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  • Genre Theory and Historical Change: The Theoretical Essays of Ralph Cohen ed. by John L. Rowlett
  • Robert Kilpatrick
John L. Rowlett, ed. Genre Theory and Historical Change: The Theoretical Essays of Ralph Cohen. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2017. 432 pp.

When Ralph Cohen passed away in 2016, his contribution to literary studies seemed clear: he would be remembered for his four-decade tenure as the editor of New Literary History, the journal he founded in 1969. Although Cohen had made his name as a scholar of the eighteenth century, publishing studies such as The Art of Discrimination: Thomson's "The Seasons" and the Language of Criticism (1964) in the earlier part of his career, it was his work at NLH that had the broadest impact on the discipline. Under Cohen's stewardship, the journal published the likes of Barthes, Cixous, Derrida, Iser, Jameson, Moi, Nussbaum, Rorty, Spivak, and many others, and played an important role in the rise of theory in North America.

But John L. Rowlett ventures a different claim about Cohen's legacy. In his introduction to Genre Theory and Historical Change: The Theoretical Essays of Ralph Cohen, Rowlett predicts that "Cohen's impact on humanistic scholarship, when accounts settle, will have come in two waves: his innovative guidance as editor-teacher, followed by adoption of his systematic procedures as essayist-theorist" (xviii). Accordingly, Genre Theory and Historical Change compiles twenty of Cohen's essays from a variety of sources (some initially appeared in journals and edited collections, others Cohen gave as talks, while still others sat unpublished in Cohen's papers and appear for the first time). These essays, written from the early 1970s on, revolve around Cohen's persistent interest in "certain historical problems of literary change—of tradition and innovation" (39). Together, they develop a genre theory that is highly sensitive to shifts in form and its functions, even as it remains less invested in theorizing the sources underlying those shifts.

One of the primary tasks Cohen sets himself in these essays is to rescue genre theory from a number of competing critical currents. Cohen is as skeptical of New Critical approaches that foreclosed generic classification by insisting on the aesthetic integrity of the artwork as he is of deconstructive theories that averred "the need and futility of genre designation" (86). Likewise, Cohen resists the idealism that frequently led Russian formalist, structuralist, and narratological approaches to genre to search for transhistorical laws of narrative. Among the theories that Cohen contests are those [End Page 526] advanced by Aristotle, Propp, Frye, Todorov, Blanchot, and Derrida—a formidable set whose various definitions of genre remain influential.

Against such positions, Cohen conceives of genres as irreducibly historical. As he writes, "I see genre theory operating at the level of literary continuities and discontinuities; [other] critics see genre as a hermeneutical theory rather than as a historical theory that is a precondition for interpretation" (37). This historical theory entails, first of all, a reframing of the individual text itself. In an extension of Bakhtin, Cohen proposes "a definition of the literary work as a combination of rhetorical or expressive features, subject matters, dictional styles, and aims" (224). This definition allows Cohen to bring into view a text's dependence on a generic history made up of earlier combinations, formal effects, and social purposes. That history is the ground of a text's meaning, and Cohen treats genre theory as a precondition for interpretation because, without it, we cannot grasp how a literary work makes its meaning through its overlaps with and departures from earlier combinations.

The combinatory text and its generic history lie at the heart of Cohen's efforts to theorize literary change. His procedure for charting changes within literary history receives its most practical explication in "Innovation and Variation: Literary Change and Georgic Poetry." Originally given as a talk in 1973, "Innovation and Variation" poses the question of "[h]ow…we distinguish between changes that initiate new styles, periods, movements from those which merely expand upon or extend the received conventions" (190). Cohen's answer is to pose innovations, or developments that "introduce new subjects or new functions for old features," and variations, which...

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