Are Distinctions Between Genres Still Relevant?

Abstract

Why do readers — and especially literary critics — feel the need to classify works of art into categories which one often calls genres? On the one hand fashionable ideas lead some commentators to argue that, in this infinitely innovative world, genres have become irrelevant because traditional rules have been subverted. The ineffable text (sacralized in italics) is all that counts. Yet, on the other, their description of works of literature inevitably resorts to such terms as ‘fantasy’, ‘allegory’, ‘realism’, ‘tragedy’, even if they carefully place these in inverted commas. As the ‘reception’ school of criticism has convincingly shown, a novel, poem or play takes on its full meaning when it is integrated in the framework of the reader’s or spectator’s generic expectations.¹