Linus: The Rise and Fall of Lyric Genres

Abstract

Schemes for classifying works of art according to genre flourish outside the academy—in bookstores, on music-streaming services, on Netflix; yet in literary studies genre criticismhas been facing increasing resistance since the 1980s whenFrederic Jamesonpronounced it “thoroughly discreditedbymodern literary theory and practice.”1 Suspicion hangs over the word in academic criticism, where it often seems that no sooner is a genre mentioned than its integrity as a concept is undermined and any normative authority it might have had is dismissed. One senses at times a Nietzschean disdain for genres as cobwebs spun out by desiccated pedants which supermen-poets brush through without a thought. Such attitudes have, to be sure, some grounds: it would be naïve now to regard genres as pure and timeless essences rather than hybrid, politically conditioned and contingent groupings of works that are always evolving and always changing their “laws.” Demystifications of genre can, however, overshadow its other, productive side, the possibilities it offers to sharpen and enrich amessage and to provide orientation for an audience hearing a song for the first time. The fact that the authority and perpetuation of genres depend on poets and audiences at least as much as on scholars is not always acknowledged, nor is the reality that genres are omnipresent and inescapable: we greet no song without a frame. The status of genre is no less suspect in the study of those Greeks who laid out many of the basic lines and much of the terminology used in Europeanderived criticism. In the article on “genre” for the current Oxford Classical Dictionary, for example, Glenn Most and Gian-Biagio Conte aim for a balanced presentation but find little positive to say about ancient genres. They note that genre can be useful for poets and critics if it be regarded as “a system of literary projection inscribed within the texts, serving to communicate certain expectations to readers and to guide their understanding.” Yet they find ancient