Historical Relativism and the Study of Genre

This paper attempts to shift the focus of genre study somewhat. It draws its material from that amalgam of genres often jumbled together in a macrogenre referred to as "lyrical." Its contention is that (a) shifts in the nature of the patronage extended to writers and critics, that is, shifts occurring in the environment of the generic system proper, and (b) the stability of the poetic concept as fixed source of information on which the generic system of a given literature is based, mainly determine the evolution of genres. Both these contentions can only be understood against a background of genrestudy rooted in cultural relativism and which considers history an evolving series of events. They do not, could not figure prominently in either taxonomic or reductionist approaches to the genre problem. Taxonomic approaches inevitably flounder on the somewhat disturbing, but nonetheless real existence of so-called "borderline cases," whose proliferation sooner or later erodes the authority of the approach itself. Moreover, this type of approach is often taken to "absurd extremes" by "men suffering from the taxonomic itch" (Vivas 1968:99-100). A reductionist approach, on the other hand, invariably loses touch with the very reality it is supposed to describe. In the past this type of approach has taken the guise of the "philosophically 'deepened' but too little differentiated doctrine of the three genres" (Sengle 1969:9)1 which took the place of a much more differentiated - or should I say taxonomically overdifferentiated - system at the end of the eighteenth century. More recently the same approach surfaces in attempts at classifications of types of texts within the framework of text linguistics. Furthermore, genre study in the West has behaved, rather imperturbably, as if the phenomenon of literature itself was confined to