On The Birth Of Genres

Abstract

The concept of genre as a cultural (rather than a narrowly literary) category was developed by Mikhail Bakhtin in his works of the 1920s and 1930s. For Bakhtin, a genre is a stable, conventional form of social communication that does not depend on the individual message or intention of interlocutors. “Certain features of language take on the specific flavor of a given genre: they knit together with specific points of view, special approaches, forms of thinking, nuances and accents characteristic of the given genre.”¹ The same mechanisms of “generic,” interpersonal communication transmit a cultural heritage from generation to generation. As is an archetype, a genre is a reservoir of a cultural unconscious, and it transcends the limits of personal meaning and individual creative imagination. A novelist invests her work with personal vision, but the genre of the novel possesses its own experience and world view that is communicated to the reader beyond any authorial intentions or efforts. Bakhtin and some of his disciples and followers, such as Georgy Gachev, analyzed the specific super-personal contents of such genres as the epic, the novel, and the tragedy. For example, the novel constructs a specific “experimental” status for the hero who “generically” oversteps all social, ethnic, and psychological boundaries. “One of the basic internal themes of the novel is precisely the theme of the inadequacy of a hero’s fate and situation to the hero himself.