not itself part of the set; therefore the boundary will be porous, a figure for indeterminacy. There will be seepage of material across a semipermeable membrane. Worse, what's inside the bracket only gains its categorical stature through an ultimately arbitrary act of exclusion, whereby that which is deemed outré must be held constantly at bay through a more or less frequent application of verbal or physical violence. The proximity of a male suppressive force and a female principle of indeterminacy brings on genre's admixture with the police and the vagina (that is where the rhetorical display comes in, as if it were not ornament for a skeptical commonplace). The Derridean critique of genre works if one has already delimited genre to the set of operations that restrict the superabundance of meaning. I am indeed suggesting that the recourse to genre has much to do with this problem of excess signification, but I do not see so much to blame, as if there were an alternative to imposing a limit through one's chosen categories. Genre theory takes note of the category in formation, even when the category is not a genre. If one finds at a given time, within the restricted domain of literary theory, an account of the superabundance of meaning that collapses the problematic of part and whole into a default of the sign-function itself, and if the appeal of this way of organizing the interpretation of texts engenders one and a half generations of frisky deconstructors (who in the second generation hastily segue to something less frisky, more committed) - then surely the phenomenon must be of interest to theory, though in this case it would appear to be genre theory that accounts for deconstruction, rather than deconstruction that criminalizes genre
14. Francis Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue, 2nd. ed. [1726], facsimile edition (New York, 1971), p. xiii; hereafter cited in text as IO
15. Sil Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert W. Wark (New Haven, 1997), Discourse II, p. 27; hereafter cited in text as DA
16. Burke makes much the same point in his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful when he observes that the beautiful is still too bound up in the slow and painstaking process of rational inference to strike awe and fear into the observer. "Whilst we consider the Godhead merely as he is an object of the understanding, which forms a complex idea of power, wisdom, justice, goodness, all stretched to a degree far exceeding the bounds of human comprehension, whilst we consider the divinity in this refined and abstracted light, the imagination and passions are little or nothing affected" (A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton [Notre Dame, 1958], p. 68)
17. John Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime (London, 1947), p. 18; hereafter cited in text
18. Steven Pinker, "How to Get Inside a Student's Head: What President Bush Didn't Say about Education," The New York Times, 31 January 2003
19. Noël Antoine Pluche, Spectacle de la Nature: or Nature Display'd being Discourses on such Particulars of Natural History as were thought most proper to Excite the Curiosity and Form the Minds of Youth, tr. Mr. Humphreys, 8th ed. (London, 1754); hereafter cited in text. I am grateful to my friend Doug Winslow for introducing me to this book