Introduction

Many years have passed since Mikhail Bakhtin and later Tzvetan Todorov changed the direction of genre study from classification to its functions in human speech and behavior. And although much has been accomplished in the study of the novel and nonliterary writing, there have been few attempts to envision genre study as a theory of behavior or as one that can provide an insight into the arts and sciences.

This issue and the following one "Theorizing Genres II" are an effort to expand the range of genre study as well as to examine its current practices. What is remarkable about such study is that examples of genre appear in language, in music, art, history, government, and human behavior. It is obvious that genres appear in popular culture—in films, television, journalism, and comic strips. Similar genres cross national boundaries and thus create problems about the particular social nature of genres. Genres appear in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial societies and some genres such as folktales and proverbs endure virtually unchanged despite immense social changes.

Genre study is more than another approach to literature or to social institutions or scientific practices; it analyzes our procedures for acquiring and accumulating knowledge including the changes that such knowledge undergoes. Genre study itself has undergone changes from Plato's and Aristotle's view of poetry and tragedy to genre as essential classifications to speech genres of everyday life. The very term "genre" is an example of its transformation from the earlier "kind." "Kind" was related to "kin" and was a procedure for distinguishing group behavior by attributing its belonging to a family or clan. "Kind" underwent transformation to "genre" in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, a postrevolutionary term derived perhaps from the French "gens"—people—to move from a more refined or limited concept to one less confined.

Bakhtin defines his conception of speech genre as follows: "Each separate utterance is individual, of course, but each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of these utterances. These we may call speech genres." ¹ These primary, everyday speech genres become the basis for all secondary speech genres—the language of art, literature, social, and scientific behavior. Todorov offers a succinct version of genre in language: "A genre, whether literary or not, is nothing other than the codification of discursive properties." ² Bakhtin's and Todorov's definitions are limited to speech, to language utterances. But as the contributors of this issue make clear, the notion of genre can apply to the codification of human behavior in everyday life, to the structure of films, to political behavior (in postcolonial societies), to nonliterary case studies. Still one further note is needed before introducing the individual essays.

When one refers to a genre, one refers to more than a single text. There is no name for individual texts that are members of a genre, but such members are implied in any definition of genre. To refer to a genre is to refer to a group of texts which have both some features in common and others which are individualized. The implication is that each member text contains a combination of features. But only some of these account for making a genre relatively stable; other features loosen the stability. Lee Clark Mitchell describes this phenomenon in his book on Westerns as follows:

One of this book's two premises, in fact, is that any popular text engages immediately pressing issues—issues that become less pressing in time. With each generation, a genre's plots, narrative emphasis, stylistic pressures, even scenic values have less in common with earlier versions of that genre than with competing genres, all serving to resolve the same contemporary anxieties. Yet the second premise is just as crucial and controverts the first: that from the beginning the Western has fretted over the construction of masculinity, whether in terms of gender (women), maturation (sons), honor (restraint), or self-transformation (the West itself). ³

The alteration of some features that members of a genre display over...