The G Word and the H Word

It is impossible to deal with autobiography without first tackling the issue of genre. It is commonly understood that Jauss’s horizon of expectations and the purpose of defining genres overlap. But even as simply defined as a strategy of reception, this process remains particularly complex and varied. Many theorists have defined it as loosely as possible: “Genre is thus an umbrella concept that allows for many disparate, and often related, concepts to be conveniently divided and subdivided” (Harris: 509); or: “In my perspective of research, genre is first and foremost, according to Roland Barthes’s expression, a ‘hypothetical model of description’.’” ¹ Gasparini also takes into account the marketing and commercial aspect of genre, stating that “genre is the viewfinder allowing the customer to situate the text and the seller to ‘target’ the customer.” ² But genres remain a shifting construct, mostly because they are semantic clusters historically determined. They are defined as noncommittally as possible by Seymour Chatman as “constructs or composites of features” (17). Ellen Spolsky has a similar analysis: “The genre concepts in the system must be described as consisting of variously decomposable and variously necessary or dispensable parts” (74). Chatman, probably unwillingly, analogizes genre to children’s building blocks, but here of course we are dealing with semantic building blocks. For instance, Marie-Laure Ryan highlights the various “factors of semantic diversification within a genre (thematic, stylistic, probabilistic)” (Ryan 1991: 571). From this “building block image,” two prominent ideas must be retained: First, genres can be built and rebuilt; they are flexible within a reasonable timeframe (but the timeframe remains drastically different from the one required by a child to build a new construction—we are talking about decades, sometimes even centuries for a complete rebuild of a genre); second, a building block, even though it can be deconstructed, remains a block (at least for a certain period): It has an overall identity, and works and their stylistic or thematic features can be linked to this identity (and, to push this logic even further, one would be well advised to differentiate between primary features—ones without which a genre can no longer be identified as the particular genre it is—and secondary features, the ones that are not indispensable).