Genre Identity and Intertextuality

Abstract

In genology anti-essentialism, as an epistemological trait of post-structuralism and historicism, has led – following Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblances – to the conviction that genres are merely systems which are indefinable in terms of form or content which can be displayed in texts combined in some genological category. According to such logic, genre identity is necessarily historically unstable, depending merely on “extra-textual”, pragmatic or contextual factors, in a final consequence of how routines in the production and consumption of cultural products are being institutionalized or decomposed. Although the concept of intertextuality originally also derived from the opposition to “the metaphysics of presence”, it now enables genology a different explanation of genre identity: the origin, existence, operation and changing of genres, as well as the relation between the text and genre with the help of intertextuality can be explained in a way which does not neglect the semantic, syntactic or pragmatic properties of the texts. These properties are the very starting point that in literary production itself and its immediate or subsequent reflection (genre perception) forms genres. Genres live off social practices which frame intertextual and meta-textual links and references to prototypical texts, textual series. A text or a series of texts becoming a prototype of a genre is a result of intertextual and meta-textual interaction: on the one hand, there is the effect (influence) of semantic, syntactic and pragmatic traits of prototypical texts on domestic and foreign literary descendants and, on the other hand, intertextual descriptions and intertextual derivations and references in post-texts, which re-establish the “hard core” or prototype of genre. Because of the genre and performative component of communicative competence, a particular text is, on the one hand, dependent on generic patterns (these are not abstract codes, but intertextual déjà lu’s), since the linguistic material is necessarily regulated by them; on the other hand, a text itself with different processes of intertextual reference actively takes part in the plurality of genre context; so the author creates a meaning and structure for a text, and in this way influences the reader’s expectations and procedures.