The Ideology of Genre: A Comparative Study of Generic Instability

by Thomas O. Beebee

""This is a learned and lively book. It is a scholarly essay that makes for absorbing as well as highly enjoyable reading; it functions as an initiation to modern genre theory while making an important move within that field; it deals with culture high and popular, and a range of texts from the early modern era to the contemporary period; and its writing runs a generic gambit of its own, now theoretical exposition, now ingenious criticism, now theoretical fiction.""-Ross Chambers, University of Michigan ""Besides being impressed with Beebee's overall contribution to genre theory, I am also extremely impressed with his individual chapters, with his comparative methodology in practice, as he reads texts and genres against each other. These readings expose generic instability in very provocative ways. Each chapter, each pair of works struck me as exquisitely performed. This is a work that will appeal to theorists of genre but also to generalists, and especially to those of us beginning to work in cultural studies, for Beebee takes popular culture as seriously as elite, canonical culture.""-J. Douglas Canfield, University of Arizona In a series of comparative essays on a range of texts embracing both high and popular culture from the early modern era to the contemporary period, The Ideology of Genre counters both formalists and advocates of the ""death of genre,"" arguing instead for the inevitability of genre as discursive mediation. At the same time, Beebee demonstrates that genres are inherently unstable because they are produced intertextually, by a system of differences without positive terms. In short, genre is the way texts get used. To deny that genres exist is to deny, in a sense, the possibility of reading; if genres exist, on the other hand, then they exist not as essences but as differences, and thus those places within and between texts where genres ""collide"" reveal the connections between generic status, interpretive strategy, ideology, and the

312 pages, Paperback

First published August 11, 1994

Reviews

[Joanna Eleftheriou · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes, it's excellent--three of my four comps essays depend on it.

[Parlei · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is 'genre'? If you answers "fiction" or "nonfiction" or "scifi" or "romance," then you need to read this book, because it will have you rethinking everything you thought you knew about genre.

This is an excellent work for anyone reading literature. It lays out genre as a process and not a static system of categorization and "typing" of species, which by the time this book was published was already common knowledge among people who nerdily obsess about this kind of thing, and not common knowledge at all for the public. Genre for Beebee is a question of power, of ideology, which is why we have things like the "canon" still controlling the curriculum.

What Beebee does so well is riddle the history and theory of genre with funny details, such as his description of romance novel covers: "Need I describe [them]? A half-naked man and a half-naked woman in some sort of embrace, with a castle or cypress tree or clipper ship or mountain range in the background, perhaps a sword covering the pudenda..." (3) I don't often laugh out loud reading academic books, but little snippets like these had me rolling even when it became dense. Chapter 7 has this lovely meta-snippet: "Not clear is the purpose of this writing which I am not giving to the world... There remains the bizarre possibility that a young researcher desperate for publishable material planted a hearing device on one of these two and transcribed their ravings... It is even more probable to assume that the author was simply fudging her data, desperately hoping that her inferior creative effort would appear before the eyes of her tenure committee in the raiments of the loftier genre of research." (Ouch!)

I also appreciate the way Beebee lays out heavy thinkers (Derrida, Althusser) in a way that is not only completely accessible but sets aside some of the silly academic infighting for the real stakes. He was perhaps overly harsh on Marie-Louise Pratt, but I'm sure that could be a result of the academic genre of hating on someone at least once in your scholarship to prove your intellectual superiority, like two lions gnawing off the other's paw.

That aside, this was overall a truly insightful and necessary book.