Remaping Genre (PMLA, octobre 2007)

PMLA is the journal of the Modern Language Association of America. Since 1884, PMLA has published members' essays judged to be of interest to scholars and teachers of language and literature. Four issues each year (January, March, May, and October) present essays on language and literature; a Directory issue (September) contains a listing of the association's members, a directory of departmental administrators, and other professional information; and the November issue is the program for the association's annual convention. Each issue of PMLA is sent directly to the nearly 30,000 college and university teachers of English and foreign languages who belong to the association and to about 3,000 libraries throughout the world.


Vol. 122, no 5 (octobre 2007)


Wai Chee Dimock
Introduction: Genres as Fields of Knowledge

Stephen Owen
Genres in Motion

Michael Wood
The Last Night of All

Emily Apter
Taskography: Translation as Genre of Literary Labor

Diana Taylor
Remapping Genre through Performance: From “American” to “Hemispheric” Studies
Performance as a genre allows for alternative mappings, providing a set of strategies and conventions that allow scholars to see practices that scripted genres might occlude. Like other genres, performance encompasses a broad range of rehearsed and codified behaviors, such as dance, theater, music recitals, sports events, and rituals. A performance lens allows scholars to look at acts, things, and ideas as performance. Looking at America as performance might explain why it is difficult to approach it as a disciplinary field of study. What might the shift in genres—from the scripted genres associated with the archive to the live, embodied behaviors that are the repertoire of cultural practices—enable? This essay proposes that an analysis of the performance of America might allow scholars to rethink not only their object of analysis but also their scholarly interactions. (DT)

Wendy Knepper
Remapping the Crime Novel in the Francophone Caribbean: The Case of Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnifique
Shaped by a history of mobilities, displacements, and creolizing processes, the Caribbean is a significant testing ground for theories concerning the circulation and remapping of genre. Taking Patrick Chamoiseau’s theory of generic wandering as my point of departure, I argue that his Solibo Magnifique exemplifies the principle of generic creolization. This is evident in the novel’s intermixing of the detective novel, film noir, the spaghetti western, the comic book, the hard-boiled crime novel, and creole storytelling techniques. By manipulating the conventions by which the classical detective, the hard-boiled police officer, and the private investigator are characterized, Chamoiseau’s narrative turns from an investigation into one man’s death to an interrogation of Martinique, its history and the workings of its neocolonial psyche. Through the example of Solibo Magnifique and its radiating influence on other postcolonial crime writers, I conclude that this principle of creative creolization is increasingly relevant to understanding a world in which genre’s radiating and rhizomic web of mobilities involves local and global confluences. (WK)

Rebecca Dyer
Poetry of Politics and Mourning: Mahmoud Darwish’s Genre-Transforming Tribute to Edward W. Said
This essay provides an analysis of “Tibaq,” an elegy written in Edward W. Said’s honor by the acclaimed Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Noting that the poem exhibits aspects of a number of genres and demonstrates Darwish’s generally innovative approach to traditional literary forms, I consider how he has transformed the marthiya, the elegiac genre that has been part of the Arabic literary tradition since the pre-Islamic era. I argue that Darwish used the elegy-writing occasion to comment on Said’s politics and to make respectful use of his critical methods, particularly his interdisciplinary borrowing of counterpoint, a concept typically used in music analysis. By reworking the conventional marthiya to represent Said’s life in exile and his diverse body of work and by putting his contrapuntal method into practice in the conversation depicted in the poem, Darwish elegizes a long-lasting friendship and shores up a shared political cause. (RD)

Charles J. Rzepka
Race, Region, Rule: Genre and the Case of Charlie Chan
This essay analyzes genre’s impact on racial representation in a body of popular fiction that has shaped European Americans’ definition of Asian American identity for more than three-quarters of a century: the Charlie Chan novels of Earl Derr Biggers. To advance his stated goal of overturning Chinese stereotypes, Biggers experimented with genres of locale and criminality. The Hawaiian setting of his first Chan story, The House without a Key, challenged the generic topography of Chinatown regionalism by invoking a counterintuitive regionalist prototype, while the book’s plot followed the conventions of classical detective fiction, a highly formulaic subgenre of crime literature that perpetuated racist stereotypes while dominating best-seller lists throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Exploiting a unique feature of the detective formula known as rule subversion, however, Biggers enlisted the genre’s very tendencies toward racism to undermine racist stereotypes. (CJR)

Daniel Fried
Riding Off into the Sunrise: Genre Contingency and the Origin of the Chinese Western
The paradoxical dependence of genre histories on historically accidental acts of naming and on transcendental critical imagination is demonstrated by the Chinese western, a little-understood genre that has become a major part of Chinese-language cinema over the past two decades. After the genre was proposed in 1984 by the Chinese film theorist Zhong Dianfei, as a realist reaction against the ideological excesses of the Cultural Revolution, its ambiguous status as a Hollywood import quickly became a proxy for larger cultural battles over China’s place in an American-dominated international cultural system. Moreover, despite assurances by Zhong and other critics that the genre was not susceptible to Hollywood influence, the production history of the genre from the late 1980s to the present demonstrates a pattern of generic influence and eventual fusion that tracks Chinese state-owned studios’ evolution from subsidized propaganda organs to participants in a globalized entertainment industry. (DF)

Christopher N. Phillips
Lighting Out for the Rough Ground: America’s Epic Origins and the Richness of World Literature
This essay argues that epic, far from being a dead genre, ranges readily across formal and geographic boundaries and that the terms America and epic have defined each other from the Renaissance forward. Drawing on a range of case studies from Jamestown to Kentucky, I examine the ways in which epic travels through translation, exile, ethnology, and prophecy. While I focus on the United States and the colonies that would eventually constitute it, I argue that American literature was an international endeavor before it was ever a national one and that the role epic played in that internationalism prefigures and interrogates the Goethean Weltliteratur ideal dominating current discussions regarding world literature. In response to the difficulties that theory creates in discussing the development of both genre and world literature, I advocate a return to the archive to give theoretical arguments a more inductive grounding. (CNP)

Stefan Hawlin
Epistemes and Imitations: Thom Gunn on Ben Jonson
The mode of imitatio enhances the persistence and evolution of genres over time, contrary to the implications of Foucault’s concept of epistemes (the idea of discontinuous historical eras). Imitatio, well practiced, awakens extraordinary commonalities of sensibility among poets of different periods (classical, Renaissance, contemporary), including how they understand and manipulate genres, and so raises the possibility of a more unitive view of history, culture, and time. Ben Jonson, with his coherent theoretical view of imitatio, was a crucial poet for Thom Gunn, who self-consciously imitated the mode of imitation, producing in “An Invitation” a re-creation of the country-house poem as embodied by Jonson’s “To Sir Robert Wroth” and in “Lament” (his great AIDS elegy) a response to seventeenth-century funeral elegy, in particular Jonson’s “Elegie on the Lady Jane Pawlet.” (SH)

Susan Zieger
Pioneers of Inner Space: Drug Autobiography and Manifest Destiny
The drug autobiography emerged as a genre in the United States primarily through imitations of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). For De Quincey, the intoxicating consumption of opium and print was linked to imperial mastery. Texts such as Fitz Hugh Ludlow’s Hasheesh Eater (1857) adapted this association to suit the westward expansion of the United States and its accompanying ideology of manifest destiny. Under the influence of hashish, Ludlow explored his inner psychic space as if it were the United States frontier. As nineteenth-century Romantic models of intoxicated dreaming gave way to early-twentieth-century theories of addiction, drug autobiographies such as D. F. MacMartin’s Thirty Years in Hell (1921) readapted the genre, representing the disappointments of manifest destiny as addicted exile. While drug autobiographies accrued countercultural authority, appearing to signify the irrational underside of Enlightenment modernity, their fantasies of esoteric exploration derived from broader cultural ideals of imperial power and knowledge. (SZ)

Harsha Ram
The Sonnet and the Mukhambazi: Genre Wars on the Edges of the Russian Empire
Genres travel in multiple directions. This article maps the evolution and movement of two lyric genres in Georgia, a small nation situated south of the Caucasus mountains, between Russia, Turkey, and Iran. The mukhambazi arose from a polyglot urban culture rooted in Near Eastern traditions of bardic performance and festivity, while the sonnet was imported around the time of the Russian Revolution as a marker of European modernization. The brief coexistence of these two genres allows for a reexamination of the foundational opposition between East and West. Moving beyond the familiar dichotomy of tradition and modernity, this essay explores the texts and debates of more than a century, reconstructing the discrepant cosmopolitanisms and multiple modernities that typified the Caucasus region. In doing so, it seeks both to make available a literary archive unknown to American readers and to contribute to ongoing debates on the relations between the local, the national, and the imperial as cultural formations. (HR)

Ed Folsom
Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives

Jonathan Freedman, N. Katherine Hayles, Jerome McGann, Meredith L. McGill, and Peter Stallybrass. Reply by Ed Folsom
Responses to Ed Folsom’s “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives”

Arielle Saiber
The Polyvalent Discourse of Electronic Music

John Frow
“Reproducibles, Rubrics, and Everything You Need”: Genre Theory Today

Geoffrey Galt Harpham
Genre and the Institution of Research: Three American Instances

Bruce Robbins
Afterword