Introduction

The question of what a genre actually is seems, at first glance, almost naïve — every reader of fiction claims to recognise a sonnet, a detective novel or a tragedy on sight. Yet the moment one tries to locate genre precisely, the certainty dissolves. Is genre a property inherent in the words on the page, a stable pattern of form and content that can be catalogued like a species in a taxonomy? Or is it, instead, a relation — a tacit contract negotiated anew each time a writer produces an utterance and a reader receives it? This short essay argues that genre cannot be reduced to either pole alone. It is neither a fixed textual essence nor a purely subjective reading effect; it is, following Alastair Fowler, Tzvetan Todorov, Mikhail Bakhtin, Carolyn Miller and the reader-oriented theorists Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish, a historically mutable communicative contract that exists between text and interpretive community, continuously renewed and modified by use.

Genre as a Property of the Text

The oldest and most intuitive answer locates genre inside the work itself: a formal repertoire of features — metre, structure, diction, plot-shape — that a text either possesses or lacks. This intuition descends from Aristotle’s Poetics and survives in structuralist and formalist criticism. Alastair Fowler, in Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (1982), gives this view its most sophisticated defence while simultaneously complicating it. For Fowler, genre is not a rigid pigeonhole but a “repertoire” of features — external structure, characteristic topics, “inner form” — from which individual works select and combine, so that literature behaves not as a fixed class of objects but as an “aggregate” governed by continually shifting evaluative norms (Fowler, 1982). Genres, in his account, resemble Wittgensteinian families more than Linnaean species: works resemble one another through overlapping features rather than through a single essence shared equally by all members.

Tzvetan Todorov sharpens the same difficulty from a structuralist-narratological angle in Genres in Discourse (1990 [1978]). Todorov insists that “genres are classes of texts,” yet immediately complicates that formula: a definition of genre always presupposes an observer’s theoretical perspective, and the “historical genres” recognised by a given culture at a given moment are themselves theoretical constructs retrospectively imposed on textual practice, not natural kinds discovered in the texts (Todorov, 1990). He further argues that new genres are generated out of old ones through transformation — inversion, displacement, combination — and that a work can define its genre precisely by transgressing the very conventions that make the transgression legible (Todorov, 1990). This matters because it already destabilises the idea that genre is simply “in the words.” If genre is a repertoire from which a text draws selectively, and the coding system that makes those selections intelligible as generic markers changes historically, then genre cannot be a fixed inventory of textual properties awaiting discovery by close reading alone. The text supplies signals, but the interpretive grammar that renders those signals meaningful as generic markers belongs to literary history and to the community of writers and readers who share and reproduce that grammar over time.

Genre as Utterance: Bakhtin’s Speech Genres

If Fowler and Todorov show that even a text-centred account of genre needs a social and historical substrate, Mikhail Bakhtin makes the relational dimension fully explicit. In “The Problem of Speech Genres,” collected in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (1986), Bakhtin argues that “each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types” of utterance, and these are what he calls speech genres (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 60). He distinguishes primary (everyday, informal) genres — a greeting, a complaint, small talk about the weather — from secondary genres, more complex forms, including literary, scientific and rhetorical genres, which absorb and stylise primary genres within them (Bakhtin, 1986). Decisively, Bakhtin insists that every utterance is inherently dialogic: it is shaped in anticipation of a response, addressed to someone in particular, and exists only as a link in an unbroken chain of communication stretching from prior utterances to future ones. Genre, for Bakhtin, is therefore not primarily a repertoire of formal features embedded in a text but a socially stabilised horizon of address — a shared, historically accumulated sense of who is speaking to whom, in what register, for what purpose. A letter, an epic, a scientific abstract: each presupposes a “typical conception of the addressee,” and it is this typified relation to an anticipated respondent, more than any formal inventory, that defines the genre (Bakhtin, 1986).

Genre as Social Action: Carolyn Miller

Carolyn Miller’s essay “Genre as Social Action” (1984), published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, pushes this relational logic further within the North American rhetorical tradition. Miller argues that “genre must be conceived in terms of rhetorical action rather than substance or form” (Miller, 1984, p. 151). Her thesis is that genres are not classifications of texts by shared features but conventionalised responses to recurrent rhetorical situations — the wedding toast, the job application letter, the eulogy — which communities of speakers and writers learn to recognise and reproduce because they serve a repeatable social purpose. In Miller’s words, genre thereby “becomes more than a formal entity; it becomes pragmatic, fully rhetorical, a point of connection between intention and effect, an aspect of social action” (Miller, 1984, p. 153). This formulation names precisely the relational site under investigation here: genre as a point of connection — not a thing possessed by the text, nor a private impression owned by the reader, but a shared, socially learned protocol that coordinates a writer’s intentions with an audience’s interpretive expectations. Miller’s account has direct pedagogical consequences: if genres are typified rhetorical actions rather than fixed forms, teaching genre well means teaching students to read situations — audience, purpose, context — rather than merely to imitate formal templates.

Genre as Reception: Iser and Fish

Reader-response criticism supplies the complementary half of the relational picture: if Bakhtin and Miller show genre operating from the writer’s and the community’s side, Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish show it completing itself on the reader’s side of the same transaction. In The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1978) and in earlier essays translated as “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” Iser develops the idea that a literary text is structured around deliberate “gaps” or “blanks” — moments of indeterminacy that the text does not resolve. As Iser puts it, “the written part of the text gives us the knowledge, but it is the unwritten part that gives us the opportunity to picture things; indeed, without the element of indeterminacy, the gaps in the text, we should not be able to use our imagination” (Iser, apud Pen2Print, s.d.). Reading, for Iser, is “a process of discovery,” in which the reader continually questions, negates and revises the expectations that the text itself establishes, filling in gaps and modifying interpretation as new information appears (Iser, 1978). Genre expectations belong squarely to this process: when a text signals through its opening structural cues that it belongs to, say, the detective-fiction repertoire, it activates a set of gap-filling procedures that the reader is invited, but never compelled, to perform. Iser’s concept of the “implied reader” names the reader-position the text constructs for this purpose — a position built into the text’s structure but only ever actualised by an actual, historically situated reader (Iser, 1978).

Stanley Fish radicalises this reader-oriented account still further. In “Interpreting the Variorum” (1976) and Is There a Text in This Class? (1980), Fish argues that textual meaning is not an object waiting to be extracted from the words but an effect produced by “interpretive communities” — groups of readers who share, prior to any individual act of reading, a set of interpretive strategies “not for reading… but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions” (Fish, 1980, p. 171). On this account, a reader does not discover a genre latent in a text; rather, the reader’s community has already equipped her with the strategies that make certain features salient as generic markers in the first place. Genre recognition, for Fish, precedes rather than follows textual analysis: the interpretive community’s shared assumptions determine which formal patterns will even register as meaningful before a single sentence is parsed. This is a stronger relational claim than Iser’s, since it locates the origin of generic meaning almost entirely in socially shared reading practice rather than in any residue of the text’s own structure — though Fish, like Miller, still requires that the community’s practices be historically stable enough to be shared and transmitted, which keeps the account tethered to a real communicative history rather than collapsing into pure subjectivism.

Conclusion

Bringing these strands together, the most defensible answer to the reflection posed is that genre lives neither purely in the words themselves nor purely in the subjective response of an individual reader, but in the historically sedimented, socially shared relation that allows a writer’s formal choices to be recognised, by a community of readers, as meaningful moves within a repeatable communicative practice. Fowler and Todorov show that even textual repertoires are historically mutable, theory-laden coding systems rather than fixed inventories waiting to be catalogued; Bakhtin and Miller show that genre is constituted as a typified response to recurrent situations of address, a point of connection between a writer’s intention and an audience’s expectation; and Iser and Fish show, from complementary positions on the reader-response spectrum, that this typification is completed only in the act of reception, whether through the reader’s gap-filling engagement with textual indeterminacy or through the prior interpretive strategies a community brings to any text whatsoever. Genre, in short, is not a noun naming a static object but closer to a verb naming an ongoing negotiation — it is less something a text has than something writer and reader continually do together.

Referências

BAKHTIN, Mikhail M. Speech genres and other late essays. Translated by Vern W. McGee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986.

FISH, Stanley. Is there a text in this class? The authority of interpretive communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.

FISH, Stanley. Interpreting the Variorum. Critical Inquiry, Chicago, v. 2, n. 3, p. 465-485, 1976.

FOWLER, Alastair. Kinds of literature: an introduction to the theory of genres and modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.

ISER, Wolfgang. The act of reading: a theory of aesthetic response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

ISER, Wolfgang. The reading process: a phenomenological approach. New Literary History, Baltimore, v. 3, n. 2, p. 279-299, 1972.

MILLER, Carolyn R. Genre as social action. Quarterly Journal of Speech, London, v. 70, n. 2, p. 151-167, 1984.

TODOROV, Tzvetan. Genres in discourse. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.