Because there was confusion today, here's a few more thoughts about what genre is and what theme is.
Genre refers to the problem of defining different types of writing. I emphasize problem because the act of defining the type of writing a text is is precisely that--a problem. It's the same kind of problem that occurs when we attempt to define people by type. So, in the end, maybe assigning genre is kind of like stereotyping literature. It's useful to the extent of determining what something might be, but if we over rely on it, it can be detrimental. Sometimes assigning genre is easy. The House of the Seven Gables is a novel. Sometimes a piece of literature isn't of one specific type, but has characteristics of several genres. In that case we might label it as having multiple genres. The House of Seven Gables is of the Gothic genre and of the Novel of Manners genre. Other times, a piece of literature doesn't look like any genre we know. Some of you who know the book the story "On the Rainy River" came from called The Things They Carried. That book is part non-fiction, part fiction. It is also memoir, a novel, and a collection of short stories. Tim O'Brien is intent on not letting us say that it is any one type, it is all these types at once and none of them. When I decided that we read "On the Rainy River" as a short story as opposed to a chapter in the whole book, my decision had consequences. It meant that I decided we should read it only as genre short story, not as a genre memoir or genre novel. My decision also implied that it is fiction, especially since we read it with other fictional short stories. Perhaps my decision did injustice to the story. Or perhaps reading it as a short story brings certain things to light that reading it as a novel or a memoir would not. Undoubtedly if we read "On the Rainy River" as a chapter in the novel The Things They Carried other things would come to light. If we read it together with other memoirs about war, still other things would come to light. Luckily, my decision to call it a short story is only temporary. I'm not saying that we can only read it as a short story. In fact, I've taught it in other classes as a novel and as a memoir. Sometimes scholars claim that a piece of writing only exists as one type. I'm not that kind of scholar.
Another scenario exists where because a piece of writing doesn't fit among recognizable types it does not get read at all. This often happens when we try to distinguish between what is literature and what isn't. Historically authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne produced writing that has been called literature. These authors were said to form a canon (different than a cannon) of the best literature in the world. Authors from the same period like Catherine Maria Sedgwick or William Wells Brown (an African American) produced writing that was not historically considered literature, and they were not allowed to be part of the canon. Now most scholars would say that Catherine Maria Sedgwick or William Wells Brown wrote literature as important if not more important than the literature Nathaniel Hawthorne produced. How did that happen? Well, in part it was because of genre. Scholars defined new genres such as women's literature or African American literature. Because other scholars could now see these other kinds of literature as part of a larger type, they were able to get the recognition they deserved. Scholars were able to see that writing by these groups of people were just as imaginative and creative as the writing produced by people like Hawthorne albeit in a significantly different way. As a result, the canon was exploded. These other genres led us to read canonical authors and writing differently, and I dare say also helped us to understand the human condition even better.
On the downside, it also made us much less sure of what genres are and even what literature is. Some scholars wanted to do away with genre altogether and instead talk about modes. Modes, they said, were much more flexible than genres. We could create them when they were useful and dispose of them when they weren't useful anymore. Some other scholars said that really genres are the same as modes anyway, so they kept the name genre. Most scholars now agree that there are not a finite number of genres, and that new genres should continually be defined and old genres should continually be questioned. Yet, they also agree that genres are still a useful way of identifying different types of writing. So ostensibly it is possible that anything could be a genre, it just depends on how you describe it. Also, one piece of writing does not a genre make. Really, genres can only be defined by looking for similarities across different pieces of writing.
Now, theme. We had some trouble differentiating between a theme and a genre. The Penguin Dictionary tells us a theme is the central idea of the text and gives the example of jealousy. Pretty straight forward, it's hard to think of jealousy as a genre. Then someone in class made the case that tragedy was a theme. I initially said that tragedy is a genre. Then this person explained how she saw tragedy as one of the central ideas of the text and explained why. In the context she was talking about, it made sense to see tragedy as a theme. Then we had the problem of distinguishing a motif from a theme and from a symbol. Here it became clear that in the same way that it's hard to say a piece of writing is only of one genre (or a person is of only one type), it is hard to say that only one idea is central in a text. So motif is useful because it grants us license to talk about any number of dominant ideas without having to say one is more central than another.
A symbol, Penguin Dictionary tells us, is an object, animate or inanimate, that stands in for something else. For example, the chickens in the garden that we said stood in for the Pyncheon family. A symbol becomes a motif when it is repeated. Light, we said, is a motif. Undoubtedly light symbolizes something in the novel, and lights appear again and again in the novel. In that way, it becomes a dominant symbol. It pertains to the theme of representation in the novel as we said in class. We could also say representation serves as a motif in that there are repeated instances of representation (the portrait, the daguerreotype, representation through words, etc). So, ostensibly, anything could be a theme or a motif, it just depends on how you are talking about it. Yet, light is not an idea, so it would be hard to say it is a theme. I'm not sure that we could say light is a type either, so it would be hard to say that light is a genre.
I'm sorry to say that these terms always have some sense of vagary, but none-the-less they are common and useful in literary studies. And, in the end, I think literary studies remains a useful way for understanding the world and understanding the experience of living in the world even though as a discipline literary studies is much more open about it's own vagaries than other disciplines tend to be. Even though practitioners of literary studies are less willing to state their observations as absolutes than practitioners of other disciplines, it doesn't make their observations any less important or any less true.
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