TOWARD A THEORY OF GENRE: GENERIC DEFORMATION IN LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN PROSE FICTION

THOMAS L KENT, Purdue University

Abstract

This study attempts to demonstrate that a clear relation exists between form and meaning in literary texts, and it also attempts to demonstrate that this relation may be employed to clarify as well as to classify texts. Each of the first three essays confronts a particular problem in genre criticism. The first essay addresses the problem of generic description, and it suggests a technique for the systematic analysis of automatized texts. The term "automatized" is usurped from the critical lexicon generated by the Prague School of linguists, and the term means something like "formulaic" or "predictable." An automatized text possesses a plot structure that is highly formulaic, and the formula for a specific group of automatized texts may be codified. In the first essay of this study, I attempt to describe the formal conventions of the American dime novel in an effort to reveal the formula for this group of automatized texts. The second essay addresses the problem of "literariness," and it makes a formal distinction between sub-literary texts and texts we usually consider literary. I argue in chapter two that automatized texts, although different in content, share the same narrative structure and, therefore, may be classified as the same kind of narrative genre. Because it is formulaic and because it fulfills our reader expectations, the automatized text generates no uncertainty about its meaning, nor does it generate any new information. Literary texts, on the other hand, are high in information content because they deform the formulas produced by automatized genres so that our reader expectations are continually disappointed. As an example of this process, I attempt to show that two classic American texts, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, are deformations of two sub-literary genres, the dime novel and the "bad-boy" or "Aldrich" novel. The third essay attempts to demonstrate that a text's generic structure may directly influence its meaning. Although all literary texts deform in varying degrees the conventional elements of automatized genres, some texts so strenuously foreground the deforming process that the process itself becomes, in a certain sense, the subject matter of the text. These "epistemological" narratives confound the reader's ability to know the kind of text he is reading, and he seeks continually, but without success, to identify the generic category of the text. In chapter three, I attempt to show that three of Stephen Crane's most renowned stories, The Red Badge of Courage, "The Open Boat," and "The Blue Hotel," may be classified as epistemological texts because they confront on both the narrative and extra-textual levels our inability to comprehend our universe. Building on the discussion presented in the first three essays, chapters four and five offer tentatively a theoretical model that describes the relations between the levels of the generic hierarchy suggested by the preliminary essays. I argue in these chapters that generic categories may be formulated according to a text's degree of deformation or, stated another way, its manipulation of generic conventions from genres below it in the hierarchy. As generic deformation increases from the level of the automatized text up to the level of the epistemological text, the degree of reader uncertainty and narrative unpredictability within the text increases as well. Employing principles from information theory, I argue that the increase in deformation and uncertainty is the same as an increase in information content. Within the generic model, texts are grouped according to their information levels and not their subject matter, and this kind of classificatory system enables us to group together texts that are different in content but similar in narrative structure.

Degree

Ph.D.

Subject Area

American literature

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