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CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
ISSN 1481-4374
Purdue University Press ©Purdue University
Volume 7 (2005) Issue 1
Article 4
Generic Identit y and Intertex tuality
Gener Iden ity and In extualit y
Marko Juvan
Juva
University of Ljubljana
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Juvan, Marko. "Generic Identity and Intertextuality."
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
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CLCWeb
Volume 7 Issue 1 (March 2005) Article 4
Marko Juvan, "Generic Identity and Intertextuality"
<http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol7/iss1/4>
Contents of
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
7.1 (2005)
<http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol7/iss1/>
Abstract:
In his paper, "Generic Identity and Intertextuality," Marko Juvan proposes that an anti-
essentialist drive -- a characteristic of recent genology -- has led postmodern scholars to the
conviction that genre is but a system of differences and that its matrix cannot be deduced from a
particular set of apparently similar texts. Juvan argues that the concept of intertextuality may
prove advantageous to explain genre identity in a different way: genres exist and function as far
as they are embedded in social practices that frame intertextual and meta-textual links/references
to prototypical texts or textual series. In Juvan's view, genres are cognitive and pragmatic devices
for intertextual pattern-matching and texts or textual sets become generic prototypes by virtue of
intertextual and meta-textual interaction: on one side there is the working (influence) of semantic,
syntactic, and pragmatic features of prototypical texts on their domestic and foreign literary
offspring; on the other side we see meta-textual descriptions and intertextual derivations or
references, which establish or revise retroactively the hard core of genre pattern. Any given text
is, because of the generic and pragmatic component of the author's communicative competence,
dependent on existing genre patterns.
Marko Juvan, "Generic Identity and Intertextuality"
page 2 of 11
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Marko JUVAN
Generic Identity and Intertextuality
Translated from the Slovene by Andrej E. Skubic
In
Kinds of Literature,
Alastair Fowler notes that 1) literature is not a uniform class of phenomena
but rather an "aggregate," 2) literature itself is actually viewed as a genre, comprising different
genres in various socio-cultural environments and periods, and organizing changing genological
systems and hierarchies, and 3) genre is a "concept with blurred edges" (i.e., a fuzzy set), since
its members only bear Wittgensteinian family resemblances: "Individual members are related in
various ways, without necessarily having any single feature shared in common by all" (3-19, 41).
Although Fowler builds his genological synthesis fairly descriptively and prefers an erudite
accumulation of examples, primarily from Anglo-American literature, to a rigorous theoretical
argument, the above theses fit well into current views which have, since the 1970s, reshaped our
thinking about traditional genological systems. After the paradigm shift from the modern to the
post-modern -- usually associated with the emergence of post-structuralism, deconstruction, and
reader-response criticism -- it was anti-essentialism that took power as the foundation of "normal"
science, to borrow Kuhn's term. Anti-essentialism contested categorical thinking of essentialism
based on long metaphysical tradition (see, e.g., Margolis) and it was genre theories that, within
poetics, figured as a stronghold of essentialism ever since Aristotle (see Schaeffer,
Qu'est-ce
12-
24, 32-38).
Jean-Marie Schaeffer notes in his paper "Literary Genres and Textual Genericity" that genres,
in theories from the Enlightenment and nineteenth-century historicism to structuralism, were
regarded as internal forms, essences or deep structures from which the texts emerge. According to
this view, a literary work with its meaning and form is essentially a consequence, an organic
development of its generic core. This was the approach grounding Goethe's conception of three
"natural forms" of poetry, as well as most Romantic notions of literary types. Thereafter,
metaphysical categories ruled over genre theory for more than a century. Theorists attempted to
determine the "essences" of individual literary kinds or genres with concepts like subject, object,
time, or space. The essentialist approach to literary kinds and genres was in agreement with the
general essentialist view of literature in that period. The line of argument was roughly as follows:
literary discourse, defined by its aesthetic, imaginative, and other inner features, is divided into
three types -- lyric, epic, and dramatic literature -- and only those works which belong to one of
these "natural forms" can be considered literary. Schaeffer concludes that these theories reified
the concept of genre. Literary scholars explained the relationship of a particular text to a genre
and literature as hierarchic inclusion: the text "belongs" to a literary kind or genre; the latter
belongs to one of the "natural forms" (types); and the type is necessarily part of the concept of
literature.
While essentialism insisted that individual phenomena (like particular texts) possess
a priori
essences which define their identity within generalized category (such as a literary kind), anti-
essentialism claimed that literary phenomena are indeterminable, without a stable content, and, as
individual items, not bound to represent or illustrate a single type. On the one hand the identity of
literary texts depend on their relationship to other equivalent phenomena, i.e., on the system of
differences, and on the other hand, on the observer's socio-cultural, cognitive or ideological
perspective as well as on historically contingent roles texts play in a given culture. Neither
literature nor genre are therefore concepts that modern scholars would dare to describe like
Goethe, who insisted with a fierce determination of a genius that poetry had only three forms
given by nature (Hempfer 67). Those who nowadays want to demonstrate in literary and culture
scholarship that they take recent theory seriously, would not dare to propose that literature or
genre should have a permanent essence (on the issue of literariness, see Juvan, "On Literariness"
<http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol2/iss2/1/>). Instead of essence, internal form, archetype,
Grundhaltung,
deep structure, recognizable worldview, etc. (see Hempfer 56-110), which were
supposed to be common to all texts belonging to a literary kind, genres -- as literature in general -
Marko Juvan, "Generic Identity and Intertextuality"
page 3 of 11
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- look like to retain merely an identity defined by their use value or, in other words, by their
function in the network of cultural practices (on this, see Glowinski 83).
In the heroic age of (post-)structuralist attacks against essentialism one could perhaps still
hope that the term "genre" might help to solve the crux of drawing the dividing line between
literature and non-literary discourses. Tzvetan Todorov was ready to admit that texts which had
been in Europe classified as literature for about two hundred years were only similar according to
their societal roles and the types of inter-subjective relations involved. Structural resemblances
between texts or utterances could only be sought at the level of "discourse genres." However, in
Todorov's opinion, these genres with the conventions for their production and reception frequently
cross the borders of literature. He therefore proposed that scholarship on literature -- instead of
trying to delineate and maintain a homogenous concept of "literature" -- should observe the
plurality of genres' discursive rules within and outside the aesthetic realm (Todorov 13-26). On the
other hand, Todorov maintained that, in comparison to literature, genres were more certain,
objective. They are like conventions governing the internal structure of speech and linking it to
ideologies of the socio-historical context. But the very concept of genre soon came upon a similar
fate as Todorov's concept of literature. Thomas O. Beebee is neither the first nor the last theorist
emphasizing that literary genres are merely ways of using texts. Genres only exist -- to summarize
Saussure and Derrida freely -- as systems of differences without their own, positive content or
structure (Beebee 257). As many theorists of literariness, Beebee adopts the pragmatic definition
of generic system as "economics of discourse" or an institution (Beebee 274, 277). The view of
genre as institution, which has proved to be an extremely productive theoretical analogy ever
since Wellek and Warren's
Theory of Literature
(see Fishelov 86-99), was adapted by Beebee from
Fredric Jameson (Jameson also understands genres as "essentially literary institutions, or social
contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a
particular cultural artefact" [Jameson 106-07]).
In the late 1960s, the resistance to essentialism or -- to use the once popular Derridaian
terminology -- the "metaphysics of presence" gave birth both to the idea of intertextuality and the
critical observation that literature was an institution or middle-class ideological fiction (see Juvan,
Intertekstualnost
52, 92-104, 117-38). The term intertextuality was, as known, coined by Julia
Kristeva between 1966 and 1969; revisiting Bakhtin's dialogism to revitalize the allegedly formalist
French structuralism and imbue it with historical, social, and political issues of the writing/reading
subject, Kristeva also advocated a "different logic" ("une autre logique"), which should replace
substances and
essences
with
relations
between entities (Kristeva 150-53, 172-73). The idea of
intertextuality therefore originated from anti-essentialist post-modern and post-structuralist
thought. Intertextuality, together with related concepts such as "writing" or "signifying practice,"
was introduced in the context of disassembling the once homogeneous concept of literature. In the
critical light of French radical
theory,
"literature" turned into a functionalist plurality of "literatures"
(see Leitch 59-60) or even completely lost its contours in an anarchic heteroglossia. The borderline
between the aesthetic-artistic and other genres of symbolic exchange was no more supposed to be
pre-given; it was claimed, instead, that it was socially constructed by means of institutionalized
practices, such as the school system, literary history, and publishing. But later on even genre
itself, although at first seeming to contain more substance than literature, proved to be nothing
more than a network of inter- and supra-textual relationships. However, it is not only that
intertextuality figures as an interpretative framework challenging established genological notions.
Genological considerations, on their part, have also improved the explanation of key phenomena of
intertextuality. We have become aware of the literary kinds whose identity indeed depends
precisely on intertextuality that is foregrounded, so that the reader is ready to grasp it as a clear
expression of the writer's communicative strategy. Marked and explicit intertextuality can be called
citationality (Juvan,
Intertekstualnost
57-59) and the literary kinds depending on it citational
kinds: they include parody, travesty, burlesque, pastiche, counterfeit,
cento,
collage, paraphrase,
variation, imitation, sequel, summarization, interpretation, etc. (see Juvan,
Intertekstualnost
31-
46, 265-70). Citational genres function in a similar way as "normal" genres, although they could
also be seen as their modulations, as certain genologists hold about satire or other modal terms,
Marko Juvan, "Generic Identity and Intertextuality"
page 4 of 11
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such as tragic, elegiac, bucolic (consequently,
parodic
novel,
parodic
sonnet, etc.). It cannot be
denied that a text may be identified as a parody regardless of whether it is formally a sonnet, a
tale, or a grotesque play. There are multiple reasons for that: 1) the texts denoted as parodies
refer to their pre-texts in a parallel manner (by caricaturing their features and/or by introducing
disharmonies in content/form) -- therefore they exhibit a similar intertextual syntax and
semantics, 2) they play analogous communicative roles (from entertainment to criticism of ideas
or styles) -- they are therefore related by their pragmatics, 3) they have successfully formed a
cognitive class backing up literary perceptions of authors, readers, poeticists, critics and others --
this can be seen in the fact that a specific genre term has been conceived (the term "parody" is
actually one of the oldest in literary scholarship) and that an extensive body of meta-discourse
was produced about it since Aristotle (on this, see Juvan,
Intertekstualnost
37-45).
How to discern between a romance and a mystery novel, between a sonnet and a ghazal, a
comedy and a tragedy? To be sure, the text's linguistic structures are something else than the
genre consciousness (see Glowinski 89) of those who perceive its specific patterns. Genre
consciousness is like any other knowledge: it is either "theoretical," temporally and cognitively
distanced from acts of writing and reading, or "practical," simultaneous and innate to these acts.
In the latter case, it depends on historical and pragmatic circumstances in which an individual
activates it. In genology, attention has been drawn to these differences more than once: for
example, in the discrimination between genological objects, terms and concepts (see
Skwarczynska), or, between the object and meta-descriptive generic levels (se Hempfer 16, 99-
102). Todorov, too, distinguished the abstract sorting of "text classes" in theory from empirical
accounts of the actual life of genres in social discourse (47-49). Genre concepts are formed and
promoted by journalist literary criticism and the discourse of literary studies (see Pavlicic 33-37,
57-63, 70-77, 98-122); "endogenetic" generic terms inform author-dependent genre choices while
"exogenetic" labels imply interpretations and classifications made
ex post
by lay and professional
audiences (see Schaeffer,
Qu'est-ce
77, 147-53).
Determining distinctive features of genres with reference to paradigmatic and borderline
examples can therefore be deemed a theoretical activity, already removed from the heat of literary
production and reading. But theory is by no means an opposite of historical practice. Theory itself
is but a special genre embraced by such practice. As a meta-discourse producing genre concepts
and systems, it enters into intricate relationships with the primary literary discourse, i.e., the
writing and reading of literary texts. One such affiliation was indicated by Todorov. Meta-discourse
on genres -- it may appear not only in literary criticism, but also in literary texts themselves (e.g.,
satires) -- bears witness to the historical existence of literary kinds. For example, the continuation
of "tragedy" in seventeenth-century France can be seen not only in the recurrent patterns in a
series of texts, but also in the consciousness of "tragedy" as a recognizable unit in the bustle of
discourse; this awareness is historically documented owing to the genres of poeticists' disputes
about "tragedy" and through the formation of meta-discursive concepts (see Todorov 49).
Theoretical discourse displays a methodically regulated knowledge; a telling example is that, from
Aristotle and the mediaeval
rota Vergiliana
to the genre maps by Frye, Scholes, or Hernadi (see
Fowler 235-46), theorists were inclined to produce closed-set classifications, based on structural
invariants of the texts stemming from different periods and environments. They considered textual
volume, use of verse/prose, form, prevalent mode (dialogue, narrative, exposition, confession,
etc.), style, topic, story, characters, emotional and evaluative mood, situation, the subject of
utterance and other factors. In principle, such attempts construct genre concepts and systems
only in retrospective,
ex post.
The poetics of genre therefore often tends toward universalism --
even in the case of theoreticians who, like Wilhelm von Humboldt, appreciated historicism and
individuality of artistic creation (see Dolezel 16-25, 72-74; see also Zubarev
<http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol1/iss1/2/>).
There are comparatively few observers of literature involved in this post-activity, but their
meta-descriptions, generalisations, or prescriptions can indeed be followed by countless academic
readers. This was the case with Aristotle and his distinction of three manners of speech (lexis) and
the German Romantics and their three literary types, either subjective or objective (see Genette,

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